Midsummer Night is the big festival this month, though confusingly Danes shift this to the 23rd rather than the 21st of June to mark Sankt Hans Eve – the night before the saint’s day of John the Baptist. It’s celebrated with a big bonfire that Danes begin building a month in advance so that by the third week of June, Denmark’s countryside is dotted with impressive twiggy mountains.
Lego Man, the dog and I traipse along the beach, wriggling our toes/paws in the sand on the way to our first Sankt Hans celebration. The air smells of woodsmoke and sausages and the dog, who lives for sniffs and snacks, is in heaven. The locals are out in force and I spot the Mr Beards (I–III). I give them a tentative ‘Hej!’ as we pass and miraculously, they nod in response. And then they speak to us.
‘We see you have been getting the recycling right…’ Mr Beard I comments.
‘…But your dog still seems pretty wild,’ cautions Mr Beard II, lighting a sleek black Popeye pipe and giving it a puff.
I thank them for their input and we walk on, not hugely easy as the dog seems to have become mesmerised by fire, like early man.
We’re meeting up with Friendly Neighbour, The Viking and my new Danish friend who looks a lot like a blonde Helena Christensen (and she’s nice – I know, life isn’t fair). There’s also an assortment of other waifs and strays that each of them have brought along, and I eye up the picnic supplies and copious quantities of beer contributed to see us through. Tucked into The Viking’s surprisingly well-appointed picnic basket is a Tupperware container filled with dough that he tells us is for ‘snobrød’ or ‘winding-bread’. To celebrate the feast day of John the Baptist, Danes wind strips of dough around a stick (efficiently prepared in advance and well-soaked in water) to cook by the heat of the bonfire. Lego Man makes the mistake of asking why, to which we get the now familiar response, en masse, like an upbeat Greek chorus: ‘It’s tradition!’
A man who looks a lot like Robert Plant starts making a speech over a PA system but he’s interrupted by screeches of ear-splitting feedback. He taps the microphone a few times, which does nothing other than add a thumping noise to the cacophony, before finally giving up and shouting to be heard.
‘Who’s he?’ I whisper to The Viking.
‘Oh he’s a local MP. In Copenhagen and places like that you’d have someone famous doing this bit, but here we usually get a politician or a local radio DJ or something.’
‘How showbiz…’ I murmur, as The Viking turns back to give Robert Plant his full attention. ‘And, er, what’s he saying?’ My Danish still leaves much to be desired and random mumblings in a rural Jutland accent are beyond me.
‘He’s just telling everyone what’s happening – next we’re going to sing.’
‘Oh good,’ says Lego Man, as a lady in her later years ambles over to hand out song sheets. ‘And what are we singing about?’
The Viking sighs slightly and I wonder whether he’s regretting befriending a couple of dumb Brits. He points at the song sheet in his hand: ‘This one’s called “Vi elsker vort land”, which means, “We love our country”.’
Of course it does! I think.
A woman who’s clearly had too much sun in her time and now resembles a mahogany-hued marmoset starts to slam out a few chords on an electric keyboard with one hand while smoking a cigarette with the other. The crowd begins to sing and Marmoset Woman joins in, trying not to set the sheet music alight during page turns.
I try to concentrate on the song, despite no prior knowledge of the tune or the words, but get distracted by a young boy who starts climbing the man-made mountain, dragging some sort of Flamenco-dancer scarecrow behind him. Having positioned the unfortunate offering on top of the stick pile, he proceeds to punch it in the face. Once the small child has dismounted, a woman stuffs some extra straw around the base of the bonfire then sets light to it with a torch. Flames begin to crackle and lick their way up, illuminating the figure astride the pyre. I can make out a hat covering scraggly wool-hair and a cape of some description over the top of a frilly red dress. Some wit has also seen fit to draw an unhappy face on the papier mâché globe of a head.
‘I haven’t revisited my convent school copy of the King James Bible for some years,’ I whisper to Lego Man, ‘but I’m pretty sure John the Baptist was beheaded, not burned alive. And he wasn’t famed for his Flamenco dancing…’
The Viking, overhearing, chips in: ‘Oh, it’s not Saint John up there. It’s just the eve of his saint’s day.’
