I am not really qualified to teach you Danish history but the little of Danish history I learned while in the country was very interesting and since it involves an ancestor of mine (part of my family tree is Danish) I am going to write it the best I can.<\/p>\n
The Danish are some of the oldest people known on the planet. Know one knows exactly when they formed as a civilization but there is plenty of archeological evidence that they were forming fishing groups around the Ice Age, which makes them at least as old as 10,000 BC. The Danes are a seafaring people and master ship builders who conquered wood, bronze and iron. This all lead them into eventually becoming vikings. Which is not what they called themselves, because the word viking is an old Scandinavian term that basically means pirate, they would have preferred to be called Norsemen.<\/p>\n
The whole viking thing probably really came from the English, French, and Spanish people who were constantly getting their coastal towns raided by the North. The English, French, and Spanish would have loved to take them over but considering not even the Romans were able to do it, those countries had even less of a chance.<\/p>\n
The people of the North were a pretty wild bunch until my ancient grandpa King Harald Bluetooth (yes I am related to him and yes they named it after him) came to power in 965 AD. Bluetooth was so powerful he conquered what is today Denmark, Norway, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and some of Sweden. King Bluetooth was good but it always takes a woman to do things right so it was Queen Margrethe I , who in 1397 formed what was called the Kalmar Union. This was the ultimate Scandinavian empire, it ruled Denmark (including Greenland and Iceland), Norway, and Sweden.<\/p>\n
It was awesome, but there was a problem, the Germans. Well sort of the Germans, because they never really called themselves Germans. First it was this thing called the Hanseatic League, which was like a trade organization with guns. Then it was the Duchies of Schleswig, who kept telling the peasants they had rights, but once they had power took away the peasants rights. World War I came and the Central Powers came and took away some land, but then they lost and had to give it back. The Nazis trampled Denmark in World War II, but they eventually lost as well. It is therefore not surprising, that even though they are a founding member of the UN, NATO, and the EU, they were not having anything to do with a currency regulated by Germany, thus Denmark uses the Danish Kroner.<\/p>\n\n\t\t