Denmark
Denmark historical timeline
History
Origins
The Bronze Age here left objects of startling quality — the Sun Chariot, the long curved horns called lurs — and the Iron Age left bodies preserved in peat. From the eighth century Danish ships raided and then settled across the North Sea, taking much of eastern England. Around 965 Harald Bluetooth had it carved on a stone at Jelling that he had won all Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian; his great-grandson Cnut ruled England, Denmark and Norway at once.
Turning points
Margrete I brought the three Nordic crowns into the Kalmar Union in 1397 and ruled them from Denmark. The Reformation arrived in 1536. Then came three centuries of contraction: Skåne lost to Sweden in 1658, Norway lost in 1814, and in 1864 a war with Prussia and Austria took Schleswig and Holstein — roughly a third of the territory and two fifths of the population. The country turned inward and rebuilt, with a constitution in 1849 that ended absolutism and a cooperative farming movement that transformed the countryside. Occupied from 1940 to 1945, Denmark managed in October 1943 to move almost its entire Jewish population to safety in Sweden. It joined the European Community in 1973 and rejected the euro by referendum in 2000.
Influential people
Harald Bluetooth, whose initials in runes make the Bluetooth logo. Margrete I. Tycho Brahe, whose observations made Kepler’s laws possible. Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard, contemporaries in the same small city. N. F. S. Grundtvig, whose folk high schools shaped Danish education and self-image. Niels Bohr in physics, Carl Nielsen in music, Arne Jacobsen in design.
Cultural evolution
Hygge is the word that travelled, though it describes something closer to a heating strategy than a philosophy. Danish design — furniture, ceramics, lighting, and Lego — carried an argument about ordinary objects deserving care. Cycling is infrastructure rather than recreation. And from 2004 the New Nordic movement, with Noma at its centre, changed how ambitious restaurants everywhere think about local ingredients and season.
Present-day significance
Denmark places at or near the top of most international rankings of trust, equality and reported wellbeing, funded by among the highest taxes in the world. Roughly half its electricity comes from wind, and Danish firms built much of the offshore wind industry. Greenland and the Faroe Islands remain part of the realm with their own home rule, which gives a small country an Arctic seat.