ABSTRACT
So ends the Danish national anthem, written in 1819 during the emergence of a national-romantic historical tradition that drew heavily upon medieval themes. Danish self-understanding and Danish identity have been and still are connected to the sea, by which is normally meant the Baltic Sea; in some western parts of Denmark the sea is synonymous with the North Sea.1 This predilection for the sea is surprising because Denmark has for centuries been almost exclusively dependent upon agriculture. The majority of Danes worked on farms, as late as the second industrialisation in the 1960s. The high importance of the sea is founded neither in its economic importance nor in its being part of people’s daily life. It might, however, reflect a historical past when Danish identity was formed by contrasting Danes with peoples over the sea, Germans and the Slavic Wends. It reflects a time when an attempt was made to turn a Baltic frontier region characterised by cultural and economic interchange into a frozen borderline, by creating a new image of the enemy. It is the claim of this chapter that this change happened during the twelfth century and was promoted by the Danish historian Saxo, who wrote around 1200 and who has had a remarkable success in the sense that his analysis of the relations between Danes and Wends has been accepted with almost no criticism for 800 years. It is, further, the aim of this chapter to suggest that the picture presented by Saxo is probably an artificial
1 See the chapter ‘Havet’, in Den Nordiske Verden, 2 vols, ed. K. Hastrup (Copenhagen, 1992), vol. 2, 11-76.
