Copenhagen

Sniders have been here for a couple of days, and besides all of the wine tasting (very mellow) and touring the peninsula, we stopped in at AAA and began planning a Scandinavian cruise for next May (2008).

It's very exciting to think about, even from this far away. The cruise will begin and end in Copenhagen, and will stop in Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Talinn (Estonia), Gdansk (Poland), and Oslo. Woo Woo! We'll be going on the Crown Princess. The brochures won't be available until the end of this month, and we're all on the mailing list.

It's lovely to think about it and the four of us are all very excited already!
I haven't been able to get this song out of my head - I've known it for decades - it was in the old Danny Kaye movie musical about Hans Christian Anderson - maybe we really will sail up the Skagerrak and sail down the Kattegat!

Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen
Friendly old girl of a town
'Neath her tavern light
On this merry night
Let us clink and drink one down
To wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen
Salty old queen of the sea
Once I sailed away
But I'm home today
Singing Copenhagen, wonderful, wonderful
Copenhagen for me
I sailed up the Skagerrak
And sailed down the Kattegat
Through the harbor and up to the quay
And there she stands waiting for me
With a welcome so warm and so gay
Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen
Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen
Friendly old girl of a town
'Neath her tavern light
On this merry night
Let us clink and drink one down
To wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen
Salty old queen of the sea
Once I sailed away
But I'm home today
Singing Copenhagen, wonderful, wonderful
Copenhagen for me

Here's what another blogger had to say about this song:

Wonderful Copenhagen
(and the meaning of "Kattegat")
I'm off to Copenhagen for the weekend. I made the plans some time ago, just to add my minor support for a country that did so much to protect Jews during WWII and that suffered from boycots because of the cartoons published last year.

Before going, I decided to refresh my memory about the lyrics to the Danny Kaye song "Wonderful Copenhagen" from the movie Hans Christian Anderson (but I have since been warned not to whistle or sing that song while I am there — too bad; I loved the movie when I was a kid.)

After I downloaded the lyrics, I wondered, "Where and what are the Skagerrat and the Kattegat that he sings about?"

I sailed up the Skagerrak
And sailed down the Kattegat

The Skagerrak is the strait between Denmark and Norway, and the Kattegat is the strait between Denmark and Sweden. So it makes sense, when you look at a map, to say that on your way to Copenhagen from the Atlantic Ocean, you've sailed up the Skagerrak (it runs up to the northeast) and down the Kattegat (it runs down to the southeast).

But check out the origin of the word "Kattegat"!

Here is what Wikipedia has to say about Kattegat:

The name Kattegat derives from the Dutch and Middle Saxon words Kat (cat) and Gat (hole). It refers to the medieval navigation, where captains spoke of this area to be as narrow as a cat's hole, since there are several flats in the sea, which made navigation difficult.

The second segment of the name is of greater antiquity, appearing, for example, as Codanus in Pliny's Natural History (4.13.96). It is described as a sinus (bay) between Scandinavia and Jutland. Julius Pokorny (Page 423) repeats the hole derivation, listing the Proto-Indo-European root, *ghedh-, "to defecate, hole".

In keeping with sailors' well-known use of the language of bodily functions, one might paraphrase the concept by stating that, to seafaring men who must use it, the Kattegat has always been the anus of the Baltic.


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