Quezi

Fresh lingonberries - once called red whortleberries (Photo by Kimtaro - CC-BY)

Over the last few years lingonberry has become a fairly familiar English word. Thanks to a well-known Swedish furniture store putting lingonberry jam, jelly, and cordial on its shelves, and a few foody articles in lifestyle sections of the newspapers, many of us have a general idea that this small red berry is from Scandinavia, can be made into preserves with sugar, and spread on toast.

You can soon find out that it grows in every cool, northern country from Alaska to Siberia, and it has a lot of different names. I wanted to know when English-speakers started calling it by the Swedish name, lingon, and whether there was a traditional English name that went back centuries.

Cowberry was the “traditional” word I had hopes of at first, but it is regarded as an 1800-ish made-up name* by the Oxford English Dictionary. “Red whortleberry” is an older name, and can be traced back to Shakespeare’s era.

There be two sortes of Whortes, and Whortel berries, wherof the common sort are blacke, and the other are red.
Lyte’s translation of Dodoen’s Herbal, 1578

None of the other names claimed for this berry seem to have a paper trail going back as far as red whortleberry, and that seems like the best candidate for a traditional English-language name. Very likely there were also other regional names that didn’t get into print.

As for the word lingonberry, the earliest citation in the dictionary is from 1955, but Google Books shows it in use in North America long before that. Perhaps Swedish immigration to the US helped lingonberries make it into English?

All the small low-growing berries on hills and heaths seem to have had a fairly low status with 19th century British writers who expected only children and poor people to bother picking them. Red whortleberries were “made into pies and eaten by the common people” and their taste was inferior to cranberries and bilberries, according to some rather snooty Victorian authors.

Berry-picking is more of a traditional seasonal treat than a chore in Scandinavia and the Baltic countries, where lingon and other berries are valued for their contribution to the cuisine. Preserved with sugar, lingonberries make tasty and colourful sauces, jams, and jellies that go well with savoury, meaty dishes. Put a dollop on a plate of pork or venison, or eat a classic Swedish bacon pancake with lingonberry jam (lingonsylt). Give a special flavour to sweet goodies like cake or pie filling, or drink lingonberry cordial, tea, liqueur or Norwegian tyttebær ale.

*OED call it a “a book-name” based on the Latin botanical name Vaccinium Vitis-idaea where vaccinium is like vacca, Latin for cow