We Love our Land (Vi elsker vort land)

By Holger Drachmann (1885)

We love our land,
but at Midsummer most,
when every cloud above our fields
blesses the land with light.

When flowers bloom in full array,
and the nights grow shorter and bright,
we sing our song to Denmark—
our heart is warm with delight.

We love our land,
but at Midsummer most,
when every bird above the field
sings of things untold.

When gently blows the summer breeze,
and the ears of grain grow gold,
we stand together in joy and song,
our love for the land grows bold.

We love our land,
but at Midsummer most,
when bonfires shine by the coast,
and glow across the night.

Each burning flame speaks hope and cheer,
each spark becomes a light,
that warms our hearts and calls us home
in summer’s glowing night.

Beginning

By Pastor Ebbe Juul

[This sermon was originally published in Kirke og Folk, on June 25, 1956. It was translated by Brad Busbee]

(5th Sunday after Trinity)

The Gospel Reading: Luke 5:1–11

1. On one occasion, while the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret, 2 and he saw two boats by the lake, but the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. 3. Getting into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, he asked him to put out a little from the land. And he sat down and taught the people from the boat. 4. And when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” 5. And Simon answered, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.” 6. And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking. 7. They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both the boats, so that they began to sink. 8. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” 9. For he and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish that they had taken, 10. and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. And Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.” 11. And when they had brought their boats to land, they left everything and followed him.

***

The message



After Peter has gone back to his ordinary work one more time at Jesus’ urging, he suddenly experiences something different: this time it actually leads to results. And in response to that, Peter says only one thing: “I am a sinful man.”

This is his entire reaction.

And that same thought appears in the day’s prayer: We are unworthy to receive all this. We acknowledge that is no real proportion between the one who receives and what is given—neither in scale nor in worthiness or merit.

That day—when everything suddenly turned out so overwhelmingly—must have been a turning point in Peter’s life. It was something he would remember again and again, something that remained vivid in his mind when he later spoke about the abundance of God’s grace.

The point is that God’s rich love is meant to be seen in all areas of life, especially in everyday work. Life is not meant to blur into one monotonous long stretch of labor where only a few moments stand out. Instead, every day must carry the possibility of being new—a true beginning—because each day brings its own calling.

But often we stop seeing things that way. Nothing feels surprising anymore. We get used to things—perhaps even to other people—and then life itself starts to feel flat. The sense of something new and joyful is gone, and we begin to look for liveliness somewhere outside ordinary life.

Christen Kold said that we must begin with the basics. For life to be real, it must be simple and straightforward. That is the nature of everything that comes from God.

In this sense, all work is new. It is not just a dull continuation of the same old routine—it always holds the possibility of a fresh beginning. When Jesus tells Simon to go out into the water, he does not say, “try again.” He is not appealing to stubborn persistence. Instead, his command is for something new in itself—like the sunrise, fresh and original each time.

What we are called to is not something grand or extraordinary. It is something simple and direct—just like everything that comes from God.

And yet, in another sense, it is extraordinary. Because it is precisely in our unworthiness that we meet what we have not earned: God’s gift—another day. A day that may seem plain and ordinary is surprisingly full of what is holy and meaningful.

So we begin again. And we become aware of our own unworthiness once more. The story of how things turn out well, through a new beginning, also reminds us that the “great fishing for people” is not over yet.

In Christ’s kingdom, people gather not only to meet again, but also to rediscover one another—to take hold of something living and to move together toward something good. If we learn to see life from this perspective, it becomes simple, clear, and true.

Other people are no longer just objects or obstacles in our lives. They become fellow travelers—people who help us take the first steps toward something whose final outcome we cannot yet see.

Amen

“Danish Pedagogy & Social Values,” a presentation for the International House, Copenhagen, by Professor Sally Anderson

By Brad Busbee

Earlier this month, at a gathering titled “Danish Pedagogy and Social Values” in Copenhagen, I met Professor Sally Anderson, Professor Emeritus at Aarhus University. She offered an engaging lecture, based on years of observation, about the intersections of student learning and Danish social values.  What follows is a summary of her lecture with some observations of my own, as a parent with a child in the Danish public school system.

