Danish people

“ And beyond the tranquil enclosures of the royal parks the Danish people is moving surely and steadily towards a broader and more democratic life than it has hitherto enjoyed. And women are in the forefront of the movement. The Danish women refuse to be slaves of fashion and display a certain charming coquetry in their dress. ”

“ This must have been a most exceptional state of affairs, if one may judge from Danes one has the pleasure of knowing, or from what one may see of the race making holiday at these seaside resorts. No European people seems to get more out of life and into life than the always cheerful inhabitants of this small land. It is the mark of true genius that, shut out from so much, they have made still more of what remains.
Less than thirty miles north of Copenhagen, where the Sound is straitest, stands the town that is next best known to the world of all on Danish earth. ”

“ Meanwhile French philosophy, infidelity, and republican principles have been increasing in this city and throughout the country, until about the time of the late revolution in France, the death of the old king of Denmark afforded the Danish people an opportunity to reform their government. ”

“ In Danish settlements there seems always to have been an overlord, who led his people in war and ruled in time of peace; though there was a class of freemen amongst them which had special rights and privileges.
12. But the Danes were something more than tillers of the soil; they were traders too, and "tuns" became in many places more like our "towns" and trading-places than ever they had been before. In time we find the largest towns in the Danish part of England—Leicester, Lincoln, Derby, Nottingham, and Stamford—binding themselves together to protect their trading interests. ”

“ The business language is everywhere Danish, even in the West India islands. In Iceland, and less purely in the Faroe islands, the old Norwegian or Icelandic is spoken. The Danes are an industrious, patient, and contented people, and make good soldiers and seamen. They have regular features, blue eyes, and light hair. The religion of Denmark is Lutheran, but all creeds are tolerated. ”

“ All these perilous wars and fortunes had so exhausted the royal line among the Danes, that it was found to be reduced to GURID alone, the daughter of Alf, and granddaughter of Sigar. And when the Danes saw themselves deprived of their usual high-born sovereigns, they committed the kingdom to men of the people, and appointed rulers out of the commons, assigning to Ostmar the regency of Skaane, and that of Zealand to Hunding; on Hane they conferred the lordship of Funen; while in the hands of Rorik and Hather they put the supreme power of Jutland, the authority being divided. ”

“ DANISH ESTABLISHMENTS, GREENLAND.
The Esquimaux are not subject to Danish laws, but although proud of their nominal independence they are sincerely attached to the Danes, and with abundant reason; a Lutheran clergyman, a doctor, and a schoolmaster, whose duty it is to give gratuitous instruction and relief, are paid by the Government, and attached to each district; and when these improvident people are in distress, which not unfrequently happens during the long winters, provisions are issued to them free of cost; spirits are strictly prohibited. ”

“ Björn Halderson's lexicon, Icelandic, Latin, and Danish, edited by Rask in 1814, and Danish-English, by Ferral, in 1845-'54; Hornbeck's “Danish-English and English-Danish Dictionary” (2 vols., Copenhagen, 1863) .—The literature of Denmark is for the most part of recent growth. Mediæval Danish writings belong to the general literature of Scandinavia. The most important of them are the codes of the ancient kings, which belong to the 12th century, and the songs and ballads, partly derived from the Scandinavian sagas, which have been preserved by being sung by the people. ”

“ Because it contradicts the sense of justice, inherent during centuries in our Danish civilisation and which lives in the Danish people. In accordance with the above principles, all Danish citizens have equal rights and duties before the law and freedom of religion assured to them by the constitution. ”

“ They still maintain their [554] reputation for seafaring skill and hospitable customs. They belong to the Scandinavian branch of the Teutonic peoples, and speak the Danish form of the old Norse, which was fixed in writing about the time of the Reformation.
Since the Reformation the Danes have been adherents of the Lutheran Church. Education is well advanced, and there are very few people in the country who can neither read nor write.
Government.—The present constitution of Denmark dates from 1866. ”

“ The Danes are a yellow-haired and blue-eyed Teutonic race of middle stature, bearing traces of their kinship with the northern Scandinavian peoples. Their habits of life resemble those of the North Germans even more than those of the Swedes. The independent tenure of the land by a vast number of small farmers, who are their own masters, gives an air of carelessness, almost of truculence, to the well-to-do Danish peasants. ”

“ Charming, too, are the city's many squares and public gardens, canals with many-masted ships making an unusual spectacle in the streets. But, after all, it is perhaps the innate gaiety of the Copenhagener which impresses you most. You feel, indeed, that these kindly Danes are a little too content for national development; but their light-hearted way of viewing life makes them very pleasant friends, and their hospitality is one of their chief characteristics. Every lady at the head of a Danish household is an excellent cook and manager, as well as being an agreeable and intelligent companion. ”

“ In reviewing the literature of Denmark, one is surprised to see, not so few but so many authors—many, when the limited size of the country and extent of the population be taken into consideration. It must be remembered that the Danish language is not much known, and that it is spoken and read only by the inhabitants of Denmark Proper, its dependencies, and a portion of its colonists in the East and West Indies; yet it can boast of more writers than countries of an equal or larger size—than Holland, Italy, Spain, or Portugal. ”

“ In Denmark, God be praised, thoughts, and their rudest expression, are still free, when the law of the land is not transgressed; and I regard no Dane as the enemy of his country because, perhaps, he does not join in our common wish for its welfare, and in personal attachment to the royal house, with the same warmth as myself. In such unsettled and unhappy times as the present, we must, alas! experience that the opinions of the best Danish men differ on many important matters. ”