‘Right … so, who’s he?’ I say, pointing at the unhappy felt-tipped face as it explodes into flames, sending a cheer around the crowd.
‘She,’ he corrects me, ‘is a witch.’
At this moment, the unfortunate creature’s synthetic red frills catch fire and black plumes of smoke start billowing out to sea. There’s whooping and clapping and a few of our party capture the moment on camera phones.
‘You still burn witches?’ I ask in horror.
‘Just tonight,’ he tries to explain. ‘That’s what the bonfires are for. It’s tr—’
‘—Don’t tell me, “it’s tradition”?’
‘How did you guess?’
‘Just a hunch.’
‘And the punching in the face bit,’ Lego Man asks, ‘was that part of the tradition too?’
‘No, that kid was just a brat,’ replies The Viking.
‘Right. And the Flamenco outfit?’
‘Just whatever someone could find, I suspect.’
A gust of wind fans the flames and soon the crudely fashioned ‘witch’ is just a blackened chicken-wire mesh on a stick. There’s some clapping and Brat Boy and his friends begin laughing uproariously. Another song starts up and we’re encouraged to huddle around the dying fire to start baking our bread kebabs, but I’ve rather lost my appetite.
Friendly Neighbour, observing my consternation, attempts to console me.
‘We have to burn the witch to ward off evil spirits,’ she says, as though this is the most natural thing in the world.
‘Right…’
‘Witches are very active around Midsummer Night’s eve. So we burn a few to make the rest go to Germany—’
‘What?’ This is getting weirder by the minute.
‘To Bloksbjerg, in the mountains, where all the witches get together.’
‘Why? Why would they go to Germany?’ For cheap lager and cheese?
This is met by general shrugging before The Viking announces, audibly tipsy now: ‘I don’t know, it’s Germany. Bad stuff happens there!’ This, it seems, is the best anyone can come up with to explain away the mild xenophobia towards Denmark’s powerful southern neighbour.
It’s at this point that I’m given a semi-inebriated beach-side history lesson by The Viking, who studied the subject at university, occasionally corrected by Friendly Neighbour and Helena C, keen that we don’t end up with a totally skewed impression of their country.
I learn that the burning of ‘witches’ in Denmark started in the 16th century when the church took great pleasure in convicting and sentencing women to death by flames. The practice officially stopped in 1693, when 74-year-old Anne Palles was burned as a sorceress for having ‘enchanted’ a bailiff, caused the sudden death of a woman her husband danced with and been responsible for a poor yield on a farm on which she had once taken a pee.
‘Really? Is that last part true?’ I ask suspiciously, only to be met with vehement nodding. At this wee-based revelation, the dog starts to whimper slightly, as though conscious that he’s done far worse on many of the farms around here. He backs away from the dying embers and hides behind Lego Man’s legs.
‘So you see, we haven’t burned actual women for ages!’ The Viking ends his tutorial brightly. ‘It’s just been fashionable to burn straw witches since the 1900s.’
‘We don’t mean anything by it,’ Friendly Neighbour tries to assure me, ‘it’s just tr—’
‘“Tradition”?’
‘Yes!’ the chorus responds in now-drunken unison
.
‘But I thought Denmark was meant to be this great place for gender equality? With a long and illustrious history of promoting women’s rights?’ I am not drunk enough to let this go.
‘Sure,’ The Viking shrugs, ‘but not witches’ rights!’
‘You do know witches aren’t real, right?’
There is laughter and Lego Man goes into peacekeeping mode: ‘Don’t worry, we’re talking about hundreds of years ago. And things have been pretty good since then, right?’
‘Well…’ Friendly Neighbour pulls a face that makes her look like a plasticine figure from Wallace & Gromit.
‘What?’
‘Well, you know all the big red buildings round here?’
‘The old hospitals?’ I ask, thinking she means the 1920s red-brick institutions that make up most of the village and are now populated by bearded retirees.
‘Ye-es,’ she answers, sounding a little unsure. ‘Only they weren’t quite hospitals…’
‘They weren’t? That’s what the estate agent told us.’
