Mattis is a Scandinavian and German form related to Matthias, from Hebrew, meaning 'gift of God.'
Mattis is the Scandinavian and German form of Matthew, derived from the Hebrew Mattityahu, which means 'gift of God' — from mattan (gift) and Yah (God). The name traveled from Hebrew through Greek as Matthaios, then into Latin as Matthaeus, branching into dozens of vernacular forms across medieval Europe. In Norway and Sweden, Mattis emerged as a distinctly Nordic simplification: compact, two-syllabled, and carrying none of the ecclesiastical solemnity of the Latinate Matthew.
It is, in the best sense, a folk name — the name a farmer or a sailor might have carried in a fjordside village. Saint Matthew the Apostle, traditionally identified as the tax collector called from his booth by Jesus and later credited with the first gospel, gave the name its enduring Christian currency. In Scandinavia, Mattis appears in church records from the medieval period onward, and the name has been borne by fishermen, craftsmen, and in the twentieth century by a beloved fictional character: Mattis Hamsun, the lonely, gentle-souled bird-catcher in Tarjei Vesaas's 1957 Norwegian novel The Birds.
Vesaas's Mattis made the name synonymous in Norwegian literature with tender-heartedness and a childlike openness to the world. Outside Scandinavia, Mattis has begun to attract parents in North America and Western Europe who are drawn to its clean Nordic aesthetic — related to but clearly distinct from the more familiar Matt or Matthias. It sounds natural spoken aloud, ages gracefully from childhood through adulthood, and carries the cultural luster of a name rooted in both scripture and northern Europe's literary tradition.