Research Questions and the Danish folkeskole

Anderson came to Denmark 50 years ago, married a Dane, and had two children. When their children went to school, she became curious about the educational system. That curiosity led her back to anthropology and, specifically, studies of educational methodology through fieldwork in schools across Denmark—public schools, private schools, faith-based schools—as well as in sports associations. Dr. Anderson’s PhD dissertation focused on the sociology of children in sports associations. She wondered: When we tell children to go play football, I wonder how they do that. How do they position themselves socially? How do they find their place in a group?

These questions have guided much of her research over the years, and recently, they have expanded to questions about how people learn to “do” social life when they are new to a culture and much of her research came to focus on immigrants.

Responses

The Danish school system places a strong emphasis on social learning. Children are not only learning academic content; they are also learning how to be part of a group, how to balance individuality with belonging, and how to navigate complex social environments. These skills are not always easy to learn, but they are fundamental to fruitful participation in any society, and it seems to be working especially well here—any clear-eyed, engaged visitor to Denmark can see that Danish people are, in general, very well educated and cooperative. Denmark is a prosperous nation.

During the presentation, my initial, somewhat cynical reaction was to relate Danish pedagogy to "Janteløven" (The Law of Jante), which comes from Aksel Sandemose’s 1933 novel En flygtning krydser sit spor (A Fugitive Covers His Tracks). In the book, citizens of the fictional town of Jante follow a set of unwritten social rules that might be summarized as follows: "Do not think you are better, smarter, or more important than others.” Related rules include not to stand out, not to boast, etc. When I first came to Denmark 23 years ago, I was told that evidence of Janteløven could be seen everywhere. Just look, I was told, at the Carlsberg Beer sign in Copenhagen's town hall square, which says, "Carlsberg, probably the best beer in town."

But the question-and-answer session that followed Anderson’s talk increased my sense that Danish pedagogy does something vital for a democracy by prioritization of "civil sociality." Of course, all social spaces have their own unique tensions. But Danish schools, like the one my son attends, and the Danish workplaces I've seen, like Copenhagen University where I’ve been doing research -- these places discourage hierarchies, yet (and possibly as a result) they are productive, pleasant places to learn and work. (My son has enjoyed his semester.) Also during post-presentation discussion, one audience member voiced concern over a leveling of the students that potentially hampers the education high achieving students in order to accommodate lower-achieving ones. This might be the case, sometimes, but the main takeaway for me, as a parent, student and scholar who has experienced both American and Danish models, is that values and pedagogy are hardly separable. (The International House should be congratulated on open acknowledgement of this fact.)

We teach and learn what we value, and if we value civil sociality (social harmony and general collective well-being) more than individual progress and productivity, we might choose the Danish model.

A Contested Marriage

By Erik S. Hansen

A marriage opposed is not necessarily a marriage failed. Neither is it any guarantee of success. Conventions may intervene to shape the outcome, and so may happenstance, or headstrong conviction.  One defiant young woman in love with an older man of another stature does not immediately alter the circumstances of either family’s station in life. But the lovers are forever changed. While they may never make themselves over into individuals of original mint they might wish to be, however much they choose to look beyond their origins of descent, they escape simultaneously into both past and future to test and bend the limits placed upon them. Only then do they reignite the spark of creation and emerge in the afterglow illuminating their humanity.

When the Jonsens initially objected to releasing their youngest child Mette’s hand in matrimony to my great grandfather, the moorland crofter Anders Toft, they did so not in any vindictive way. They were not mean-spirited people. Nor small of mind. Time would prove them to be quite the opposite. Two generations later, when Mette’s children’s children returned to visit the Jonsen family in Denmark, they were found to be open and accepting of their curious American cousins. Any lingering objections either had been forgotten by them or suspended in neglect. If nothing else, the family resemblance was immediately recognizable. “Why, you look just like us,” a great aunt said to my father. The power of individual will merged with the march of time to reshape all manner of daily lives after Mette got her Anders, or vice versa. 

