How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark

by Kingsley, Patrick

  Sofie Gråbøl, who plays Sarah Lund, also remembers wearing the jumper during her hippyish upbringing. She says that it symbolises hygge, the Danish concept explored in earlier chapters that translates badly into English as “cosy” or “togetherness”. “That sweater,” Gråbøl has said, “was a sign of believing in togetherness.”

  But by the late 90s, many local women had stopped knitting, and the tradition looked to be dying out. Gudrun Ludvig decided to do something about it.

  “She took a sweater of her dad’s,” says Rógvadóttir. “And her thought was to simplify it. The old ones were very thick, made for fishermen – but she wanted to adapt the sweater so that it could be used by a woman, a mother. Altered to be so small that you could wear it inside a small jacket.”

  Ludvig knew Súsan Johansen through her sister, and she knew that she knitted. So she brought Johansen the snowflake pattern and asked her to make a jumper from it. It took a week of back-and-forth before Johansen, who was used to making baggier shapes, realised what Ludvig wanted.

  “She kept saying: ‘Make it smaller, make it smaller’,” says Johansen.

  She got there eventually, and in 2007 the two Gudruns took the range to the Copenhagen fashion show. One day, a producer from DR turned up and said they were working on a TV series and they were looking for some clothing. The producer took two jumpers, and later asked the firm to send some more. “And then we didn’t hear anything until the series was on two years later. Suddenly there was a lot of talk about the sweater. After a couple of episodes, the papers started saying: ‘Is she going to wear this sweater all this time? Doesn’t she have any other clothing? What is that sweater?’ The whole story was about the sweater.”

  Johansen is slightly non-plussed about it all. “It was very funny,” she says. “Everyone was saying: ‘You made Sarah Lund’s jumper’.” But she’s kept herself grounded. She was proud to see her work on screen, but she didn’t watch all the episodes. She helped make the red jumper Lund wears in the second series, but she didn’t like it so much – “Too Icelandic!”, she says. Three years ago she moved to Copenhagen, and still knits three jumpers a week for Gudrun and Gudrun. She orders the wool from certain Faroese farms and gets friends to carry back the finished products. She says knitting stops her smoking – something to keep her hands busy when she’s on the train to the care home where she works. She’s even started teaching her patients to knit.

  But Johansen is no longer the jumper’s sole knitter. Gudrun and Gudrun employ around 60 knitters – mostly in the Faroes, but some in Jordan, where Rógvadóttir used to work – and each will specialise in a specific size range.

  “No two people knit in completely the same way,” explains Rógvadóttir. Someone might knit particularly tightly, in which case they’re asked to make small sizes. “If someone has a slightly looser hand, we’ll make them a medium. But the difficult thing is that the same woman can knit a small one day, and the next day she’ll knit a medium. If you are very relaxed, you’ll knit looser. But if you’re stressed, you’ll knit smaller and more tightly. Maybe your husband was stupid that day, so you’ll knit tighter. It’s very emotional and personal.”

  It’s important not to overstate the knitting resurgence in Scandinavia: one class of sixth-formers I talk to groan when I mention that jumper. But there is definitely something going on. Since 2006, Gudrun and Gudrun’s profits have increased more than tenfold (though Rógvadóttir is at pains to emphasise that they’re about so much more than just jumpers.)

  “The whole handcraft thing has completely blown up,” says Vibskov. “It’s become something. Nowadays, everything goes so fast – you know, the World Wide Web, click click click – so people are trying to hook onto something more stable, old-school.”

  It’s not just thanks to The Killing, either. On the other side of town, halfway towards the airport, half a dozen elderly women are knitting in the garden of an old people’s day centre. The oldest is 96, the youngest 65. The chattiest, Ketty Brøgger, was 80 last week. They natter away, sipping on coffee, munching on homemade cakes. They are the ladies of Kaffeslabberas, a knitting group for pensioners. They could be any gaggle of grannies, but to the fashion-conscious Dane, they are almost minor celebrities, and their story has also played an unlikely role in the revival of Danish wool.

