ABSTRACT
The Danish Grundtvigian spiritual and national revival in the decade around 1900 contained a high degree of enthusiasm and a strong collective feeling, which was demonstrated not least through gymnastics displays where young farm-lads’ and girls’ teams marched into and out of the arena singing patriotic anthems, led by a gymnast carrying a huge Danish national flag. Through gymnastics rural ideas and values were dramatized and embodied, making gymnastics a dynamic part of the overall transformation of Danish society around 1900. This peculiar Danish bias towards the straightened and enlightened farmer was the result of an independent tradition of a voluntary gymnastics culture practised in the countryside, the equivalent of which cannot be found in other European countries, where the tendency, on the contrary, was towards an undermining of the rural population’s position.
