Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0016/00165.txt

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$Unique_ID{bob00165}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Denmark
Facts About Denmark}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Henning Dehn Nielsen}
$Affiliation{Ministry of Foreign Affairs}
$Subject{denmark
danish
queen
danes
age
jutland
margrethe
prince
years
km
see
pictures
see
figures
}
$Date{1990}
$Log{See Poul Schluter*0016501.scf
}
Title:       Denmark
Book:        Facts about Denmark
Author:      Henning Dehn Nielsen
Affiliation: Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Date:        1990

Facts About Denmark

[See Poul Schluter: Prime Minister of Denmark. Courtesy Embassy of Denmark,
Washington DC]

Foreword

     The purpose of this little book is to give you a brief introduction to
Denmark.

     We do this by inviting you on a short tour through Denmark and Danish
society and, on the way, relate a little about the country and its nature,
history, government, social and cultural relations, daily life and a whole lot
more.

     While far from being an in-depth description of Denmark, we hope that
through this booklet you will receive an inkling of how five million Danes go
about their lives.

     We wish you a good time on this little journey through our country.

UFFE ELLEMANN-JENSEN
Foreign Minister

Denmark - a Green Country in the Sea

     Hans Christian Andersen has written fairytales, which have been
translated into almost 100 languages and read by children and adults
throughout the world.

     But he also wrote poetry - not known by the world at large but loved by
all Danes - in which he praises his country and declares his love, as in the
following lines:

     "In Denmark I was born, 'tis there my home is, From there my roots, and
there my world extend. You Danish tongue, as soft as Mother's voice is, With
you my heartbeats O so sweetly blend".

     Andersen wrote further of the bracing Danish beaches, of the green
islands and of Jutland as the head of land separating on one side of the
Baltic and the Kattegat and on the other the North Sea.

     This picture of Denmark as a strongly varied land, both from a
geographical and scenic point of view, also applies today, but first some
of the salient facts regarding size and situation deserve to be mentioned:

     Denmark's total area is around 43,000 sq. km, equivalent to the size of
Switzerland or one-ninth of California, situated between 54 degrees 34' and
57 degrees 45' N. lat. and 8 degrees 5' and 15 degrees 12' E. long. If these
figures do not convey much, suffice it to say that Denmark is joined to the
European continent by a frontier with the Federal Republic of Germany;
otherwise its nearest neighbours are Sweden and Norway, lying respectively
just 20 km away over the Sound and approximately 200 km over the Skagerrak.
The distance to Britain measures about 500 km across the North Sea.

     Despite its very modest size, Denmark, as already mentioned, offers a
greater geographical variation than that found in many other countries. The
peninsula of Jutland is anchored to the central European mainland, but
otherwise Denmark is comprised of those green islands that Hans Christian
Andersen wrote about and there is an incredible amount of these, numbering no
fewer than 406 larger and smaller isles, of which 90 are inhabitated. The
largest are Zealand - with the capital of Copenhagen - Funen, the twin islands
of Lolland-Falster, and Bornholm in the Baltic, lying about 200 km east of the
rest of Denmark.

     This sharp land division has in relation to area created an unusually
long coastline of no less than 7,300 km, equivalent to, believe it or not,
one-sixth of the earth's circumference. This close proximity to the sea comes
naturally to the Danes themselves, but is seen by many foreign visitors as
something unusual and attractive. There have been cases of tourists from
Central Europe visiting Denmark for the sole reason of wandering along the
300 km of shore bordering the North Sea and stretching from the Danish-German
border to the tip of Jutland.

     Along the west coast of Jutland stretches an almost unbroken row of high,
denuded dunes, Mid-Jutland is characterized by moors, lakes and "mountains",
which do not approach a height of more than 170 metres, even if
Danes - somewhat exuberantly - describe one of them as "Sky Mountain". The
east coast of Jutland is indented with many inlets surrounded by woodland and
fertile agricultural land. Most of the bigger islands are a constant green
with good arable land and towns and villages nestled close to one another.
Exceptional is the rocky island of Bornholm, which geologically has more in
common with Sweden than Denmark. Denmark's climate, because of its variable
nature, is always a good topic for conversion. One is never certain whether a
new day will bring sun or rain. Many Danes would prefer more settled weather
conditions, but visiting foreigners, used perhaps to longer periods of warmth
or cold, often find the changeable Danish climate charming.

     It comes as no surprise that it has proved less than easy to link up
Denmark's traffic network, and many ferries and bridges are necessary to
accomplish this. Ferries accommodating up to 2,000 passengers and 300-400 cars
regularly sail between Zealand and Funen and between Zealand and Jutland, and
ever more impressive new bridges continue to be built. The latest of these
stretches for 3.3 km between Zealand and Falster, serving as a link for the
motorway between Scandinavia and West Germany.

