Åsane (municipality)

Åsane is a former municipality in the old Hordaland county in Norway. The municipality existed from 1904 until 1972. The municipality encompassed the northern part of the Bergen Peninsula, roughly corresponding to the present-day borough of Åsane in the city-municipality of Bergen. The administrative centre of the municipality was the village of Eidsvåg. The main church for the municipality was Åsane Church. Historically, the area was called Aasene, but with spelling reforms in the Norwegian language, the modern spelling has been Åsane since about 1920. The large parish of Hammer existed for many centuries and within the parish existed the annex of Aasene. On 1 January 1904, the annex of Aasene (population: 1,625) was separated from the rest of Hammer to become a separate municipality. The original municipality included the northern part of the Bergen Peninsula, except for the coastal areas along the Salhusfjorden and Sørfjorden. On 1 July 1914, most of the northern coastal part of the Bergen peninsula (population: 644) was transferred to Aasene (except for the far northern tip around Tellevik). On 1 July 1938, the far northern tip of the Bergen peninsula around the villages of Tellevik and Hordvik were transferred from Hamre municipality to Åsane. The new municipality was small, but over the next several decades, there was major population growth due to the growing city of Bergen, located to the southwest, over the mountains. On 1 January 1972, the municipality of Åsane (population: 19,205) was merged into the city of Bergen (the other neighboring municipalities of Arna, Fana, and Laksevåg were also merged with Bergen on the same date). The municipality (originally the parish) is named Aasene after an old name for the area (Ásar or Ásarnir). The name is the plural form of áss which means "rocky ridge" or "hill". Thus the name (since it was plural) means something like "the hills" or "the ridges". Prior to the 1917 Norwegian language reform law, the name was spelled with the digraph "Aa", and after this reform, the letter Å was used instead.