Here are some recommended readings and games to further aid your getting in the mood for our trip.
From Amazon.com: “Why are Danes the happiest people in the world? The answer, says Meik Wiking, CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, is Hygge. Loosely translated, Hygge—pronounced Hoo-ga—is a sense of comfort, togetherness, and well-being. “Hygge is about an atmosphere and an experience,” Wiking explains. “It is about being with the people we love. A feeling of home. A feeling that we are safe.”
Hygge is the sensation you get when you’re cuddled up on a sofa, in cozy socks under a soft throw, during a storm. It’s that feeling when you’re sharing comfort food and easy conversation with loved ones at a candlelit table. It is the warmth of morning light shining just right on a crisp blue-sky day.”
From Amazon.com:
“Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, and The Copenhagen Trilogy (1969–71) is her acknowledged masterpiece. Childhood tells the story of a misfit child’s single-minded determination to become a poet; Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband.
Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, and she writes about female experience and identity in a way that feels very fresh and pertinent to today’s discussions around feminism. Ditlevsen’s trilogy is remarkable for its intensity and its immersive depiction of a world of complex female friendships, family and growing up […].
Born in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen in 1917, Ditlevsen became famous for her poetry while still a teenager, and went on to write novels, stories, and memoirs. Having been dismissed by the critical establishment in her lifetime as a working-class female writer, she is now being rediscovered and championed as one of Denmark’s most important modern authors.”
From Wikipedia: “In 873 CE, political pressures in Norway prompt Eivor Varinsdottir and her adoptive older brother, Sigurd Styrbjornsson, to lead their clan of Vikings to settle new lands in Anglo-Saxon England, as part of the Viking expansion across Europe. The clan comes into conflict with the kingdoms of Wessex, Northumbria, East Anglia, and Mercia over the next several years, as well as the warring sons of the legendary Viking warrior Ragnar Lothbrok, who made up the Great Heathen Army. Eivor’s clan faces forces led by the leaders of these kingdoms, including Alfred the Great, the king of Wessex. It is during this time that Eivor meets the Hidden Ones and aids them in their fight against the Order of the Ancients.Explora ble cities include Winchester, London, and York. Parts of Norway and Vinland are also included, while dreamscapes of Asgard and Jotunheim also feature. How historically accurate is this reconstruction? Get a glimpse of that here. This is a videogame.