The Jonsen family’s only indiscretion, if they could be ascribed any at all, stemmed from a purely personal sense of self-preservation. A compound base of opinion about themselves had been laid down over generations, like annual aerobic layers of soil inching upward out of the peat bogs of primaeval Europe. Theirs was the long residue of post-glacial rise along the Neolithic ladder rungs of evolution. From hunter to gatherer, farmer to gardener, from land grabber to landgrave, their advance was matched only by how little change actually had occurred.

Some years after the already aging couple of Anders and Mette sold their Danish farm, such as it was, and along with the full family complement of seven remaining children converted all their earthly possessions into ready cash and emigrated to America, the grave of a young woman was discovered in the nearby medieval town of Egtved, just across the river from where Mette Jonsen had grown up. A hard-headed Jutland neighbor thumped a prybar against a hollow tree trunk coffin that had been preserved under an old stone setting mound for three thousand years. He was clearing rocks away on his high ground pastureland, intent on adding tillable acreage to his fields, as his kind had done for generations. This discovery of the girl’s grave occurred in 1921, just after the return of the southern peninsula of Jutland to Denmark following the German defeat in WWI. Full consideration for antiquities was only beginning to be imposed by more liberal governments. The law of conservancy had not yet been mandated—and prior to that, in practice, only by modest enforcement of the concept. 

What the ages hid, the need and greed for land revealed. 

South central Jutland still exists as a kind of kettle-forge for what would become the country of Denmark. Heathland hills and outwash plains mark the end moraine advance of glaciers after the last ice age. To this day fields and forests frequently offer up artifacts from the past. A walk along a plowed furrow may reveal anything from fossilized dog whelk shells, to stone spear points, to bronze axe heads. A record of the march of time. And everywhere are flint shards flaked by a napper’s hand. This was the Silicon Valley of its time. Advances in stone tool technology were followed soon after by the application of fire to base metals. First copper and tin were combined to make bronze. Then bog ore smelted into iron. Together, each age made for leaps ahead in lifestyle and material culture.

No more evident was this than with the remains in the grave found in 1921 in the Egtved farmer’s field. The young woman buried there lay in ceremonial repose, dating from well before the time of Christ. She was clad, resplendent, in sun-worshiping jewelry and an ever so skimpy costume skirt, braided of string and with a big bronze belt buckle. Immediately, she was claimed as the embodiment of Nordic beauty. Her skeletal body was completely gone, but with locks of hair intact along with fragments of skin and teeth and fingernail, enough remained of her to know this was no ordinary human being.

Here were remnants of the flesh of the first inhabitants—a legendary Mother Denmark, it could be said.

The Egtved Girl, she was named. And so she came to be called, though younger than first thought. In truth, she proved to be barely an adult, a girl of mid-to-late teenage years, though still the epitome of Scandinavian comeliness and pulchritude. But the Egtved Girl’s past concealed a more complicated history and geography linked to her.

Her initial discovery story was swathed as much in cobwebs of faulty scientific theory as it was in the prejudices of the time. Well to remember that in 1921 phrenology and racial stereotyping were not limited to followers of the self-proclaimer of empires about to emerge across the newly drawn borderline to the south with Germany. That national boundary had just been moved again, when the lower peninsula of Jutland was returned to Denmark after WWI. Danes now had a sizeable part of Denmark back within its perimeter again. Their own brand of national romantics, if not fanatics, was eager to celebrate the reemergent prowess of the Nordic races, now that the country was whole after a half century of outside domination.

It was a time when the Modern Age had come down and come down hard on Europe. The war to end all wars had ended in an uneasy peace. Big city swing—the Weimar Republic and Roaring Twenties—was just getting started. Ironically, for Denmark, a last flowering of bucolic, rural culture bound to the natural cycle of landed peasant farmers and seasonal landscapes kept the country at least a generation behind the rest of Europe. Briefly, it was a resurgent, happy time for Denmark. A second German occupation, this by the Nazis, was still two decades away.

