A wedding in Hjorring, Denmark, July 1973, plus shots of trains in Wisconsin and other miscellania from Denmark ~

I was a summer exchange student in Denmark with Youth for Understanding.  The family I was placed with had five daughters, four of whom were adults and had moved out.  The youngest, Mukke, was two weeks older than I and lived at home with her parents, Major General Hans Christian and Else Birgitte Engell.  The second. youngest, Babse, got married while I was there and I got to observe how Denmark’s modern nobility did a wedding.  

Unlike an American wedding, the marriage ceremony itself was rather informal but the reception was quite formal.  Thus I was invited to the ceremony but not to the reception.  I was allowed to glimpse some of the reception because I was enlisted/hired to act as a server.

The ceremony was held in the local Lutheran Church.  Nearly all of the Danes were Lutheran, but not this family who were Roman Catholic.  General Engell had met Ms. Engell back in the early days of World War 2 when he was ferrying Jews out of Denmark to Sweden.  Ms. Engell was Jewish, but converted and married when they were reunited after the war.  A Catholic priest officiated, but I think that there was a Lutheran pastor at the side.  The other notable feature of this ceremony was that the congregation was split with women seated on one side of the church and the other men - rather than the US tradition of enemies of the groom on one side and enemies of the bride on the other.

The reception was held in the basement of the Engell’s house at the edge of Hjorring, a provincial capital near the tip of the Danish peninsula into the North Sea.  The house was contemporary.  The living quarters were upstairs.  The basement came out to daylight on the curb side but was subterranean on the other side.  They had maybe 50 people attending the sit-down meal in a large room.  A caterer arrived and did much of the cooking in the kitchen.  She laughed when I said that her gravy was almost as good as my mother’s.

This bumpkin from Iowa needed to be reminded that one served on the left and removed from the right.

The reception was adults only.  The bride’s three older sisters had arrived with their own children.  One sister had married a Norwegian, I cannot find notes with their names and I cannot remember anything other than the family name, Nilsen.  They had three daughters.  The youngest, Nana Therese, was about four years old.  She was very unhappy not to be included in the fun downstairs and very unhappy that her crying couldn’t summon her mother up from the basement.  When I left for Denmark, my sister Lori had just had her sixth birthday.  I was my parents’ built-in babysitter for Lori.  I picked Nana up, rocked her in my arms, and comforted her.  She settled down.  We played a bit until it was time for her to go to bed, and her older sisters, her built-in babysitters, did the rest.

Afterwards, Nana liked me and trusted me just as I liked and trusted her.  I had been documenting my Denmark experience with my camera and I shot photos of her, the ones you see here.  I then found out that she was generally extremely shy, mistrustful of strangers, and hated having her photo taken.  I was taking happy unguarded photos of her, and that was unusual.

The Engell and Nilsen families showed me many kindnesses and were extremely generous with their time and resources.  Included in that generosity was giving me a few days in Norway with the Nilsens which I will write about later.

The contact sheet that this essay refers to can be found as "00021" in the Photos by Number set of galleries.