‘No. They were institutions. For the mentally defective.’ I wonder whether to politely suggest a more politically correct term, but she goes on. ‘These were the men’s buildings,’ she waves a hand at the looming institutions further up from the beach, ‘set up by Christian Keller, the famous Danish doctor. The guy whose statue’s up there on the hill, you know?’
‘The one with the big ’tash?’
‘That’s him. But the women—’ she takes a deep breath, ‘—well, have you ever noticed the island as you cross over on the way from Funen to Zealand?’
Funen is the island to the east of the Jutland peninsular, with Zealand the island even further east that’s home to Copenhagen and, as I describe it to folk back home, ‘all the fun stuff’. Even with my woeful sense of direction, I know where Friendly Neighbour is talking about. This is novel.
‘Yes! I do! We’ve driven over it a few times. Why?’
‘Well that’s Sprogø, where the defective women were sent. Only there wasn’t always much wrong with them…’
Sprogø, it emerges, was used for the containment of women deemed ‘pathologically promiscuous’, ‘morally retarded’, ‘sexually frivolous’ or accused of ‘løsagtig’ (lewd behaviour). The institution founded by Christian Keller in 1923 was essentially a prison for women who’d had unmarried sex, lovers or a child out of wedlock. Not that locking them up on an all-female island necessarily prevented any further shenanigans. Sprogø often swarmed with men visiting it in the hope of meeting ‘easy women’, though nobody seemed to think that the men setting sail for sex were much of a problem.
‘So when did this place shut down?’
‘Oh, in the 1960s.’
I’m shocked. I know this sort of thing isn’t exclusive to Denmark. London’s Magdalene Asylum was active until 1966 and the last Irish Magdalene laundry didn’t close until the 1990s. But in Denmark? I’d assumed that the Danes had evolved sooner – that things were a little more equal here. I realise that I don’t know as much as I thought I did about what it is to be a woman in Denmark.
The partying goes on until the sun finally sets at 11pm and the moon appears, shining so brightly that it feels like midday. We walk up the hill to our house soon after and I look down at the remains of the bonfire, glowing and joining up with dozens of others smouldering away up and down the coastline, like a string of pearls.
That night, I’m plagued by dreams of semi-charred women on flaming tinder, weaving their way to Germany before being woken at 3am by a slice of sun that’s made it past the outer edge of our blackout blind and is now scalding my retinas. Midsummer, Danish-style, means a mere four hours of darkness a day, and while the long summer evenings have been most welcome, I could do without the early wakeup call complete with dawn chorus.
Squinting and cursing, I scrabble around on my bedside table for the free aeroplane eye mask I’ve taken to wearing in the early hours. I put it on, flump back down onto my pillow and attempt to drift off again, but by now my brain’s kicked into gear and instead of dozing off, I lie there fretting. About all sorts of things. I’m good at this.
Why do birds get up at dawn, and doesn’t it mean they’re knackered by sunset in summer in Denmark? I wonder where the best place to buy bras is round here? Who first decided waxing was a good idea? When did women even get the vote in Denmark? And finally, the biggie: What if it’s no better to be born female in the famously progressive Scandinavia than it is anywhere else? Realising I don’t have the answers to any of these questions, I make a plan to find out.*
Aarhus, Denmark’s second city, is home to one of the world’s few women’s history museums. Although not quite up there with the Smithsonian, it boasts an interesting assortment of artefacts and archive material charting the lives of those born with the double-x chromosome over the years. On the muggy Monday morning, I chug up to The Big City in my non-air-conditioned red mobility tomato in the hope of reassuring myself about the fate of womankind in Denmark. A helpful lady in horn-rimmed spectacles joins me for a turn around the museum’s dusty collection and gives me a quick oral history of Nordic woman. I learn that women were allowed into universities in Denmark in 1875 and that the Scandinavian countries were early starters in universal women’s suffrage, with Finland kicking things off in 1906, followed by Norway in 1913, Denmark and Iceland in 1915, and Sweden in 1919. In Denmark, Sweden and Norway political parties introduced voluntary gender quotas in the 1970s, encouraging so many women to enter politics that the quota has since been abandoned in Denmark as no further stimulus is thought to be required. At the time of writing, women make up 40 per cent of Danish parliament as well as leading both coalition parties. I learn, too, that the Danes have always been pretty progressive on women’s rights, with abortion legalised in 1973 and equal pay becoming law in 1976. As I discovered back in February, Danish employment policies place a strong emphasis on making work accessible for all and include generous parental leave.