The Egtved Girl’s remains immediately were put on public display in the national museum in Copenhagen. She became symbol for a renewed nation, particularly as promoted by prominent author Johannes V. Jensen, Denmark’s last of three Nobel Prize winners for literature. Jensen viewed the girl as symbolic of simple and enduring Danish values. He countered the initial interpretation of the museum’s director that the Egtved Girl, with her short skirt and no underwear, might be a sun-dancing cult goddess, a sex symbol. The director’s view was implausible, Jensen claimed. Instead of viewing her in this southern, sun worshipping light, Jensen wrote that anyone with even passing knowledge of Nordic values would recognize immediately the mindset of down-to-earth Danish women. The latter would never make an art form of exposing their bodies in public, the laureate Jensen wrote.

So it was the girl from Egtved became a 3000-year-old instant celebrity, if also eventual model for controversy over the disposition of human remains . . . not to mention present day contention as to the origins of the Danish people.

Had we remembered who begat whom—as did, no doubt, my great grandfather Anders Toft, devout pietist that he had been in his early years—we would have known that everyone is on a pilgrim’s passage on this earth. Immigrants all, we are, begat from a common lineage, no matter what Biblical bias later claimed for ancestral dominion at the top of the evolutionary food chain. Had Anders still been in Denmark, or even alive, when the Egtved Girl was found, mere miles across the river from where he courted his Mette on her home farm, there would have been little doubt in his mind that the Bronze Age burial girl was a distant relative of them both. Nor would he have been surprised how the former immediately became a prototype of desirable Scandinavian femininity. He knew what beauty lay in the eye of the beholder, as he had found in his Mette. 

                                                           *

The Egtved Girl’s lineage now has been confirmed. For some she still stirs controversy as to the true antecedents of the Danish nation. DNA doesn’t much lie, however. Her nucleic acids proved to exist in sufficient quantity to enable micro-slice biology to solve the riddle. The Egtved Girl’s birthright has been identified through isotope dating and dendrochronology matches, all confirming that this Bronze Age beauty turns out to be a teenage single mother and nomadic wanderer from much farther south in Europe.

She’s an immigrant to Denmark, two thousand years before there was a Denmark.

Still, it’s hard not to fall in love again with this young woman, just as Anders had with Mette. Even if, irony of ironies, Mette long since had become an immigrant herself, having bundled the family off to follow hard-headed husband Anders to America many years before. By the time the grave of the sun girl was found across the river from her home farm, she and Anders both were long dead and gone.

The Egtved Girl’s story proved to be a sadder one than Mette’s own. In one sense, though, it mimicked her family’s fortune in a particular way: The Bronze Age girl had died an early death, only sixteen, eighteen maybe, similar to one of Mette’s own sisters, who succumbed in childbirth and left behind a baby that lived only three years. Then a generation later, Mette lost her own five-year old son early on, and then later a teenage daughter, Karen, who died, tubercular, at eighteen. This daughter Karen’s death may have been one of the pretexts for why the Toft family pulled up stakes and left Denmark altogether, bound for America. 

The Egtved Girl also once had left Denmark. Maybe more than once. But she had come back. For she was a wayfarer with a purpose far beyond the ordinary, as evidence from her grave would reveal.

For one thing, buried next to her body were unusual artifacts intended for a metaphysical journey to the world beyond. A birchbark bucket placed beside her once had been filled with mead, for libation. A bronze awl lay ready for handiwork, or protection. Even a comb was included in her grave goods, to smooth her fulgent locks of hair. But that was not all her tomb contained. Recent application of modern scientific techniques of dating reveals elements of even greater mystery to her story. Not the least were seed spores and wool samples on her person that trace her place of origin. She wore a textile and pollen record like a GPS fingerprint, both products of fauna and flora far to the south. She was not Danish at all, as first claimed by Nobel laureate Jensen. Though in truth, how could she be? There was no Denmark at the time. More likely, the Jutland peninsula and surrounding islands, still rebounding from the lifting weight of retreating glaciers, were but a vaguely drawn ultima Thule nomados, or distant pasture, as the region was labeled on early mariner’s maps.

The Egtved Girl herself proved to be a formidable navigator of this terrain. And one of recent and major mobility. Radio isotope evidence records show she had been to the north before. And more than once.

