Musings on mountain names (2)

Map-making didn't always bring order to the medley of mountain nomenclature

The Gran Paradiso stands out as Italy’s sole 4,000-metre peak. In the summer of 1860, though, it proved difficult enough to find, let alone scale. As explained by John Jermyn Cowell (1838-1867), a Cambridge “Apostle” turned alpine pioneer, the problem was this:

Some mountains, which undoubtedly have a material existence, are unfortunate enough to have no name (for which reason, of course, I cannot point out an example); and on the other hand, some mountains which undoubtedly have names – and well-known names too – such as the Aiguille de la Vanoise and Mont Iseran, unfortunately have no material existence. But the Grand Paradis, previously to 1859, suffered from both these disadvantages at once …

Proof positive that the Gran Paradiso exists
Image by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure

The European Alps had no monopoly on nameless peaks. When Japanese climbers inaugurated their own “golden age” of mountain exploration, in the early twentieth century, they came up against the same sort of lacunae. This was particularly the case in remote regions such as "the innermost mountains of Sunshū Tashiro”, soon to be rebranded as the Southern Japan Alps. In an early edition of the Japanese Alpine Club’s journal, Ogino Otomatsu describes a trip to this fastness in September 1906, less than a year after the club’s establishment:

From time to time, we could see through the trees, on the other side of the valley, a mighty peak, bare-topped and reddish, in the midst of the Akaishi range. When I asked Kōhei, our hunter-guide, what it was, he called it Warusawa on account of the extremely dangerous gully that drains the waters of this mountain into the Nishimata. This sounded much as if he had just said the first thing that came into his mind …. (as quoted in Nihon Hyakumeizan).

Neither Cowell nor Ogino could refer to modern maps of their respective mountain ranges. As one would expect, it was the surveyors sent out by central governments who did most to fix mountain names in place. In a paper entitled “Mountains have names!”, Professor Martin Scharfe, a cultural historian from Bavaria, tells the story of Ludwig von Welden, an officer in the Austrian imperial service who had somehow ended up in Italy.

In 1821, von Welden visited the Monte Rosa group, which straddles the Swiss-Italian border with the aim of surveying it. But he soon found that none of its individual summits were named. Any and all high peaks in the region were pointed out to him as “Monte Rosa”. But, making a virtue out of necessity, he proceeded to make good the deficit, naming many of the previously anonymous peaks for pioneers of the range. This is why we now have the Zumsteinspitze, the Parrotspitze and the Vincentpyramide. And von Welden himself was immortalised in the Ludwigshöhe (4,341m).

Today's monomial Jungfrau
Image by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure

Elsewhere in the Alps, so far from lacking a name, some prominent peaks had an excess of them. As late as the decade and a half between 1775 and 1790, so Martin Scharfe records, four names each were in use for the Bernese Oberland’s Eiger and Jungfrau, and a “whopping seven” for the Mönch, the mountain that sits between them. Small wonder that Conrad Escher von der Linth, a Zurich-based silk merchant and mountain maven, complained in 1806 that the “muddling and confusion of names … was getting out of hand”.

As in the Alps, so in Japan. In his Nihon Hyakumeizan, Fukada Kyūya records many a case where the inhabitants of different valleys called the same mountain by different names. Or the same name drifted from one mountain to another over time.

A White Crumbling Peak also known as Kaikoma
Image by courtesy of Alpsdake (via Wikipedia)

Take Kaikoma, for example. This great pyramid of shattered granite obtrudes itself from the northern apex of the Southern Alps. That is why Shinshū folk used to call it Shirokuzure-yama, the White Crumbling Peak. But the name in use today makes it one of Japan’s many “horse mountains”, akin to one of those plentiful Rossbergs or Rossstocks in the German-speaking Alps. Indeed, there is another horse mountain just down the road, in neighbouring Kiso province. But neither name was sufficiently poetic for Monk Kairyō, who used yet another alternative in this deftly turned tanka:

Hills lap over valleys in the mountains of Kai

Alone amid the clouds floats Tetsuri-no-mine

The azure beauty of its summit stands forth

When the snows melt in May, against the blue sky .

In the Alps as in Japan, it fell to the modern mapmakers to impose order on mountain nomenclature.In Switzerland, the first nationwide mapping surveys were organised by General Henri Dufour (1787-1875), whose name has, by official decree, adorned the highest summit in the Monte Rosa massif since 1863. In the course of this rationalisation, some perfectly serviceable names were lost for ever.

Formerly known as the Silver Beard, or perhaps Saddle
Image by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure

For example, the sweeping frontier ridge once known as the Silberbart (Silver Beard) was restyled (by Dufour) as the Lyskamm – although, according to Martin Scharfe – nobody has a clue where this name came from. But another authority says that the Lys element refers to a valley on the mountain’s southern, Italian, side. And also that the mountain’s previous name was not Silberbart but Silberbast (Silver Saddle).

As this episode suggests, chaos no less than clarity could proceed from the surveyors’ efforts. Professor Scharfe goes so far as to say that “A substantial number of the mountain names that are familiar today probably resulted from simple misunderstandings – misheard or mistranscribed, mistakes that went unnoticed at the time.”

This might be particularly true if the surveyor in question was deaf. The unfortunate Peter Anich (1723-1766) from Perfuß near Innsbruck had lost his hearing early on, Professor Scharfe records, so that “one had to shout every word slowly and clearly, directly into his ears, if one wanted him to understand”. Unsurprisingly, this “caused him more than a little trouble (as can easily be deduced) in his geometric work, especially because of the many names of the places he measured and the rivers and districts he described.”

Much the same could happen in early modern Japan. A mountain of the Jōshin-Etsu region called “Warimeki-yama” (Crevice Peak) is reliably attested in the nineteenth century yet appears nowhere on modern maps. Musing on this mystery, the Hyakumeizan author Fukada Kyūya posits that the army surveyors simply misheard the name as they passed through: “Warimiki did you say? Aha, that’ll be Waribiki then.”

In a way, these cases are curiously reassuring. It’s as if the untamed mountains, the realm of nature, have successfully resisted all human attempts to impose order on them.

References

J J Cowell FRGS, “Two ascents of the Grand Paradis”, in Peaks, Passes and Glaciers, Second Series, Vol II, London 1862.

Martin Scharfe, ‘Mountains have names’: on the history of how mountain names became established, Bavarian Studies in History and Culture, English version, 2021.

Nathalie Henseler, Gipfelgeschichten: Wie die Schweizer Berge zu ihren Namen kamen, Faro im Fona Verlag AG, 2010.

Fukada Kyūya, One Hundred Mountains of Japan, Hawaii University Press, 2014.