  It all started when Susanne Hoffmann, one of Henrik Vibskov’s designers, had her first baby. While on maternity leave, she got lonely. Cooped up at home in suburban Amager, south-east Copenhagen, she was cut off from her friends across town in trendy Vesterbro. Then she found an unlikely salvation: Sløjfen, the local pensioners’ club. There were always things happening there – workshops, stalls, afternoon bingo – and Hoffmann wondered whether they’d want to start a knitting club. No one responded to her initial advert on the noticeboard, so one day she ambled in with an armful of yarn and asked if anyone wanted to join her. Around ten women did, and they started meeting every Tuesday lunchtime. Kaffeslabberas – which roughly means “coffee table chat” – was born.

  At first, it was purely about the company. “They’re very wise,” says Hoffmann, under a canopy in the garden. “They gave me advice about being a mother.” But then she asked if they might knit some baby jumpers for her baby son. Maybe, they said – never ones to be dictated to. “But then a week later, they’d suddenly done it all. I was amazed at the quality. They were so fast.”

  Impressed, she told her boss about her new friends, and eventually Vibskov came down to see what the fuss was about. He liked what he saw – “and so Susie was like, ‘Hey, Henrik, why don’t we sell some of this down at the shop?’ ” And so they did – baby sweaters at first, and then scarves. Before long. a huge high-street designer called Mads Nørgaard had heard about the group, and wanted in. So they started making him a few socks every month – long grey stockings with a ring of red at the top – and donated all the profits back to their club. Then everything snowballed. All of a sudden, Kaffeslabberas were the fashion world’s plaything du jour. They staged knitting performances in the windows of a shop in central Copenhagen. They were interviewed on national television, and given ringside seats at the capital’s biggest fashion show – much to their bafflement.

  “We all lined up and knitted during the show while the photographers were lying around us trying to take our picture,” a bewildered Brøgger told one newspaper. “They were putting all their best dresses on,” remembers Vibskov. Affectionately, he adopts the shrill voice of a pensioner: “Ewnewnew. The music is very loud. Awahhh. Is that a famous person over there? Famous!”

  A book of their work followed – fittingly, a big coffee table tome – but all the while the group kept on meeting every week for cake, coffee and a good old gossip. Like Johansen, they find the interest in their work hilarious – not least because these are the same designs that their grandchildren were only recently so snooty about.

  “I can’t understand it,” laughs 86-year-old Lily Nielsen. “People pay so much. We always made these things for our children and now people are paying us 250 kroner [around £30] for them.”

  8. JUTLAND:

  happiness country?

  “We’re not hippies…This is a business like any other business” – Søren Hermansen

  Denmark looks quite odd on a map. Its capital is on an island called Sjælland that is so far east, it’s almost in Sweden. Further west lies Fyn, a smallish blob that houses Odense, and the childhood home of Hans Christian Andersen. To the left of Fyn, there’s Jylland, or Jutland – the biggest bit of Denmark, and the only part attached to mainland Europe. It lives up to its anglicised name, jutting like a mohawk from Germany’s northern border. Halfway up Jutland’s western coast – about as far from Copenhagen as you can possibly travel in Denmark – is a little town called Ringkøbing. It’s a pretty town, too. Small, pretty buildings squashed between a lagoon and a quaint town square – and all 15 minutes from the sand dunes and summer houses that skirt the North Sea. According to a no doubt unerringly a
ccurate survey of residents by Cambridge University, Ringkøbing is the happiest town in Denmark. And given that Denmark is consistently named by the UN as the world’s happiest country, this technically makes Ringkøbing – pop: 9000 – the happiest town on earth. In pursuit of happiness, and hoping for a taste of Jutland, I head to Ringkøbing for the weekend. The journey takes three train legs, and so by the time I arrive, it’s nearly midnight. The streets are dark, the air is silent, and there is no one in sight. It’s deserted. If this is happiness, I feel very short-changed. But suddenly a noise flies over the rooftops. It’s the sound of shouting and, thinking it might just also be the sound of happiness, I head in its general direction. Following my ear, I weave through the backstreets of Ringkøbing, and with every step the sounds get louder. At last, I’m almost there. Just one more turning, and I’ll have reached nirvana itself.