This roaming itinerant girl had arrived overland, recently wandered in from somewhere down around the Black Forest of south-central Europe. Perhaps she was searching for something, or someone, the nature of which possibly is revealed by one additional burial item. A small pouch placed beside her tells the story of an intentional traveler. Next to her head lay a cinched purse filled with the ashes and bone bits of another human being.

A child was buried with her, a baby’s cremated remains.

What to make of this double interment? Had the two been human sacrifices? A baby brother or sister buried with her? Humans were known to be martyred in the Bronze Age. Or was she a solar priestess presiding over a voyage to eternity? A kind of divine babysitter, a nanny, slain to accompany a favored child into the afterworld?

Numerous ceremonial sacrifices have been found elsewhere in Denmark. These slayed remains often appear to be attempts to appease the gods. Or attempts, dually, to pave way to eternity. The base human aspiration of living forever did not arise just yesterday. 

But this grave is different. This is not a Bronze Age sacrifice. Those victims of offer usually ended up tossed into a peat bog with throat cut or a noose still around the neck.

Not so the Egtved Girl. Her mortal destiny in decaying half-lives is now delivered into our hands. Wherever and whatever her intended destination, buried as she was with both beauty aids and baby bone dust beside her, bound for some higher plateau in the afterlife, her body ends up in a place nearer the here-and-now.  Temporarily, she was given residence on display in the National Museum in Copenhagen. And there she lies in repose to this day, her remains and the child with her on display in a glass box visible to any modern-day visitor. But that is not her only final resting place.

Where else does she lie then? And why, we can ask, had she come back to Denmark at all, before there was a Denmark, if not but to seek out the father of the child at her side? And why, so buried, would she be honored with ceremonial set pieces under stone boulders piled atop her coffin to protect the grave from plunder? Only the favored few got such a ritual stone mound—broken apart by the fumbling Jutland farmer looking to put a plow to another half-acre of land. Why all of this, if the Egtved Girl first had not been reunited with her paramour chieftain before she died?

A simple question, and simple answer, to so complex a destiny.

One other clue lies with her. Even in her final rest there is a tender truth to read. A stem of a yarrow flower blossom was placed in the coffin beside her on her burial bed. How could this not be anything other than a final farewell from the father of her dead child?

Yes. Why not?

The Egtved girl, so named, once exhumed, now can be claimed by us all. All the more reason to gather round the dimly lit museum display case preserving her remains. Seeing her oak coffin under soft light—the sun dress and bronze buckle remaining, the pouch with baby bones—we ponder our common ancestry. We place a hand on the transparent case containing her remains, a separation of millennia by mere millimeters of glass. Her clothes and her hair braids and the accoutrement of worship are arranged on cowhide and woven blankets, now under close climate control, relayed to us from long ago and places far away.

Yet she presents a familiar picture. Little different is she than when my own father reached out his hand as a five-year old to touch that of his grandmother, Mette Jonsen Toft, dead and lying in an open casket placed under an apple tree on a hot August day outside the house on the home farm on the southwestern Minnesota prairie. With a child’s curiosity, he remembered the smell of decay in the humid air. It was an introductory memory of death he never forgot. And he recalls reaching over the edge of the wooden coffin to touch her hand. He was just tall enough to inspect her fingernails, grown long like the Egtved Girl’s, ready to be clipped. And then he let her hand go.

He told this story with the same reverence, maybe even the same day, when he related his first visit to Denmark. He had sailed across the Atlantic in the Thirties with a group of Danish-Americans traveling on a visit to the homeland. For him it was the first time seeing the land he had heard so much about, and whose language he spoke and wrote better than he did his native American English. He and a female cousin of his were along in the travel group. Together they visited the Jonsen farmstead and family in Ravning, located just across a shallow valley from Egtved and meandering brook at the mouth of Vejle Fjord. It was there my father met his grandmother Mette’s family. Her brother’s second wife, a woman also named Karen, was still alive, an old woman. In truth, Karen Jonsen would live another twenty years, till she was exactly a century old, dying on her 100^th birthday. On the day of his visit, great aunt Karen, still very much alive, looked him up and down and told him: “Why, you look just like one of us.” 

