The Sandefjordsfjord (), sometimes also called the Sandefjord (), is an approximately 9 km long
fjord
In physical geography, a fjord or fiord () is a long, narrow inlet with steep sides or cliffs, created by a glacier. Fjords exist on the coasts of Alaska, Antarctica, British Columbia, Chile, Denmark, Germany, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, Ice ...
in the municipality of
Sandefjord
Sandefjord () is a city and the most populous municipality in Vestfold og Telemark county, Norway. The municipality of Sandefjord was established on 1 January 1838. The municipality of Sandar was merged into Sandefjord on 1 January 1969. On 1 ...
in
Vestfold
Vestfold is a traditional region, a former county and a current electoral district in Eastern Norway. In 2020 the county became part of the much larger county of Vestfold og Telemark. Located on the western shore of the Oslofjord, it bordered th ...
,
Norway
Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and t ...
. It is located to the west of
Vesterøya. The Sandefjordsfjord is the longest of the four fjords located in Sandefjord, Norway. It is a wide fjord which gradually shrinks northbound towards the city harbor. The name dates to
Sverris saga
''Sverris saga'' is one of the Kings' sagas. Its subject is King Sverre Sigurdsson of Norway (r. 1177–1202) and it is the main source for this period of Norwegian history. As the foreword tells us, the saga in its final form consists of more ...
from 1200 AD.
Its name derives from the name which, originally, was that of the farm just outside the present town centre, and which for hundreds of years was the vicarage of the parish of Sandeherred (Sandar), also known as – hence the . As the town came into existence, the name gradually came to be applied to it, and the need for an expression to allow references to the fjord, as opposed to the town, emerged. was the
pleonastic
Pleonasm (; , ) is Redundancy (linguistics), redundancy in linguistic expression, such as "black darkness" or "burning fire". It is a manifestation of Tautology (language), tautology by traditional rhetorical criteria and might be considered a fa ...
result.
The name was suggested during the
Sandar-Sandefjord merge in the 1960s, but its current name was ultimately kept.
[Davidsen, Roger (2008). ''Et Sted i Sandefjord''. Sandar Historielag. Page 356. .]
References
Fjords of Vestfold og Telemark
Sandefjord
{{VestfoldTelemark-geo-stub