  I round the corner. I look up.

  Screaming at the top of their lungs, three drunk teenagers are pissing against a wall.

  •

  I could be in any small town on a Friday night – and for their part, my new friends are keen to dispel any myths about the place. Excited to meet someone new, they invite me back to their den, a shed that sits at the bottom of their friend’s nearby garden. Sobering up, they tell me a tale of provincial teenage angst. There’s only one bar in town, they say – not that there’s anyone they want to see there. “We’re in a minority in this town,” says Oscar, 17 last month, and “still very, very excited about it.” He and his friends Klaus, Alexander and Asbjørn are creative types, he says. They write poetry. They play music. Unlike their sporty neighbours, they go to a continuation school that focuses on drama and art. “We’re very rare in Ringkøbing,” he sighs. “It’s not that usual for people in Jylland to write and be creative. There are a lot of people who just ride about and drink alcohol.” And with that, he pops out for another piss.

  The next day, I visit the town’s local newspaper, the Ringkøbing-Skjern Dagbladet. The staff there are not nearly as down on the town, but back in 2007, they too were surprised to find it was the happiest place on earth.

  “We really were astonished,” says the paper’s jovial chief reporter, a small middle-aged man called Poul Osmundsen. “Later, we tried to find out on what statistical basis they had reached their conclusion. The material was rather skimpy. Statistically speaking, it was totally invalid. But it went totally viral. Before we knew it, we were being visited by television crews from all over the world. I have to say, the townspeople were rather bemused by it. Most of us have had many good laughs about it. One of the local traits is modesty. We do not regard ourselves as something special. So all this exposure was something quite unfamiliar.”

  But it got the townsfolk thinking, Poul remembers. “It made us reflect. If we are the happiest town in the world, why would that be? And I don’t think it’s totally faulty. I do think people here are… well, happy is the wrong word. That means giddy, or exultant, or a rather fleeting emotion. The right term would be ‘contented’. We are a contented society.”

  The gap between the richest and poorest is very small in Ringkøbing, says Osmundsen – even by Danish standards. “We all attend the same schools, the same sports clubs, the same shops. We live, more or less, in the same neighbourhood.” In other words, no one has it much better than anyone else.

  As a result, the people of Ringkøbing are happy with what they’ve got – a quality which, people constantly tell me, puts them at odds with snobbish Copenhageners.

  “We see ourselves as very different to Copenhageners,” says Peter Donslund, a senior civil servant at the town hall. “In Copenhagen they spend much more money, but here people are much more satisfied. Our attitude is not so much for complaining here.” Perhaps that’s why the area votes en masse for Venstre, whose business-friendly policies appeal to an entrepreneurial local population used to doing things by themselves.

  “We think that we work harder,” says Osmundsen. “We think that we are better, that we are more frugal. We are country mice and they are city mice. They talk much faster – too much in some cases.”

  It’s a tension that the anthropologist Richard Jenkins explores (and to some extent debunks) in his book, Being Danish. To illustrate the Jutland reserve, Jenkins retells a well-known joke about a Jutland farmer interviewing a new labourer. The farmer looks at the young man and says, “I suppose you’ll do. But there’s one thing you should know. We don’t do too much talking here. We just get on with the work.” The young man nods, and starts work immediately. A year later, the farmer approaches the man again and tells him that he’s thinking of buying a new bicycle. The labourer nods, and goes back to work. Six months on, the farmer mentions to him that he’s just bought the bike he was talking about half a year previously. Again, the labourer nods, and gets on with what he was doing. Yet another six months go by, and this time it’s the labourer’s turn to approach the farmer. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but I’m going to have to leave.” The farmer’s surprised. “What’s up?” he asks. “Don’t I pay you enough?” “No, it’s not that,” says the young man. “But I can’t stand any more of this bicycle talk.”

  It’s an exaggeration, of course – but the joke highlights the difference between the hard-working, taciturn Jutlanders and the chatty, lazy Copenhageners. “How can you find the Jutlander in Copenhagen?” begins another Jutland joke. “Just ask to see the boss.”