And so he did. Handsome enough when young, all those boys on the maternal side of the family had dark, deep-set eyes and swept-back, wavy hair, with that high forehead and brow of the maternal side of the family. This was merged in my father’s appearance, through the marriage of Mette with the movie star-dimpled chin of Anders, the other side of the family that had come up from Germany in more recent generations. My dad also visited that side of the family, the Toft side, who stemmed from Kartoffle Tysker, Potato Germans, brought in to teach the Danes how to raise a new crop that could grow in sandy, infertile, moorland soil of Jutland. That family claimed there was royalty in that line, on his grandfather’s side, by way of the nearby manor farm Donneruplund, as it was called from the Platt Deutsch, meaning Thunder Wood. But that stem line seemed to have backstepped for a time into penury. The manor long since had been sold at auction, whence it passed in various property transfers out of that branch of family. He met both sides of the family tree on the trip in the Thirties. He always said he liked the Jonsen side better, despite their original objection to his grandparents’ marriage.

Not that Mette Jonsen herself, when young, was any fair-haired Valkyrie, though she must have appeared so to her suitor Anders, bold as he was to court the wealthier farmer’s daughter with dark shaded hair like his own. We see her visage first preserved after mid-century with the advent of camera obscura photography. No comely blonde was she. Great-grandmother Mette, stern of mien, hair drawn back tightly in a bun, presents a formidable figure. We see her on the day they were joined together in matrimony. In their wedding photo, already then, Mette looks old. And when we see her recorded next, she’s double that age and half a world away in America, having borne Anders nine children, two of whom died young and were left behind, buried in the cemetery consecrated at the home church not far from where the Egtved Girl later was exhumed. By then, Mette is only a few years away from the grave herself, that day remembered by my father under the apple tree on the home farm out on the prairie.

Their legacy of intimacy—Mette and Anders—I allow myself to consider as a foil against these thoughts of gradient decay. Though hard it is, to be sure, to dwell for long on the conjugal life of one’s own great-grandparents, let alone the generations that followed and directly begat me. Profligate still, it must have seemed, this attraction in contravention to the Jonsen family, when the youngest daughter, still a teenager, married against their wishes. Then the newlyweds producing off-spring every other year like staggered lambing of the ewe, an outward increase of the family flock in which any singular gap in the annual record signified either a miscarriage or a stillborn child.

To think two people, so old, so long forgotten, could have held such passion for each other. Their biological attraction is traced in the names and dates inscribed in church record books that follow them through the ages. Late-night consorts, no doubt, were no different then, than now. Yet the mind balks at imagining too much detail. Daily confines of routine toil would seem to argue against behaviors of arousal and the selection of random sites of assignation. But it happened. The brain gets the bends seeing them entwined in coital acts, whether atop hayricks or on straw-stuffed mattress ticks, the temporary beds of antiquity making permanent the tendency toward self-perpetuation.

Easier it is to trace that family lineage on paper, where the generations are tracked in parish records kept by the hand of Protestant Lutheran clergy. The names are aligned by sex. Boys come first, by birth year and baptism. Then the girls, listed separately, as was the custom of recordkeeping in the Church of the Danish People, Folkekirken, as it was called. Even easier it is now, by contrast, to follow the human lineage sequenced by a swab of DNA off the tongue. Digitized results of laboratory analysis make for genetic markers that spiral back on the laddered helix defining our evolutionary biology. As the full genome of humanity is written, a picture appears clearer than any plate glass wedding image of Anders and Mette. One need not look far, nor long, to know the carbon record and genetic analogue is incontrovertible. Leap a few generations, and we all are related to the Egtved Girl.

The last time I visited the graveyard of the home church in the next town plus one over from Egtved, looking for evidence of distant relatives, I found the neatly bonsaied hedges and narrow gravel paths led only to a vanished record of their existence. One exception was a family headstone, broken off and set aside along the back wall of the cemetery. It carries the family name, all that’s left written in stone. Otherwise, the graves of the dead daughter, the baby brother, and other relatives are gone.

Human remains ultimately go to ground. It is in our organic nature to be returned to the dust and the clay from which we came. But are they really gone? And where else do they reside now, like the Egtved Girl, if not also in our hearts?

