Fun with flags with Dr. Lennard Ramone, part II.

 Fun with flags with Dr. Lennard Ramone, part II.

After the positive comments I received when I published my first story about flags, I thought it would be a good idea to follow up with a few things I didn’t have space for in the first story. 

The first question I got was why I didn’t make a mention in the “Flags with similarities” section of the flags of Scandinavia. 

Well, the story was already quite long and now we have a good reason to tell you more about flags.

So the flags of Scandinavia all follow the Nordic Cross pattern.

The OG of Nordic Cross flags is Denmark’s flag, the Dannebrog.

There are several conflicting origin stories, but the generally accepted legend has it that, some time in the 13th century, king Valdemar the second was leading his army into the battle of Lindanise, near present day Tallinn, Estonia. Morale was low but, with his troops in dire straits, the skies opened and a red banner with a white Nordic Cross on it fell from the clouds. This improved morale significantly and the Danish forces managed to turn the battle around and capture the territory for the Danish crown. 

Whether all, or even much, of this is true is ofcourse uncertain but it doesn’t really matter. It’s a good story and it installed the flag as a symbol of Danish national pride and is currently the national flag in longest continuous use.

All other Scandinavian flags are based on this design.

There is Sweden:

Who have a similar design, the only difference being that the color scheme is a yellow cross on a bright blue background. 

As a side note, this is also the reason that Aldi stores in Denmark have a red and blue logo, rather than the trademark yellow and blue one seen elsewhere in the world, because the association with the Swedish flag might negatively impact business. 

Come to think of it, Sweden doesn’t seem to be very popular with its neighbors.

When the Dutch record store chain Free Record Shop started opening branches in Norway in the 1990s, they met with disappointing sales. It wasn’t until someone in the marketing department pointed out the similarities between the company logo and the Swedish flag that they decided to change it to red and blue and sales immediately shot up significantly. 

To the East of Sweden is Finland, who also have the same flag but then with a blue cross on a white background. Not exactly the most exciting color combination, but not a terrible flag. 

Then, to the West of Sweden we find Norway, who have a pretty cool flag. It has the same red background and white cross as the Danish flag (Norway was once part of the Danish empire) but there is a blue cross embedded within the white. It really looks pretty cool.

And then, the 5th and final national flag of Scandinavia, and my personal favorite: Iceland.

It has the same spot-on-brilliant shade of blue as the Scottish flag, and the white Nordic Cross has a bright red cross inside it. The blue represents the Atlantic ocean, the white the ice that a lot of the country is covered in and the red is for the many volcanoes within the country. A very good flag for sure.

So, in a ranking of the flags of Scandinavia, I would out them like this:

5. Finland. Not a bad flag per se, but not very exciting either.

4.  Sweden. Same thing, just a slightly better color scheme.

3. Denmark. The OG of Northern Cross flags. Cool and recognizable, but not as good as 

2. Norway. Now this is a good flag. Nice color combination, the cross-within-a-cross works well and it just looks good.

1. Iceland. As I said above, this is a great flag that represents the country well. 

So, those were the national flags of Scandinavia, but there are 2 more that we need to discuss.

First there is the flag of the Faroe Islands. The Faroe Islands are not a country as such, but an overseas territory of Denmark. It’s a group of small and very cold islands to the North East of Scotland. They’re much closer to Scotland than to Denmark, but what can you do? 

Their flag has a white background with a blue Northern Cross within which there is a red cross. Not quite as strong as Norway but still a decent flag. 

Despite not being a country, the Faroe Islands do have a national football team. Why this is the case is unclear but I’m going to attribute it to UEFA’s ever expanding hunt for more money. 

Gibraltar, as a side note, also has a “national” football team, but the “country” is about the size of a bowling alley and they don’t even have enough space for a proper stadium. They play their home games in Faro, Portugal.

Anyway, the Faroe Islands play qualifiers for the European Championship and the World Cup but they never get anywhere near qualifying. 

Then there is the flag of a curious geographical oddity called the Åland Islands.

This is a group of islands that is an autonomous region of Finland, despite the fact that they’re closer to Stockholm than Helsinki, the population is 95% Swedish, they speak Swedish and their flag has a striking resemblance to the Swedish one.

Yet still, despite the population wanting to be part of Sweden, Finland refuses to cede the islands to Sweden. 

One more flag that needs to be mentioned here is Greenland. Greenland, like the Faroe Islands, is part of the kingdom of Denmark. It is geographically part of North America, but politically part of Europe.

Despite the fact that Greenland is about 1500 times the size of the Faroe Islands, they have similar populations of around 50.000. 

Greenland’s flag consists of 2 horizontal bands of white and red, like Poland (more on this later) but it has a large circle on it with the opposite colors, ie. it’s red on the white band and vice versa. This symbolizes sunrise and sunset, as a reference to its far Northern location, which results in the strange situation that in winter the sun doesn’t rise for months and in summer it doesn’t set. 

Now, to complete this tail of Scandinavian flags, there is one more place we need to talk about: Vinland.

What most people with an over-average interest in geography and history already know, is that the textbook story that Columbus discovered America in 1492 is complete nonsense. 

It is known that vikings reached North America at least 500 years before Columbus (who, accidentally, never set foot in what is now the USA and Canada but only sailed past some islands in the Carribean). Celtic rune signs, dated back to around the year 800, have been found carved into mountainsides as far inland as Michigan.

Chinese explorers likely reached what is now California somewhere in the middle ages.

In any case, for our story here, Columbus was full of shit and we should focus on a Norse explorer called Leif Ericson who, if the information at my disposal is correct, landed in North America around the year 1000 AD. As with many things in that time, details aren’t clear and, depending on which source you believe, he was either born in what is now Greenland or in modern day Iceland, after it was settled by Norwegian seafarers from the Western area around the modern day city of Bergen. (Which is also, accidentally, the reason that people in Iceland speak a language that is closely related to the Bergensk dialect that people speak in and around Bergen).

In any case, Leif set sail in Western direction and eventually landed, via a number of stops on islands on the way over, in an area he called Vinland.

Where exactly Vinland was, nobody knows for sure, but most sources put it somewhere in the area that is now Newfoundland, Canada, though there are also claims that it was in the modern day province of New Brunswick, or as far South as Nova Scotia or even the present day state of Maine in the USA. Nobody can really tell.

As for the Vinland flag, it is unknown what it looked like, or if there even was one to begin with.

That was, until the New York doom metal band Type O Negative created one in 2004 and started using it on band merchandise and album covers.

It is essentially the flag of Norway but with a green-white-black color scheme rather than red-white-blue, which,  rather conveniently, matches the color scheme of most of the band’s merchandise and album covers.

Whether there is much, or even any, truth in the story of this flag is not really important, I just thought I’d mention it.  

Before we finish up for the day, and conclude this story about Scandinavian flags, there is one more thing I want to tell you.

If we go back to the flag of Norway, there is a nifty trick hidden in it.

If you cut certain bits out of the flag, you can make a number of other national flags.

France

The Netherlands

Poland

Monaco and  Indonesia

Thailand

 

And, if you’re not too picky about aspect ratios and the shade of blue used, Finland.

So.. that was the story about the flags of Scandinavia. I hope you enjoyed it and I will be back with part 3 in the near future.