  Yet for all their superiority, the people I meet in Ringkøbing feel a profound sense of inferiority, or at least abandonment. “Copenhagen people think this is a back-water,” says a doleful Oscar. “They stereotype us as fishermen. They think we’re peasants and rednecks. But they’re people who just think about how they look.”

  The abandonment has physical manifestations, too. Everyone claims that state funding has been siphoned away from west Jutland and towards Copenhagen, or even Aarhus, Jutland’s eastern capital. Under the last government, political decision-making also became more centralised. Ringkøbing was stripped of its position as the seat of the regional government, while decisions about local housing construction were made from Copenhagen – a move which made west Jutlanders feel angry and helpless. Meanwhile, Ringkøbing sits in the centre of a (relatively) deprived area of Denmark known back in Copenhagen as the “rotten banana”. A strip that runs from north-west Jutland, down its western flank, and then east along the south of Fyn, the banana is home to rising unemployment and lacks centres of higher education.

  It’s a situation at odds with the role Jutland has played in Denmark’s history. In a way, you could argue that Jutland represents Denmark’s soul. It was here that the first cooperatives took off, where the first folk high schools were built, and it was the farmers from here who, in the 1890s, pushed through parliament the first steps towards a Danish welfare state. And though Copenhageners are said to be snobby about Jutland, everyone likes to claim their family was originally from here. We’re a nation of farmers, Copenhageners will proudly tell you – and this helps to explain why Ringkøbing might still be so contented. Whatever else has happened since, locals know that their part of the world is the source of Denmark’s founding myths. “Jutland,” as Richard Jenkins summarises so neatly in his book, “is both centre and periphery within the Danish historical narrative, a place of backward obscurity and the wellspring of enlightenment.”

  Danes often talk about how much they trust each other, and how, whatever The Killing might suggest, their country has a relatively low crime rate. In practice, it’s difficult to estimate how trusting Denmark is – but there’s certainly a lot of it in Ringkøbing. “It’s a secure community,” says Bent Brodersen, a local councillor for Venstre, and a man once named by French TV as the world’s happiest man. “We don’t fear for crime, terror, wild animals, monsoon.”

  “People usually don’t cheat each other,” says Else Mathiassen, headteacher at the West Jutland folk high school, down the road from Ringkøbing. “For instance, my daughter lost her p
urse. She was sure it would come back to her. She didn’t even get nervous. And it did get back to her! She knew it would be delivered to the police station. And it was! She didn’t know where she lost it. She’s done it several times. Once in a taxi. Another time by a bus stop. And it always got back to her.”

  It doesn’t really need to be said, but the town has a strong sense of community. Everyone is part of a club – at a funding meeting at the town hall recently, representatives from 60 clubs turned up. That’s at least 60 clubs for a town of only 9000 citizens. The old-fashioned local bank – Ringkøbing Landbobank – is one of the country’s most stable. “Stinginess is traditionally a local trait,” says Osmundsen. “And well, some people say the bank has this same trait.”

  Meanwhile the continued success of Osmundsen’s own employers – the Ringkøbing-Skjern Dagbladet – speaks of a community that cares about its local institutions. Unlike local newspapers in Britain, the Dagbladet hasn’t been decimated by redundancies, their advertising revenues have held up well, and, most indicatively, their circulation remains a steady 8500 – not bad for a county with less than 60,000 residents. “Our readers are very loyal,” says Lars Kryger, the paper’s chief subeditor, munching on a very sugary slice of cake. “They feel that if we were not here, something would be missing. They know we’re a cornerstone in this town’s life.”

  Another secret to Ringkøbing’s contentedness lies in its relative lack of racial tension. “There is no talk of immigration or integration,” claims Donslund. “People don’t talk about foreigners as part of a group, but more like every other citizen. It’s a special thing about this area.” This is partly because there aren’t many immigrants. In the 70s, when many people arrived from Turkey and Pakistan, they moved to areas where there was a large textile industry – something not present in Ringkøbing.