Families get a whopping 52 weeks off to share between them for a new baby in Denmark. Mothers must take four of these before the birth and at least fourteen weeks after. This seems eminently sensible since a decent amount of maternity leave has been linked to healthier children and lower rates of maternal depression, according to research from the National Bureau of Economic Research in the US. Men take the first fortnight off too and then the rest of the leave is divided between parents as they see fit. Because most men take paternity leave in Denmark, they bond with their children more quickly and learn how to do all the parenting jobs that mothers have traditionally taken care of.
The next step is more mandatory paternity leave. Norway was the first country to establish a paternity leave quota for fathers in 1993. Before that, only 2–3 per cent of Norwegian fathers took any time off. Today, Norwegian fathers are given fourteen weeks of leave and 90 per cent of dads use it, with 15 per cent choosing to work a shorter working week after this to spend more time with their family. Studies show that increased paternity leave in Norway has made a real difference to attitudes to gender roles, with boys born after 1993 doing more housework than those born previously. In Sweden, fathers take two months of paternity leave, paid at 80 per cent of their usual salary.
If we were ever able to start a family, I can’t help thinking, Scandinavia would be a bloody good place to do it…
There’s also a family allowance from the state, paid directly to any mother with children below eighteen, regardless of income, as well as child benefits awarded to single parents and the children of widows or widowers.
Once they’ve had children, 78 per cent of Danish mothers return to work – far higher than the OECD average of 66 per cent. This is because childcare is subsidised by the government and the famed work-life balance of Danish workplaces makes it easier to balance career and family life here than it would be elsewhere. What has traditionally been defined as ‘women’s work’ is valued as highly as traditionally defined ‘men’s work’
here – and both sexes do a bit of each.
Being out and about during the day (the happy lot of the freelancer) is always an interesting exercise in anthropology, and in Denmark I notice more men around than I did back home. This is not because I’m specifically looking for them, you understand, but because they’re just there, usually with a small person attached to them. There are dads wheeling around buggies in the middle of the day, pushing kids on swings, waiting to pick up their offspring from childcare at 3.30 in the afternoon or racing around the supermarket with a head of lettuce in one hand and a toddler in the other. Men doing just the sort of parental chores that you see women or put-upon grandparents doing for the most part back at home. And this seems like a Very Good Thing. Studies from the OECD confirm that Scandinavian men are more involved in childcare than ever before and do a higher proportion of domestic work than their British counterparts. So I’m delighted to discover research from the University of Missouri showing that men and women are happier when they share household and child-rearing responsibilities. I make a mental note to send this to all my mum friends, with a suggestion to print it out and pin it to the fridge.
As well as doting dads, I check out the shops in Aarhus. For research purposes, obviously. The women’s fashion on show is fairly homogenous, coloured strictly between the lines of Scandi chic and all looking a little on the flammable side. But it’s not, I’m interested to note, overtly sexual, or in a size zero. The women I see around me aren’t stick-thin. Instead, they’re strong-looking. Vikings, in fact. In my local bakery (aka my second home) a rare American tourist passing through recently told the girl behind the counter: ‘You look like a Viking woman!’ OK, so it was slightly creepy, but if anyone had said that to me back in England, I’d have thought they were calling me stocky. Manly, even. And that would have been seen as A Bad Thing. But here, the girl looked genuinely pleased and thanked him for the ‘compliment’. Being seen as a strong woman in Denmark is an accolade. Even in the fashion-conscious capital, Copenhagen, I haven’t observed anyone rocking the bow-legged, heroin-chic look I became accustomed to in London, nor the bony, over-Pilated physique of New Yorkers. Being too thin isn’t seen as particularly desirable here. Women eat.
The Year of Living Danishly Page 14