”It goes with a people, just as with the individual man; none of them know their first origin. The distant past is, like the future, shrouded in darkness. But man wants to know what lies behind him, just as he questions what lies ahead of him.” (Adam Fabricius: Illustreret Danmarkshistorie for Folket,[1] 1853)
Danish man! Danish maid! and others who may read these lines!
Who are we Danes? And what is it that makes us Danes?
The Danish-Norwegian word os (Swedish oss, English us, old-English ós) means one of the Aser. Because the old-English word ós is the singular form of Ése (old-English) and Aesir (old-Norse) or Aser.
The Aser were the gods of the Norse mythology. Odin and Thor were Aser. The other Norse gods - such as Frej and Freja - were the Vaner. The word vi in Danish-Norwegian (we in English) is derived from the old-Norse word ver or Vaner.
Today, we say us Danes, and then them, all the others.
But perhaps not all the others. When the talk is of Danes and other peoples living in Denmark, I am sure that most Danes would not think of Swedes in Denmark as the aliens. Would you not, if you should be really honest, think of the Swede in Denmark as one of us, and not one of them? The word us does mean As, one of the Aser, the Norse gods, and Odin and Thor were just as Swedish as they were Danish. The same could be said of Norwegians, Faroe Islanders, and Icelanders. Aser and Vaner, Odin, Thor, and Freja, are just as Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish as they are Danish.
In the Norse countries[2] we even call each other for brother-folk (brother-peoples), as if we were brothers, the sons of one father.
We also have a close bond and feeling of kinship with the great peoples the Germans and the British. In several Midieval centuries entire classes of craftsmen in the Danish towns were all Germans, who entirely looked like Danes and today are in the Danish people. The nobility and large tradesmen in Denmark were also dominated by Germans for a long while. When the Reformation broke out in Northern Europe, the English chose Anglican Protestantism, and the Dutchmen, the Swiss, and many Frenchmen chose Calvinistic (Reformed) Protestantism. In the North we became Lutherans, just like most of the Germans, after the German Martin Luther.
The thing with the Catholic Church that really outraged Luther was his pilgrimage to Rome, where the Catholic priest-hood had sunk down into unrestrained whoredom. The peoples who fervently received Luther’s Christianity were specifically those peoples who 1000 years earlier had worshipped the Aser and Vaner, Odin, Thor, and Freja. Here in the North and in the Northern 2/3 of Germany the Lutheran Church is still the People’s Church, or the People’s Faith, however dull the spirit may have become for the last 40 years.
Why did we specifically accept Luther's Christianity? What kind of men and women were we back then? one could ask. We were, of course, exactly the same men and women of the same flesh and blood, as the ones who today make up the Norsemen and most of the Germans. Deep down inside of us there lies a heart of flesh and blood, but it is also a heart full of life, spirit, and soul.