Re: What's going on in Scandinavia, North Atlantic, Baltic States and Scotland?
Reply #43 –
It is already "on the map" in the sense that you will find it if you search for "Mark, Sweden" on Google Map, but I had never heard of it, and that, combined with the overly generic name, made me curious. Oslo has a mark called (by Oslo people) The Mark, but for outsiders it is known as The Oslo Mark.
Mark, no definite article and no prefix, is, as it happens, a landlocked piece of nowhere not too distant from Gothenburg (but still with a Wikipedia entry in 22 languages,
including Scots and Swahili). This submarine purchase is no doubt the most exciting thing to happen to the place the last century or so. The county is a new one, from merging eight even smaller counties, and then the story turned into legacy.
Most countries, even Britain, have streamlined and rationalised their administrative structures. Not so much Sweden. Or they have, several times, it is just taking some centuries to sink in, like with the
provinces of Sweden. The boundaries between administrative, mustering, legal (courts), church units (
parishes) were overlapping, and in some cases are overlapping still. In this case we're talking of a härad or
hundred.
Eventually that division was superseded by introducing the härad or Herred, which was the term in the rest of Scandinavia. This word was either derived from Proto-Norse *harja-raiðō (warband) or Proto-Germanic *harja-raiða (war equipment, cf. Wapentake). Similar to skipreide, a part of the coast where the inhabitants were responsible for equipping and manning a war ship.