     Parliament has approved a project to be carried out in the next years,
linking Zealand and Funen via a 20 km long bridge and tunnel network over
the Great Belt. The scheme has been discussed for many years, but large-scale
work has now begun, and all Danes look forward to the day when trains and cars
can begin to roll over the Great Belt, respectively from 1992 and 1996.

     Denmark has a population of just over 5.1 million, of whom 70 per cent
live in urban areas. The largest city is Copenhagen, with a population of 1.4
million in the entire metropolitan area. Arhus on the east coast of Jutland
is Denmark's second-largest city, with 254,000 inhabitants, followed by
Odense, the largest town on Funen, with 173,000 and Aalborg in North Jutland,
with 155,000.

     The autonomous regions of the Kingdom of Denmark - Greenland and the
Faroe Islands - are discussed in later chapters.

Brief Tour Through 12,000 Years

     The desire by most people to deepen their knowledge of a small foreign
country's history is probably strictly limited, but a brief and comfortable
trip several thousand years back into Denmark's past can be taken, if one
feels inclined to visit the National Museum in Copenhagen.

     Here one can see rich collections of the weapons and implements of
flint - arrow-heads, axes, swords and much more besides - crafted and used in
the everyday life of the peoples of Stone Age Denmark from around 10,000 to
1,800 B.C. They lived from hunting, as well as gradually a little farming, and
their places of dwelling and remains have been found at many sites throughout
the country. They buried their dead in stone cairns, often comprised of a
number of upright stones topped by one huge capstone, which can still be seen
in landscapes today.

     Bronze came to Denmark around 1,500 B.C., imported from southern Europe.
Weapons, ornaments and sacrificial offerings could be crafted from this in a
much more artistic manner than with flint's limited means, and a tour through
the National Museum provides illustrious examples of what the Danish craftsmen
of the Bronze Age could produce. One of the  masterpieces is the Sun Chariot,
which was made around 1,500 B.C. or thereabouts and comprises a circular disk
partially gilded, representing the life-giving sun, drawn by a bronze horse.
The chariot, used as a gift of sacrifice to the sun, was buried in a Zealand
moor, where it was discovered in 1902.

     Not far from the Sun Chariot in the National Museum are the lurs, which
also date from the Bronze Age and are the world's oldest musical instruments.
These gracefully curved bronze horns are 1.5-2 metres long from mouthpiece to
funnel. A total of 31 lurs have been found, and many of them are so well
preserved that they can still be used to play fanfares today, which actually
occurs from time to time on festive occasions.

     The Bronze Age was replaced by the Iron Age around 500 B.C. More
effective implements to cultivate land were thereby created, and rural
settlements effectively came into existence. But first and foremost, iron
provided the means for more and stronger weapons, inspiring the Danes of that
time to take up warring pursuits, which culminated several centuries
later - after the craft of building sea-going vessels had been learnt - with
the Viking expeditions to England and Normandy. It is the period of the Viking
Age that Danes often can be heard to talk about with a certain pride, perhaps
because Denmark then experienced a brief heyday of big-power status,
stretching from 1013, when the Vikings conquered all of England, reigned over
by the Danish king, Knud (Canute) the Great, up to 1035.

     In order to find really tangible evidence of the Viking Age, one must
leave the National Museum and go into the countryside. In a specially-built
museum at Roskilde, one can study the ships of the Vikings, long narrow boats
with steeply curving bows and sterns. Also Viking fortified camps have been
found and partially reconstructed at three sites in the country - at
Trelleborg on Zealand and Aggersborg and Fyrkat in Jutland - each consisting
of a large number of houses symmetrically ordered in squares surrounded by a
circular earthwork.

     It is not known who actually built these forts, and on the whole little
is known in the way of historical facts from the Viking Age, but in the last
century of this famous period - when the conquest of England also took
place - the foundations were laid of the Danish kingdom as it is known today.
As first in the line of Danish monarchs can be named Gorm the Old, who reigned
in the first half of the 10th century and died around 940.

     He was succeeded by his son, with the somewhat peculiar name of Harald
Bluetooth, and it was this king that left his indelible mark on Denmark's
history by erecting a runic stone over his parents' burial mounds at Jelling
in eastern Jutland, at the time a seat of kings but today a small town. This
stone bears an inscription, in which Bluetooth commemorates his parents and
particularly praises himself for having unified "all of Denmark" and for
having "made the Danes Christians". This stone is often described as the
Danish kingdom's birth certificate and is still regarded today - 1,000 years
on - with national respect.

