The lore of skiing is full of fascinating tales. Some of them actually are true. And some are not, being based more on outdoor versions of urban myths than on accounts of reallife events or persons. Were a list of current skiing myths to be drawn up, Telemark might well top it. Not the practice; that’s real-life daring. It’s the word itself that’s fogged.

Received skiing wisdom holds that Telemark technique originated in the 19th-century in Telemark, an ethereal region of Norway then populated almost exclusively by skiers, the most famed of which was Sondre Norheim, who invented the Telemark turn. History and political geography tell a somewhat different story.

Skiing evolved over the centuries as a means of wintertime transportation. For people living in small rural towns, such as those of the Morgedal Valley of Telemark, where Sondre Norheim was born in 1825, skiing was the only means of getting around in winter. So Sondre grew up skiing. By the time he was in his 20s, competitive skiing had been born and ski-jump meets attracted daring young men who would fly on skis to vie for monetary prizes. Understandably, Sondre, a sharecropper’s son, was interested. In the 1850s and 1860s, he and other young men of the valley sharpened their competitive skills and experimented with new ways of making ski gear. It may have been the first time that skiers had recognized and sought to improve upon the interrelation between ski gear and ski technique. In any event, it was decisive. In 1868, Sondre skied 125 miles to Christiania, as the capital, Oslo, then was named, to enter a ski jump meet there. Thanks to his superior tighter ski bindings and techniques refined using them, he won. That triggered the first reports on ski gear and ski technique in the media, and soon young men of Christiania took to innovating technique and gear. One of them, Fritz Huitfeldt, invented the toe iron that afforded ski control by edging. By the end of the 19th century, competitive ski jumping was dominated by two groups of men, those from Christiania and those from Telemark.

At the time, as today, there were two ways of turning to a stop after landing: one with parallel skis, enabled by the new binding designs, and one the more traditional turn with a steered, trailing ski. Both groups of men used both turns. But what the turns should be called perplexed ski officials then concerned with compiling a rule book. In 1901, the answer came almost by accident when the parallel-ski turn was called the “Christiania turn” in a newspaper article. The name stuck. What, then, was the other turn used by all? Obviously, the Telemark, in honor of the other leading group of jumpers.

As for the word, just as Boulder is the name of a county in Colorado, Telemark is the name of a county in Norway. It’s located at a latitude of about 59°N on the west side of the Oslo Fjord, some 60 miles southwest of Oslo. In modern international databases, it is numbered 8 of the country’s 19 counties. As in the other 18 counties, the local governing Telemark County Authority (“Telemark Fylkeskommune” in Norwegian) has its own logo, a stylized Viking axe. The roots of the name Telemark go back to Old Norse, a compound of “?ilir” (? is the capital Thorn, a letter still recognized in English, ANSI code 0222), a folk name, and “mork,” meaning “woods” or “forests.” Telemark County is a relatively large though thinly populated, with just 117,000 people in an area of 5,976 square miles, about eight times the size of Boulder County, Colo. It includes the Hardanger mountain plateau, the largest in mainland Europe, and it has several sea ports, most notably Kragero, which in the 19th century had one of northern Europe’s largest registries of commercial sailing vessel tonnage. Amusing for skiers, the name of its county capital city is Skien, meaning “The ski,” where “ski” is Old Norse for “piece of wood.” In modern Norwegian, a fence of slanted pickets still is called “ski fence.”

So the name Telemark as it is applied now in skiing is an accident of history. It might have been Christiania, which, of course, would have made “Stem Christy Turn” a superfluous term. And Telemark is a fairly average southern Norwegian county, with mountains, forests, farmlands and a coastline.

In the world at large, Telemark perhaps is most known for the daring sabotage of the Vemork heavy water plant carried out there during World War II and for the snowscape backdrop it provided for the second film of the Star Wars series, “The Empire Strikes Back.”

M. Michael Brady lives in a suburb of Oslo. He has written and translated several books on Nordic skiing.