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

by Michael Booth

Midsummer’s Eve is one of the highlights of the Scandinavian calendar; pagan in origin but hijacked by the Church and renamed in honor of “Sankt Hans” (St. John). In Sweden they will be dancing around maypoles garlanded with flowers; in Finland and Norway they will have gathered around bonfires. Here in Denmark, in the garden of my friend’s summerhouse north of Copenhagen, the beer and cocktails are flowing. At ten o’clock we gather around a fire to sing “Vi Elsker Vort Land” (“We Love Our Country”) and other stirring, nationalistic hymns. An effigy of a witch, assembled from old gardening clothes and a broomstick, is burned, sending her—my friend’s eight-year-old daughter informs me—off to the Hartz Mountains in Germany.