Scandinavian Aggression

The goddess Gefion doesn’t fuck around when it comes to farming: when she plows she plows so hard that Sweden loses over 2000 square miles of its land area. This strip of land then ends up being dumped in the water next to the country’s southern tip, forming the Danish island of Zealand where the modern city of Copenhagen and the ancient seats of Norse kings, Roskilde and Lejre, can be found. Also, Hamlet’s castle is on this island, but that’s a tangent. The main point is that the residents of Copenhagen recognized the mythological importance of the ground upon which they bicycled and thus commissioned Anders Bundgaard to sculpt the masterpiece shown in these photos in Gefion’s honor. The work was actually donated by Carlsberg, the brewery, so it even has a legitimate and highly relevant relationship with beer as well which makes it even cooler.

For those of you who can stomach pseudo-phonetic imitation Mark Wahlberg rantings, Gefion was the hot chick who King Gylfi of Sweden banged at the very beginning of the Prose Edda for Bostonians. Of course I just followed Snorri’s lead in the telling of events with his statement that King Gylfi “offered a travelling woman, in return for the pleasure of her company, a piece of ploughland in his kingdom as large as four oxen could plough in a day and a night” (quoting Jesse Byock’s translation). In old-time Norse lingo the pleasure of female company does not usually refer to polite, non-physical conversation befitting British tea time. However, she’s also associated with virgins and the stories about her are contradictory in this sense.

Regardless of all that, Anders Bundgaard totally nailed her when it comes to the statue.