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Susanne Bier (Best Foreign Language Film, for A Better World).
The Danes were Lutheran by nature, if not by ritual observance: they shunned ostentation, distrusted exuberant expressions of emotion, and kept themselves to themselves. Compared with, say, the Thais or Puerto Ricans or even the British, they were a frosty, solemn bunch.
In fact, Denmark was not without rivals to the title of peachiest place to live. As the UN report suggested, each of the Nordic countries has its own particular claim to life-quality supremacy. Shortly after the UN report was published, Newsweek announced that it was Finland, not Denmark, that has the best quality of life, while Norway topped the UN’s own Human Development Index, and another recent report claimed that Sweden is the best country to live in if you are a woman.
So, Denmark doesn’t always come first in all the categories of these wellness, satisfaction, and happiness surveys, but it is invariably thereabouts, and if it isn’t number one, then another Nordic country almost inevitably is. Occasionally New Zealand or Japan might elbow their way into the picture (or perhaps Singapore, or Switzerland) but, overall, the message from all of these reports, which continue to be enthusiastically and unquestioningly reported in the media, was as clear as a glass of ice-cold schnapps: the Scandinavians were not only the happiest and most contented people in the
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north of Germany, and just to the left of Russia.
(Weather still shitty? Check. Tax rate still over 50 percent? Yep. Shops closed whenever you need them? Oh, yes)—I
works by artists like Olafur Eliasson were appearing everywhere from Louis Vuitton window displays to MoMA.
former Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen was recently replaced as head of NATO by another Scandinavian ex-PM, Norway’s Jens Stoltenberg, and a former Finnish president, Martti Ahtisaari, won the Nobel Peace Prize.
As Nordic historian T. K. Derry writes in his history of the region, for literally thousands of years “the north remained almost entirely outside the sphere of interest of civilised man.”
Even today the lack of interest is deafening. A journalist writing in the British Sunday Times recently described this part of the world as “a collection of countries we can’t tell apart.”
For all its scenic wonder, the cost of visiting Scandinavia coupled with its discouraging climate (not to mention the continuing existence of France and Italy) tend to dissuade most from vacationing here. Where is the travel writing on the north? Barnes & Noble’s shelves are buckling beneath the weight of Mediterranean memoirs—Dipsomaniac Among the Olive Groves, Extramarital Affairs on Oranges, and so on—but no one, it seems, wants to spend A Year in Turku, or try Driving over Lingonberries.
you could go as far as to argue that Anglo-Saxons are, essentially, Scandinavians. Well, a bit. The cultural links are undeniably deep and enduring, dating back to the infamous first raid on the monastery at Lindisfarne, England, on January 8, 793,
Viking kings went on to rule a third of Britain—the territory known as the Danelaw—
during a period that culminated with that great spell-checker booby trap, Cnut, as undisputed king of all England.
Excavations of a ship burial at Sutton Hoo have given plenty of evidence of a Swedish link, too. After they had got all that raping and pillaging out of their systems, there is strong evidence that Vikings of various tribes settled amicably among the Anglo-Saxons, trade...
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Norwegian language professor at Oslo University, Jan Terje Faarlund, recently went as far as declaring English a Scandinavian language, pointing to shared vocabulary, similar verb-then-object word order (as opposed to the cartwheels of German grammar), and so on.
(Wodin or Odin for Wednesday; Thor for Thursday; Freya for Friday),
sted” meaning “place,” and a common Danish town name ending);
Danish and British royal families having been tightly intertwined by marriage over many centuries.
mother (mor), father (far), sister (søster), brother (bror)—
far-far, mor-mor, far-mor, and mor-far method of distinguishing between maternal and paternal grandparents.
Uma Thurman, Scarlett Johansson, Matt Damon, the Jameses Coburn and Franco, Julia Roberts, and all of the Wahlbergs are in part of Swedish descent.
Buzz Aldrin and Abraham Lincoln, both of whom boast Swedish ancestry.
though stereotypical depictions usually include reference to their sexual liberalism and physical beauty, somehow they still manage to project an image of being pious, sanctimonious Lutherans.
It is a neat trick to be thought of as being both deeply hot and off-puttingly frigid, isn’t it?
