Danish national costume

This material is made up of pictures and its purpose is to introduce you to national costume the Danes used to wear in general.  There are clothes of the Viking Age portrayed in the pictures, as well as the Danish folk costume from the beginning and the end of 19th century.

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Taste for the beautiful in the Viking Age has also found its repercussion in the fibulae and other accessories. With their help one could not only enhance his or her beauty but also display one’s wealth. In the meantime, there were not so many adornments, having no functional applicability. These are bracelets, necklaces, collars and diverse chain-hanging pendants. Such pendants were generally made as the Christian or pagan symbols, such as the chrisscross or a miniature hammer of Thor.  The finger rings were worn quite seldom, and the temporal chaplets were completely unfamiliar to the Scandinavian tradition.

Archeological excavations carried out in York (England) show that in towns of that period of time people lived in conditions which by today's standards cannot be considered sanitary. However, it was surely typical for that period and even later. Though, in the eyes of a European of that time the image of Vikings as of dirty, scruffy barbarians is remote from the truth. That is not at all the way the king of Denmark and England Knud the Great looks in an English drawing of 1030s. It is a whole-length portrait – he is slim, coiffured, chicly dressed, in tight-leg pants, boots and tight-fitting leggings. Over the shirt the king wears a knee-length tunic with wide trimming, a mandilion with a chic bow is slipped over his shoulder.