Linnesby is a pen name for a small village in the Swedish countryside.
(-By means village; we still find it in the English word “by-law,” and at the end of town names in Britain, both I think a holdover from Norse times. Linne is the cloth made from lin, or the flax plant. In English, “linen.”)
In the relatively recent past, not quite within living memory but not so very long before, every family in a village like this grew its own small patch of lin, called by Linnaeus usitatissimum: “most useful.” The crop provided cloth-making fiber, oil, and fodder for animals.
Processing the households’ flax crop was an annual village chore and festival, done collectively over several days and nights, accompanied by food, liquor, song and laughter, and accomplished through water and fire.
The garden beside my house once played a small part in this village’s flax festival: a small spot is still reserved as of right for families to lay their lin stalks to dry in the sun.
I sometimes, just to myself, call the house Lin or Lynn or Linn Huset. It seems to fit.
I do find the links between all three Scandinavian languages and English fascinating (all those invasions)... Two things which I think particularly interesting are that spoken Norwegian is the easiest to guess correctly if you speak English; and that if you just listen to the *sounds* of Swedish, Danish et al., it sounds like English spoken with a northern accent (maybe not to a northerner)...
Thank you for this explanation! Very interesting. And isn't that photograph and flower beautiful?