Industrious, trustworthy, and politically correct, the Scandinavians are the accountant at the party, five countries’ worth of local government officials, finger-wagging social workers, and humorless party poopers.
technically speaking, neither the Finns nor the Icelanders were actually Scandinavians: that term refers to the people of the original Viking lands—Denmark, Sweden, and Norway—only.
Strictly speaking, if we are going to lump all five countries together we really ought to use the term “Nordic.”
DENMARK
Denmark
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
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flagpole flying a large, red-and-white Dannebrog
Danish children are granted what, to American eyes, can seem an almost old-fashioned freedom to roam and to take risks,
The Danes work almost half the number of hours per week they did a century ago, and significantly fewer than the rest of Europe: 1,559 hours a year compared to the EU average of 1,749 hours and the US average of 2,087
More than 754,000 Danes aged between fifteen and sixty-four—over 20 percent of the working population—do no work whatsoever and are supported by generous unemployment or disability benefits. The New York Times has called Denmark “The best place on earth to be laid off,” with unemployment benefits of up to 90 percent of previous wages for up to two years (until recent reforms, it was eleven years).
The Swedes, whose twinkling lights I can see just across the Øresund strait this evening, have long flocked to their southern neighbor to let their hair down and sample what is, from their perspective, the Danes’ louche, fun-loving lifestyle. (Younger Danes, in turn, head for Berlin to get their jollies.) At the end of the evening a group of us go, giggling, to the beach, disrobe, and tiptoe into the waters. It is something I have struggled to adjust to, but nudity is no biggie here and at least by now it is dark.
how surprisingly warm the Danish sea in summer can be.
Once upon a time, the Danes ruled all of Scandinavia.
The Kalmar Union of 1397 was an historic high point for the Danes, with the then queen, Margaret I, ruling a loosely unified Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. The union held for over a century until, in 1520, the then Danish king, Christian II, rashly beheaded around eighty Swedish nobles in the so-called Stockholm Bloodbath,
Though Denmark did manage to hold on to Norway for a few hundred years more, henceforth the Swedes would play a far more proactive role in the region’s history, mostly by holding Denmark’s head in the toilet bow...
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Renaissance king, Christian IV—Denmark’s Henry VIII,
Denmark’s most ambitious military and architectural projects, funded chiefly via the toll he extracted at Helsingør (Elsinore) from ships entering and leaving the Baltic through the narrow bottleneck there (the Panama Canal of the north).
Christian IV lost a few too many battles, mostly with the Swedes, finally bringing his country to the brink of bankruptcy. He died in 1648, consumed by envy at the rise of his Swedish rival, King Gustav II Adolf. One historian wrote of Christian’s funeral, “Financially Denmark had now sunk so low that, when the most splendid of her kings was finally laid to rest, his crown was in pawn and even the silken cloth which covered his coffin had to be bought on credit.” In contrast, by the time Gustav Vasa die...
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Treaty of Roskilde, signed a decade later in 1658, the Danes were forced by the Swedes to relinquish what are today the southern Swedish regions of Skåne, Blekinge, and Halland, as well as the Baltic island of Bornholm (the latter was eventually returned and remains Danish).
1801 a British fleet, with Nelson as second in command, attacked the Danish navy anchored outside Copenhagen to prevent it from falling into French hands.
The British returned in 1807, this time bombarding Copenhagen
Essentially, when the dust settled on the Napoleonic wars and everyone had swapped sides at least once, Denmark discovered that it had lost Norway to Sweden in yet another of those dratted treaties, this one signed in Kiel in 1814.
denude them of their troublesome territories, Schleswig and Holstein, the Danes having been forced to abandon their thousand-year-old defenses, the Danevirke, to the Prussians in 1864.
the Danish king even mooted the idea of Denmark becoming part of the German Confederation and, when that was rejected, offered Iceland instead. But Bismarck was an all-or-nothing kind of guy, and so both duchies became forever German, and Denmark’s borders were redrawn once more.
Thank goodness for Iceland, I hear you cry. But eventually the slender thread of a shared monarchy linking those two nations was also severed by that most unlikely of liberators, Adolf Hitler: when his army invaded Denmark in April 1940, it inadvertently relieved Iceland of its Danish head of state.