     The inscriptions on the Jelling stones (there are in fact two) are in
runic characters, a written alphabet which spread from Southern and Central
Europe to the Nordic countries. With their lines of almost equal length, the
characters were well suited to carving in stone, and more than one hundred
runic stones are to be found in Denmark, raised in memory of the famous dead.
The runic alphabet was replaced by Latin script around 1100.

     As Harald Bluetooth has stated in stone at Jelling, Christianity had come
to Denmark, brought by the French monk Ansgar, called the Apostle of the
North. As tangible evidence of the inroads Christianity made during the
following couple of centuries, some 2,000 rural churches stand to this day,
built of stone hewed by the peasants. They are sited a few miles apart,
usually whitewashed and standing on hilltops, thereby characterizing the
landscape in high degree some 700-800 years after their construction. In many
of them one can surprisingly find walls and vaulted ceilings adorned with
medieval frescoes depicting angels and devils and frightful beasts in
grotesque combinations, often symbolizing the corruption of earthly life.

     The Danish monarchial line, stretching from the above-mentioned Gorm the
Old and Harald Bluetooth to the currently reigning Queen Margrethe II,
numbers 54 names. Not all of these monarchs naturally have won an equally
strong place for themselves, either in history or in the consciousness of the
everyday Dane. Among the foremost are Queen Margrethe I (1387-1412), who
united Denmark, Norway and Sweden in 1397, and King Christian IV (1588-1648),
who had little luck with his war campaigns but who was a passionate builder
and who to this day has left his mark on the capital with many highly
remarkable buildings. A certain degree of veneration surrounds Frederik VII
(1848-63), who had the foresight to realize that new times were on their way
and relinquished some of his absolute power by signing the actual Danish
Constitution dating from 1849.

     During long periods, also after the Viking age, the Danish kingdom was
much larger than its current 43,000 sq.km. For no less than 434 years - from
1380 to 1814 - Norway belonged to Denmark, as did southernmost Sweden until
1658 and Schleswig and Holstein in North Germany up to 1864. Unfortunate
Danish participation in a row of wars led to a drastic decrease in the size
of the country. Most consuming was a series of wars with neighbouring
Sweden, culminating at the end of the 1650s with the Swedish invasion of
entire Denmark and the siege of Copenhagen.

     A heavy blow for Denmark was a brief war with Prussia and Austria in
1864, which resulted in the ceding of Schleswig and Holstein to Germany, and
the annexation of 200,000 Danes until the northern part of Schleswig was
returned to Denmark in 1920 following Germany's defeat in the First World
War - irrespective of the fact that Denmark had not participated in the war.

     During the Second World War, Nazi Germany invaded Denmark and Norway on
the 9th of April 1940. After a brief skirmish at the border, the Danish
government ceased resistance and attempted to reach accommodations with the
occupying forces in the greatest possible way to secure Danish right of say in
internal affairs. But increasing German interference with unacceptable demands
led to a definitive breach between the Danish government and the Germans on
the 29th of August 1943.

     By that time a Danish resistance movement had been organized, and in the
closing stages of the occupation the number of acts of sabotage increased,
directed at blowing up any means of production or transport in the German
interests. Numerous resistance members were captured by the Germans and sent
to concentration camps in Germany, together with a large part of the Danish
police force. A total of 7,000 Danish Jews were smuggled out to neutral Sweden
via clandestine sea routes just prior to a German action directed against
them. A couple of hundred Danish ships, which on the 9th of April found
themselves outside Danish territory, sailed in Allied service for the duration
of the war and many Danish seamen lost their lives through torpedo attacks and
other belligerent action.

     At the end of the war, Denmark was recognized as an Allied nation, was
among the founders of the United Nations and, as a member of NATO and the EC,
has since found a firm place in the Western European nations' cooperation.

Modern Queen in World's Oldest Monarchy

     Denmark's reigning Queen Margrethe II is a highly contemporary
representative of the world's oldest monarchy with ancestral links stretching
back 1,000 years.

     Queen Margrethe acceded to the throne in 1972, when at the age of
31 - following new rules laid down in 1953 concerning female succession - she
succeeded her late father King Frederik IX. With the sole exception of Queen
Margrethe I (1375-1412), all prior monarchs had been male.

     That a pretty and talented young princess should break with the
560-year-old tradition of male supremacy in the Danish monarchy was felt by
the vast majority of the Danish people as a refreshing inauguration of a new
era - with equal rights for men and women.

     Quite apart from all the goodwill surrounding her accession to the
throne, Queen Margrethe has succeeded in distinguishing herself as an active
and vital person in today's Denmark; she combines a pronounced ability to live
up to the duties of her high office with an understanding of what motivates
the ordinary citizen. Thanks to these qualities, Queen Margrethe on several
occasions has won first place, when Gallup opinion polls had the task of
finding the most popular Dane.

