world: denmark | From the Heart of Europe

Denmark is in Northern Europe, with a land border with Germany to the south (adjusted after the first world war) and a very close sea border with Sweden to the northeast. It has been a recognised state for almost 1100 years, and historically at different times controlled Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Iceland, New Jersey, what are now the US Virgin Islands, chunks of England and Germany, and is still the sovereign power over Greenland and the Faroe Islands. Fans of politics will know the TV show Borgen, based on a slightly alternate reality where Margrethe Vestager (or someone rather like her) becomes prime minister.

Danish is one of the northern Germanic languages, related to English, Dutch and German, more closely to Swedish and even more closely to Norwegian, which only became a separate literary language in the nineteenth century.

I have only been to Denmark a couple of times, though I have many Danish contacts – in particular, I was friendly with Uffe Ellemann Jensen, the former foreign minister who missed out on becoming prime minister in 1998 by 85 votes. In my 27 years in Brussels, I have always found Danish officials (and other Danish people) easy to engage with. So it’s a place I have positive feelings about.

See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the current boundaries of Denmark.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Hamlet	William Shakespeare	1,081,659	37,487	116,575
Number the Stars	Lois Lowry	633,464	22,154	51,186
Beowulf		354,096	29,424	41,910
The Little Book of Hygge	Meik Wiking	116,858	2,315	18,324
The Keeper of Lost Causes	Jussi Adler-Olsen	97,246	4,165	8,001
The Complete Fairy Tales	Hans Christian Andersen	108,877	2,866	6,326
Smilla’s Sense of Snow	Peter Høeg	53,252	7,938	4,620
The Chestnut Man	Søren Sveistrup	90,469	1,694	12,689

The top three here were also the top three, in the same order, when I crunched these numbers in 2015, and the other books I found then also feature in the above list.

Hamlet is Shakespeare’s best known play, and it is very specifically set in Denmark. We had the Shakespeare effect before for Italy, and I haven’t crunched the numbers yet, but I expect the same for Cyprus.

Number the Stars is a novel about a Jewish girl in hiding during the Holocaust. Some of it is set in Sweden, but the majority in Denmark.

More than half of Beowulf is explicitly set in Denmark. Hrothgar is the king of the Danes and Heorot is his palace.

The Little Book of Hygge is about good living, firmly set in Danish culture and habits.

The Keeper of Lost Causes aka Mercy (originally Kvinden i buret, “The Woman in the Cage”) is the first in a series of crime novels featuring Department Q of the Copenhagen police.

I hesitated for a moment or two over Hans Christian Andersen’s Complete Fairy Tales, but actually the majority of them have pretty clear Danish settings.

Smilla’s Sense of Snow aka Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (the latter is closer to the original Danish title, Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne) is another crime novel, about the death of a Greenlandic boy and the Greenlandic roots of the woman who investigates it.

The Chestnut Man is another crime novel.

For once, I did not have to disqualify any books here; the top eight tagged as ‘denmark’ on the various sites are the eight listed above. However that’s only because I included the StoryGraph numbers; without them, two books which I would have disqualified were ahead of The Chestnut Man: Out of Africa by ‘Isak Dinesen’ (set in Kenya) and Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard (set in Biblical Palestine).

Danish women writers bubble under on my calculations. Karen Blixen (‘Isak Dinesen’) has already been mentioned. The Employees by Olga Ravn is set in outer space. On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle is set in France. The top book by a Danish woman writer (probably) set in Denmark is Janne Teller’s existential teen story, Nothing.

There’s not a lot of Denmark on my own shelves. Apart from Hamlet and Beowulf, I have Music and Silence, by Rose Tremain, and also read the amusing comic book Hr. Alting (Mr Everything), by Bente Olesen Nyström.

Coming next: Singapore, Lebanon, Liberia and the Central African Republic.

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The best known books set in each country: Denmark