Norwegian names

My Norwegian instructor's last name is Aune. He told us that it means "desolate farm", or something like that. It's a common name and can be traced back to the Black Plague. The plague wiped out half of Europe, and Norway was apparently hit pretty hard. The Norwegians apparently either died or retreated to the hills. Either way, they left their farms behind.

After the Plague was through ravaging Europe and the population started to rise again, the Norwegians eventually came back down from the hills. The cities and surrounding farms were still standing, so families would just find a property and take over it. No one could remember the names of the people who had originally owned the land, though, so they just started calling the places "deserted farms", or Aune. And because the Norwegians generally took as their surname the name of where they happened to live, Aune became a common last name.

On another note, prior to the Viking days, Norwegians didn't have family names. They eventually adopted the practice of using the name of their current home as their last name. However, names were not a permanent thing for them, it seems, because if they happened to move somewhere else, they would change their name to the name of their new home. So if a farm worker, for example, worked at several different farms over the years, he would generally adopt the name of the family or place at which he was working at a given time.

Or something like that.