The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

by Michael Booth

But Holst’s declaration also encapsulates what turned out to be the Danes’ great cultural ‘Golden Age’, a mid-nineteenth-century period of increased social mobility and artistic blossoming that saw the son of a washerwoman, Hans Christian Andersen, publish his first fairy stories and go on to become one of the first genuinely world-famous figures; Søren Kierkegaard write his groundbreaking existentialist works; and the great classical sculptor, Bertel Thorvaldsen, along with painters like C. W. Eckersberg and his pupil Christen Købke, and the Royal Ballet master August Bournonville, contribute to a great flurry of artistic activity within Denmark at the time.