“ All their fine speeches went for nothing when it came to the test, and King Christian rode back to Denmark, a sadder and wiser man. It was left to Gustav Adolf, after all, to teach the German generals the lesson they needed.
In the years of peace before that unhappy war, Danish trade and Danish culture had blossomed exceedingly, thanks to the wisdom, the clever management, and untiring industry of the King. He built factories, cloth-mills, silk-mills, paper-mills, dammed the North Sea out from the rich marshlands with great dikes, taught the farmers profitable ways of tilling their fields ”

“ Every child between the ages of 7 and 14 is obliged by law to attend some school, and it is rare to meet a Danish peasant, however poor, who cannot read and write. The university of Copenhagen, which dates from 1478, has 40 professors and upward of 1,100 students, and there are colleges in all the large towns, besides 2,940 public schools. The number of periodicals is large in proportion to the population.—The government of Denmark is a hereditary constitutional monarchy. ”

“ Its development was retarded by the use of German as the court language and of Latin as the language of literature, and in the 17th century by the inroads of French taste and phrases. In the 18th century it was again affected by the predominance of German culture, but the subsequent revival of ancient Norse studies and of a national literature developed the Danish into one of the richest and most refined European tongues. It is now not only the language of Denmark proper, but also of Norway, and of the northern part of Schleswig. ”

“ The time once was when, as we have seen, all Scandinavia, and England also, were governed by Danish kings, and Denmark was one of the great powers of Europe. Since that proud time the power of the Danish throne has steadily declined, until now it is but the shadow of its former self.
A great blow came in 1814, when it was forced to yield Norway to Sweden. All its possessions on the Baltic had vanished and its dominion was compressed into the Danish peninsula and its neighboring islands, with the exception of the duchies of Holstein and Lauenburg lying south of the peninsula. ”

“ But Denmark is a leaner land than Holland, less moist and more thinly inhabited, so that its art lacks the comfortable self-satisfied character of Dutch art. It betrays rather a tremulous longing, a pleasing melancholy and delight in dreams, a trembling dread of contact with coarse and stern reality. It was only for a time, early in the ’seventies, that a touch of cosmopolitanism affected Danish art. The phase of grandiose historical painting and anecdotic genre was experienced there, as in every other country. ”

“ While in Sweden the free and energetic peasant was a salutary power in the state, which he served with both mind and plough, the Danish peasant was sinking to the level of a bondman. While the Swedish peasants were well represented in the Swedish Riksdag, whose proceedings they sometimes dominated, the Danish peasantry had no political rights or privileges whatever.
Such then, briefly, was the condition of things in Denmark when, in 1588, Christian IV. ascended the throne. Where so much was necessarily uncertain and fluctuating, there was room for an almost infinite variety of development. ”

“ Norway, subsequently, threw in her lot definitively with Denmark. Dissensions resulting in interminable civil wars had, even before the Union, exhausted the resources of the poorest of the three northern realms; and her ruin was completed by the ravages of the Black Death, which wiped out two-thirds of her population. Unfortunately, too, for Norway’s independence, the native gentry had gradually died out, and were succeeded by immigrant Danish fortune-hunters; native burgesses there were none, and the peasantry were mostly thralls ”

“ Beside Christian’s coffin is a silver wreath sent by the Danes of America. The king was their king during childhood and youth, until they adopted a new land; so the Danes of America had a friendly place in their hearts for him.
Most of the earlier Danish rulers—those of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—are [231] buried in the old convent church of Ringsted. And in the convent church of Sorö, which is near at hand, sleeps the great warrior bishop Absalon, founder of Copenhagen. ”

“ The result of a fairly equal distribution of wealth is a marked tendency towards equality in social intercourse. The townspeople show a bias in favour of French habits and fashions. The separation from the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, which were more than half German, intensified the national character; the Danes are intensely patriotic; and there is no portion of the Danish dominions except perhaps in the West Indian islands, where a Scandinavian language is not spoken. The preponderance of the female population over the male is approximately as 1052 to 1000. ”

“ Considering Copenhagen as the capital of Denmark and Norway, I was surprised not to see so much industry or taste as in Christiania. Indeed, from everything I have had an opportunity of observing, the Danes are the people who have made the fewest sacrifices to the graces.
The men of business are domestic tyrants, coldly immersed in their own affairs, and so ignorant of the state of other countries, that they dogmatically assert that Denmark is the happiest country in the world; the Prince Royal the best of all possible princes; and Count Bernstorff the wisest of ministers. ”

“ Denmark when we have got away from the heroic age into the dawn of the true historical period, is definitely separated from Germany in the parts about the Eyder—perhaps by the river itself. It is Pagan and Anti-Imperial; the Danes being, in the eyes of the Carlovingians, little better than the hated Saxons. Nor is it ever an integral part of the Empire; though Danish and German alliances are common. ”

“ All that can be said is that the measures adopted in Denmark are in harmony with the whole trend of Danish thought, and this is the best guaranty we have that they have benefited both the employer and employee. ”

“ The Enevaelde, or absolute monarchy, also distinctly benefited the whole Danish state by materially increasing its reserve of native talent. Its immediate consequence was to throw open every state appointment to the middle classes; and the middle classes of that period, with very few exceptions, monopolized the intellect and the energy of the nation. New blood of the best quality nourished and stimulated the whole body politic. ”

“ The interior is washed and encompassed by the ocean; and this, through the circuitous winds of the interstices, now straitens into the narrows of a firth, now advances into ampler bays, forming a number of islands. Hence Denmark is cut in pieces by the intervening waves of ocean, and has but few portions of firm and continuous territory; these being divided by the mass of waters that break them up, in ways varying with the different angle of the bend of the sea. Of all these, Jutland, being the largest and first settled, holds the chief place in the Danish kingdom. ”