My most recent act of Covid escapism was a semi-binge on three seasons of the Danish political drama from a few year back, Borgen. “Borgen” is a synecdoche (a figure of speech in which one uses the container for the thing contained, or in this instance a particular location for the thing that happens at that location), such as the “Quai d’Orsay” in Paris, or “Whitehall” in London, or “the Hill” in Washington, all of which denote governmental functions carried out in those places. In its root Danish Borgen means “castle” or “fortress”, and here specifically the Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen, the seat of the Danish government. If you happen to be a professor of Old English you will notice as well that the borg part has to be cognate with high German -burg and English -bury, as in Luther’s famous hymn Ein feste burg (“A mighty fortress…”) or in the place name Canterbury, “fortified place in Kent”. In Romance countries you get castel-this and chateau-that, and everything-ville, because big buildings owned by important people were so often the nuclei of whole towns and cities.
Borgen deals with the fictional career of a fictional pioneering prime minister, Birgitte Nyborg. Other major characters include her husband and two children, several parliamentary colleagues and adversaries, a couple of oversexed press agents, and various other newspaper and television journalists.
The English language dubbing, on which I am of course dependent, is rather disconcerting, as the voices are a medley of British accents ranging from apparent natives of the Orkneys to the male lead’s Mick Jagger London mumble. The use of the revolting verb shag is prominent, since for approximately twenty percent of the screen time somebody or other is doing it, though there is still more than the statutory use of the f-word in its general all-purpose meaningless adjectival senselessness. The leading actor, Sidse Babett Knudsen, comes across as so mentally, morally, and physically attractive that I was smitten from the first moment. Indeed, the writing, the plotting, the direction, and above all the acting in this series are of a very high quality. For a long production in which there are many big roles, this is really saying something. I strongly recommend it.
For Americans the trouble with West Wing and House of Cards, the obvious models for Borgen, is not that they aren’t great TV serials, which they certainly are, but that you are likely to know just enough about actual American political life to be unable to ignore their lack of verisimilitude. Since I know nothing of Danish politics, the boundaries of the plausible, and even the barely plausible, are much more fluid. In fact, I have met few Danish people in either my actual or my imaginary lives. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were already dead when I got there. And none of the only five vaguely recent great Danes I have read or read about—Hans Christian Andersen, Soren Kierkegaard, Niels Bohr, Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen), and my brilliant long-time colleague Hans Aarsleff--is a political type in the conventional sense.
Denmark is not a world power, but an itty bitty little place with roughly the population of Washington, D. C. As presented in Borgen, however, it is a very attractive place, big on intelligence, beautiful young people, social welfare, pork bellies. The Danes have a multi-party parliamentary system with the usual problems and usual advantages. It may be difficult to construct workable governing coalitions, the construction of which generally requires imagination, cooperation, and compromise. But if one of the parties suddenly suffers brain death, it is not necessarily a national catastrophe. Simply form a new and improved party. People peddle about on bicycles except when shagging, and the political correctness quotient is off the charts. The government has a Minister for Integration, just in case, since most the dislocated immigrants seem to be brain surgeons, though a few are merely academic PhDs. On the down side, the Danes don’t seem to have gotten the word about smoking, and they sleep in their clothes a lot. The chief executive lives in a little house without security guards, heats up her own TV dinners, worries about her teenager’s anxiety problems, has a cool British architect lover who designs bridges in Finland, and she speaks in complete sentences in which subject and predicate are in invariable grammatical agreement. Not exactly what you could call presidential. You can absolutely believe that her political party is called “The Moderates”.
But Borgen is no mere rip-off of the Anglo-American political drama. Though I have not found this in the few reviews I have been able to find, I think Borgen subtly aligns itself with an ancient Danish tradition. I think most people know that Beowulf is a very old English poem, but they may not know it it is an old English poem about old Danes, effectively a piece of Danish literature accidently written in English. The Danes show up in the poem’s third word:
Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas.,,
which goes roughly like this: “Listen up! We have heard about the prowess of the leaders of the Spear Danes in days of yore, how the princes performed bold deeds. Frequently Scyld Scefing (that is, “son of Scef”) seized the mead-benches of enemy forces, of many tough folks, and terrified their officers.” This Scyld Scefing was himself a child immigrant who became the founder of a warrior society (hence the spears). In the poem his descendants are sometimes also called the Ring Danes (they loved the bling), also the South-, West-, North-, and East-Danes (which pretty much covers the waterfront of Denmark), and occasionally the Scefings. The Danes were really rough customers in the old days. If you don’t think it takes cojones to seize an enemy mead-bench, I invite you to try it for yourself.
Well, the action of Beowulf is set many generations after Scyld Scefing. The current king is a wise and venerable senior named Hrothgar. His borg is not a stone castle but a huge wooden mead-hall called Heorot. In this mead-hall his warriors sit around on their mead-benches drinking mead, which is a highly intoxicating drink made from fermented honey—a drink that this blog cannot in good conscience recommend even in this festive season. Beowulf is an epic, and in its way an immigration epic. Hereot is under attack by a monstrous outsider, Grendel, who breaks into the borg of an evening to chow down on a few of Hrothgar’s thanes. The Spear-Dames seem incapable of dealing with this invasion. In desperation Hrothgar must turn to another foreigner, the hero Beowulf, who eventually quells not merely Grendel but Grendel’s even more ferocious mother. I’ll grant you that the parallels are not exact. There has obviously been considerable social evolution in Denmark since the days of Beowulf. I don’t think that the Moderate Party had yet been founded in Beowulf’s time, for instance. Yet I suspect that careful textual research would discover a pattern of subtle continuity.
In Borgen the widely bruited spiritual void of the modern Scandinavian welfare states, classically illustrated in the gloom of Bergman's Seventh Seal, is clearly on display. The series appears to search for redeeming redress in a strange quarter: journalism. Newspaper reporters and TV anchors form a thin red line of heroes mounting a lonely defense of Truth, Beauty, and meaning in life. But then it may be only natural that a bunch of television writers and producers should stake a claim for the unique nobility of their trades. One of the great scenes in Beowulf is the bragging contest.