And why should any of this really matter? 

Except for this:

One wonders about these things?

Where do we come from? Where do we go?

Sankt Hans Aften at the Museum of Danish America

You’re invited to attend the Museum of Danish America’s free Sankt Hans Aften celebration in Elk Horn, Iowa, on June 20 from 5:00 to 10:00 pm! Sankt Hans Aften, or Saint John’s Eve, is a Danish style midsummer festival.

• Explore our many exhibitions on view
• Browse and shop the museum’s design store
• Visit Fjord Færgemand: a lumbering troll sculpture by world-renowned recycle artist Thomas Dambo
• Eat the Danish hot dogs served at 5 p.m.
• Hear a performance of The Tivoli Troubadours at 7 p.m.
• Stay to enjoy lawn games, s’mores, Danish snobrød, and a bonfire at sunset!
• Pack your own lawn games, seating, beverages, etc., and be sure to bring your friends!
• Feel welcome to attend!

Sankt Hans Aften is sponsored in part by the Rebild Heartland Chapter and Shelby County State Bank, Harlan, IA.

History of Sankt Hans Aften (Midsummer)

Before Christianity came to Denmark, Scandinavian peoples celebrated the longest day as a supernatural struggle between light and dark, heat and cold. Since the feast day of Saint John the Baptist occurred on June 23, near the date of the annual summer solstice, the Christian Church emphasized this celebration in Scandinavia. “Hans” is the diminutive of “Johannes” or “John.”

In the late 19th century, it became common to affix a figure resembling a witch on top of a bonfire. The witch is said to be sent back to Brocken/Blocksberg in the Harz Mountains of Germany, reflecting the uneasiness Danes felt about their powerful neighbor to the south. Some Danes regard this part of the tradition with mixed emotions as it evokes memories of the horrible persecutions and “witch” burnings carried out in Denmark and other European countries in the 17th century. However, this custom is only a little part of the overall tradition. Over time, the tradition of lighting bonfires became dominant, and other rituals gradually diminished as people enjoyed the coziness of gathering around a warm fire.

Songs and music are also a part of this tradition. During the 19th century, the singing of traditional folk songs was replaced by patriotic songs. The most popular of these is the Danish patriotic song "Vi elsker vort land" (given at the opening of this issue of Church and Life).

Danebod Folk Meeting

Come and experience the Danish folk school tradition of life-long learning at the annual Danebod Folk Meeting, where teachers and students learn from each other. At the 2026 Folk Meeting, August 19-23, in Tyler, Minnesota, professionals and participants will come together for three and a half days of mutual learning. You will hear from experts on topics like campaigning American style, literacy and Legos, unpacking a chamber music work, and translations of Louis Jensen’s “Square Stories,” and you will have the opportunity to let your voice, questions, and perspectives be heard! All events, from lectures to leisure, are designed for active participation and engagement. 

In the spirit of Grundtvig’s goals for life-long learning, this year we are offering two afternoons of experiential activities for small groups. Attendees will be able to choose to: 

• Join a team of Danebod pastry chefs to make almond, cherry, and apricot pastries to serve to all the Folk Meeting participants on Friday after your class.
• Hike at Camden State Park, exploring the history of the park with a park ranger or hiking with a local park enthusiast.
• Explore your inner artist in a drawing class. Learn the principles in basic drawing of the human figure; drawing from life with a human model to develop a sense of proportion and feel of movement. 
• Experience the joy of folk dancing for the body and soul.
• Explore the hidden depth of your daily life by turning everyday objects, old memories, and forgotten experiences into rich, vivid poetry.
• Try your hand at basic wood carving and learn the Scandinavian figure carving style.
• Participate in the Danish art of paper-cutting, making intricate designs for Christmas and other seasons.
• Hone your skills in chess, from the basics of setting up the board and moving the pieces to playing the Larsen Opening, the Scandinavian Defense, and the Danish Gambit.

Join us in August (19-23) on the Danebod campus in Tyler, Minnesota, for three days of lively discussions  and hands-on learning! Learn more at danebodfolkmeeting.org. 

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Anita Young

612-860-8070