In this episode of the How to Live in Denmark podcast, host Kay Xander Mellish playfully imagines modern Danes as Vikings, contrasting the brutal, communal Viking past with today’s peaceful Danish society. He describes how Vikings are celebrated in Danish culture—through museums, school projects, and themed experiences—while reminding listeners that historical Vikings were violent raiders. Mellish then draws practical lessons from this heritage, explaining that Danes value communal cooperation. He advises using the Danish word samarbejde (working together) and solidarisk (solidarity) when seeking collaboration, and warns against the word kollaborere, which in Danish evokes wartime collaboration with occupiers. The episode concludes with a call for feedback, sponsor acknowledgment, and promotion of Mellish’s book and the podcast platform.
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Hello, welcome to the How to Live in Denmark podcast. I'm Kay Xander Mellish. I have a secret. I play a little game sometimes when I look at Danish people. I imagine them as Vikings. It's easy now that big beards are in fashion on young men. Sometimes on the metro, I'll look up at the hipster guy playing with his iPhone next to me and imagine him wearing a big fur cape, maybe a rope belt with a sword dangling from it. I imagine him stepping off the boat in Newfoundland in the year 1000, freaking out the local American Indians. Imagining Danish women as Vikings is a little harder. They don't usually have the long braids or the big golden brooches that Viking ladies used to fasten their dresses. They don't wear the headscarves that married Viking women used to wear. Of course, you can still see plenty of headscarves in Denmark, but usually not on the Danes. Anyway, the Danes love the Vikings the same way the French love the Age of the Impressionists, and the British love the Second World War, and the Chinese love the 2008 Olympics. The Vikings was a time when their country was at its peak of power and influence. If you go to Denmark's National Museum in Copenhagen, you can spend hours looking at Viking handicrafts— lots of golden horns and runestones. Danish kids learn a lot about the Vikings at school. Even in kindergarten, they make Viking shields and Viking swords and try out Viking handicrafts. There's various places around the country where the whole family can live like a Viking for a week. That means Viking-era clothing, Viking-era food, and Viking-era plumbing. Unsaid in all this is that the Vikings were not just fun guys who wore horned hats to soccer games. The Norse pagans were a gruesome people by modern standards. Their religion involved a lot of human sacrifice, including young children, particularly girls, Viking is the Norse word for pirate. So when they took off on a raid to England or France, they stole everything they could. They burned down people's homes. They hacked off people's limbs with axes. All that scary stuff you see in horror movies with fake blood, the Vikings actually did. These guys were not cute and cuddly. They were bad guys. They were villains. Of course, your Danish friends will tell you the people you meet in Denmark today are not the descendants of the Vikings. The Vikings, they'll tell you, were the guys who left. They settled in what is now England or France. The people you meet today in Denmark are the descendants of the people who didn't want to go anywhere. The current Danes are peaceful people, but there are still some things they have in common with the Vikings, and not just the way they scream bloody murder at you in the bicycle lanes. For example, they still love the sea and the water. Denmark wins its Olympic medals for sailing more than any other sport, followed by rowing and canoeing. And Danes still think communally. The Vikings lived communally in what were called longhouses, with many families living inside. People lived together and worked together to survive the tough Scandinavian winters. Understanding this can help you in your daily life in Denmark. If you want Danish people to do something, tell them you want to work together on it. For example, let's work together to stop your kid from hitting my kid in the sandbox. Or to your boss, you might say, let's work together to figure out the best way to share our corporate resources. In other words, I want a raise. Samarbejde is the word for working together in Danish. Another good word if you're dealing with people who are kind of on the left side of the political spectrum is solidarisk— solidarity. Some of the parents at my child's school wanted to throw a fancy party, which I didn't want to attend or pay for, but it was decided that we all had to pay whether we attended or not for reasons of solidarity. Communal thinking. So you can talk with your Danish friends about working together, cooperation, coordination, but there's a similar English word you should avoid, and that's collaboration. In English, to collaborate just means working together. Rihanna and Jay-Z are gonna collaborate on a great new joint. In Danish, collaboration, kollaborere, does not mean working together. It means working with the enemy. A collaborator, kollaborator, is somebody who works with an occupying power, like the certain number of Danes who collaborated with the Nazis during the 1940s. If you use the English version of collaborate, Danish people will probably understand the difference, but the word has a nasty flavor. It brings back memories of a bad time in Danish history, of gruesome villains who are a lot more recent and well-documented than the Vikings. And that's the How to Live in Denmark podcast for this week. If you disagree with my point of view about the Vikings, come tell me so on the Xander Mellish Facebook page or on Twitter @howtoliveindk. The 2 is a number. This week's podcast is sponsored by Libsyn. Modern podcast hosting for as little as $5 a month at Libsyn. Music arranged by George Garbus. See you next week. Bye. Remember, the How to Live in Denmark book is available for download on amazon.com. You can read it on any phone or tablet. All you need is the Kindle app, and the Kindle app is free. The book's not free, but it's not very expensive either. If you read the book and enjoy it, please leave a review on your local version of amazon.com. It helps other people find the book and find the podcast.
