Naming the Estonians

Naming a people and the place where they live stamps their identity. Eesti and eesti rahvas or eestlased do that for a subset of Finno-Ugrian culture, living in a 45,000-hectare area of pine and spruce forest, boglands, lakes and rivers, and of boulder-strewn coastline at the edge of free Europe.  

Strangely, the Estonians have taken their name from elsewhere and from an unrelated people, or had their name bestowed upon them by others. English and German speakers would be tempted to think Estonia or Estland means “eastern land”, and we would be mostly wrong.

Writing in 98 CE the Roman historian Tacitus mentioned Aesti, an area “upon the right of the Suevian sea”. Historians today take this to be the Vistula lagoon fringing the Baltic far to the south and west of Estonia, and attached at the time to a Baltic people of Indo-European origin. One basis for this pinpointing is the Latin word aestuarii, meaning “estuary dwellers”.

The Vistula river enters the Baltic sea east of Gdansk

So began the evolution of a name. 1,000 years after Tacitus, there are two written mentions of note. English King Alfred the Great wrote an account of a 9th Century voyage by Wulfstan, which mentions Esti, Est-mere and Eastland in connection with the original Prussian people (Baltic waterside folk, not the much later empire). He also writes that the area near the Vistula “belongs to the Esthonians”. No change here from Tacitus.

In contrast, Adam of Bremen also writing in the 11th Century says, “the Slavs and the Aisti live on the shores of the Eastern Sea”. He calls the coastal tribe the Haisti, and refers to today’s location of Estonia as Aestland.

A century later the historian Saxo Grammaticus in Gesta Danorum – the deeds of the Danes – uses the words, Hestia and Estia, for the land, and Estonum, for the people. Also during the 1100s, the Arab geographer al-Idrisi, the first to put Estonia on a map, uses the term Astalanda, presumably sourced from a Viking contact.    

Scandinavian runestones before this time, and sagas since, referred to present-day Estonia as Eistland and Aistland. By this time the area meant “east land” to speakers of the Old Norse language.

Then we come to the Livonian Chronicle of Henry (1229), written in Latin, and one finds Estonia for the northern part of the country (Livonia for the rest), and the people, estones.

No one consulted the locals 

One of the oddest aspects of this story is that no one seems to have asked the locals what they called themselves. Possibly, this was because no one could speak their language.    

For long centuries our ancestors simply called themselves maarahvas, or “people of the land”. They lived hidden from history - since the early 1200s, the property of a Baltic German aristocracy; and earlier, as independent clans or tribes, speaking closely related languages and dialects.

The Finns refer to Estonia as Viro, a nod to a northern county of Estonia, the present-day Virumaa. In Latvian, the country is rendered as Igaunija, a reference to an ancient southern Estonian toponym, Ugandi.  

The Estonians themselves only started calling their homeland Eesti and themselves eestlased or eesti rahvas in the 1800s, particularly from the National Awakening onwards. It is gratifying to learn the Estonians view themselves as neither estuary-dwellers, nor people from the east, but simply a people in their own right, connected to the land in which they have lived for millennia.