England’s worthy opponents: why the Danes are so great

A thousand years ago, England was part of Canute the Great’s North Sea Empire, which also included Norway and Denmark. Canute, or Cnut, was the first monarch to declare himself “King of all England”, not just “of the English”. By uniting the kingdoms, the Danish king could abolish the Danegeld — the tribute punned on in this morning’s Daily Mail headline: “Danes gelded.”

Indeed, Canute was famously so mighty that his courtiers affected to believe that even the waves obeyed him. And so he sat on the shore as the tide came in to prove that he was humbler and wiser than they. However, in the original legend about Canute, recorded in Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum dating from a century later, the king commands the waves not to rise; only when his feet are drenched, does he affirm his Christian faith by declaring: “Let all the world know that the power of kings is empty and worthless, and there is no king worthy of the name save Him by whose will heaven, earth and the sea obey eternal laws.” Perhaps Boris Johnson is channeling his inner Canute when he jokes with his aides that he is not fit to be Prime Minister; alas, Dominic Cummings has no sense of humour.

Here on these British Isles, Danes are hardly foreigners; they are family. And though they showed true Viking spirit in last night’s hard-fought and memorable match at Wembley, the Danes and the English both know that football is only a game. Both during and after the contest, they demonstrated fair play and true sportsmanship, even though they lost only after a dubious penalty in extra time.

Was it a foul, or merely a hard tackle? The eminently impartial Dutch referee agonised over his own decision, but followed the rules, which allow the penalty to be altered only if it was clearly mistaken. For once, fortune favoured the English. It is perhaps worth noting that the old Anglo-Saxon word “foul” first comes to prominence in Hamlet, Shakespeare’s play about a Prince of Denmark. His father’s spirit commands the Prince to avenge his “murder most foul”, amplifying the word as “most foul, strange and unnatural” — poisoned while sleeping “by a brother’s hand”, without the opportunity to confess his sins or receive the last rites. Hence the Ghost cannot find eternal rest, but is doomed to haunt the Castle of Elsinore. The penalty that enabled Harry Kane to score on the rebound may haunt the Danish goalkeeper, Kasper Schmeichel, and the rest of his gallant team. They played well, yet England played just that little bit better. Whether or not it was a foul, there was nothing strange or unnatural about the result.

Not since the Napoleonic Wars, when Nelson turned a blind eye at the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, have the Danes and English been enemies. For many years in the 19th century the peace of Europe was troubled by the Schleswig-Holstein Question. Of this dispute about the two duchies on the border of Denmark and Prussia, Lord Palmerston, the British Prime Minister, is said to have remarked: “Only three people understood it: the Prince Consort, who is dead, a German professor, who has gone mad, and I, who have forgotten all about it.” When the Prussians solved the question by seizing the disputed province in the war of 1864, Denmark also temporarily lost its lucrative trade in pig meat with Germany. The resourceful Danes diverted their keenly priced exports of cured meats to England. And so the great British breakfast of bacon and eggs was born — a delicacy that had hitherto been beyond the means of the English working class. (The Danes themselves, like the Scots, traditionally eat porridge for breakfast.) In recent years they have adapted their intensive agricultural methods to enable bacon exports to meet British animal welfare standards: the Danish “UK pig” is not reared in the inhumane sow stalls which are still legal in much of the EU. 

In the Second World War, Denmark was, like most of Europe, occupied by the Germans. But the Danes distinguished themselves in one respect: on October 1, 1943 Hitler ordered the arrest and deportation of the small Jewish community of just under 8,000 in Denmark. A few days before the Nazi authorities began rounding them up, the Danish resistance evacuated 7,220 Jews, plus 686 non-Jewish spouses, (out of a population of 7,800) across  the Baltic Sea to nearby Sweden. A tip-off from an anti-Nazi German diplomat, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, enabled the Jews to go into hiding and the Danes to improvise a rescue. Niels Bohr, the great Danish-Jewish physicist, was instrumental in persuading an initially reluctant Swedish government to accept the Danish Jews, with the help of Greta Garbo, the Hollywood star. The Elsinore Sewing Club and other civil society groups smuggled hundreds of Jewish families across the Oresund strait in trawlers, rowing boats and even kayaks, under the noses of the Nazis. It was, in a way, the Danish Dunkirk. Those who did not escape were deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp, but most survived the war. According to Yad Vashem, 102 Danish Jews were murdered in the Holocaust — the lowest proportion in occupied Europe. 

Danes are justly proud of this solitary bright chapter in the grimmest period of their long history; but they never boast of it. As their greatest philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, wrote, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” The Danish people won’t dwell on their defeat at Wembley. They will absorb its lessons, but are too wise to allow the past to overshadow the present. England could learn a thing or two from them. 

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