     Winning such a distinguished place in the mind of the ordinary Dane owes
much - among many other qualities - to the deeply committed New Year speeches
that Queen Margrethe holds each year on radio and television, and in which she
often has appealed for compassion and goodwill towards the weaker in society.
As the monarch said in one of her addresses: "Let us turn to our neighbours to
see if they need our assistance. That applies not only to our relations with
the people of the Third World, for whom the global crisis is a misfortune, but
it also applies to those around the corner, the elderly couple down below, or
those of our own family, whom we tend to forget, because they do not live
nearby."

     Also contributing to the fondness felt towards Queen Margrethe are her
obviously creative and artistic talents, which have found particular
expression in the illustrative areas. In 1977-78, she contributed 70 drawings
for J.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and has since illustrated diverse
Danish works. One year she festively composed the "Christmas seals", which all
Danes add to the normal stamps on their Yuletide letters. A couple of years
ago, the Queen designed both the sets and the costumes for Danish television's
adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Shepherdess and the
Chimney-Sweep". The Queen, together with her consort, Prince Henrik, has
translated Simone de Beauvoir's "All Men are Mortal" from French into Danish.
The Queen and Prince, as they themselves have said, had "used the long
dark winter evenings at the royal palace to amuse themselves by translating
this fine French prose into Danish".

     Queen Margrethe (Alexandrine Thorhildur Ingrid) was born on the 16th of
April 1940, the first child of King Frederik IX and Queen Ingrid. The event
occurred just one week after the Germans had occupied Denmark, and the birth
of the princess was seen by many Danes as a ray of light in the dark. Her
schooling took place at the palace and at a Copenhagen high school for girls,
whereafter she studied history, politics and economics at the universities of
Copenhagen, `Arhus, Paris and London, in order to prepare herself for her
coming vacation. Apart from her studies, she immersed herself in archaeology
and participated in excavations in Denmark and Italy, in the latter together
with her maternal grandfather, Sweden's King Gustaf VI Adolf.

     During one of her many tours of study abroad, Princess Margrethe met in
London the young French Count Henri de Laborde de Monpezat (b. 1934), who was
at the time attached to the French embassy there, and, as the Queen declared
in a later television interview, it was love at first sight. "The horizon was
all aflame", she said and they were married in Copenhagen in 1967. Count Henri
was named Prince Henrik of Denmark and in the years since has strengthened his
position as the queen's consort through his personal charm and through - what
Danes strongly appreciate - a fine sense of humour. He is influential in
supporting Danish exports and participates actively in the Danish Red Cross
and the World Wildlife Fund. He has at the same time maintained strong contact
with his homeland, pursuing his interest for viticulture at the chateau of his
home region. Chateau de Caix in Cahors, which the Queen and the Prince have
acquired and where they tend to spend a part of the summer vacation.

     The royal couple have two sons, Crown Prince Frederik (the heir to the
throne), born in 1968, and Prince Joachim, born in 1969. They both passed
their matriculation examinations in 1968, whereafter they together with other
recruits fulfilled their military service, rounding off with courses in
parachute jumping. Reaching the age of majority, when he turned 18 on the 26th
of May 1986, the Crown Prince joined his mother in the Council of State and,
in preparation for his future role, has been studying political science at
Arhus University.

     The Queen's days are filled with the strenuous duties of her position.
She presides over meetings of the Council of State, where all legislation is
put forward. Beyond this her tasks are largely of a representative nature. She
receives new ambassadors and foreign heads of state visiting Denmark, and
together with Prince Henrik she undertakes official visits to other countries,
in 1987 as far as Australia. She has often visited the autonomous regions of
the Kingdom of Denmark - the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic and
Greenland - displaying, in the latter's case, a preference to wear the
decorative Greenlandic costume with long white sealskin boots.

     The Queen's parents, King Frederik IX and Queen Ingrid - who, prior to
her marriage to the Danish Crown Prince in 1935, was a Swedish Princess - had
two other daughters: Princess Benedikte, born in 1944, married in 1968 to
German Prince Richard of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg, and Princess Anne-Marie,
born in 1946, married in 1964 to then King Constantine of Greece.

     Queen Ingrid is the royal house's grand old lady and delights in
surrounding herself with her daughters and sons-in-law and numerous
grandchildren as often as the occasion allows.

     The royal family's official residence in Copenhagen is the Amalienborg
Palace - alternating during the summer months with Fredensborg Palace in North
Zealand and Marselisborg in Arhus.

     Queen Ingrid's summer residence is Grasten Palace in South Jutland. The
royal couple often sail during the summertime in the royal yacht Dannebrog.