I found this travelogue of Danish author Hans Scherfig’s 1950 trip to the USSR. I think it will be of interest to people here so I have translated it. The illustrations are by Scherfig himself.

In chapter 8 the delegation arrives in Kiev by airplane. Scherfig does not like flying. He describes the quickly reconstructed city as a very green and pleasant place before telling the ancient history of Kiev. Ancient history is contrasted with recent history as Scherfig describes the terrors of German occupation and the horrific scale of Nazi murder and destruction in Ukraine. The darkness of the war years makes the feeling of optimism Scherfig experiences all the more powerful as he describes day two of Kiev’s May Day celebrations.

CW: The text contains a description of Babi Tar massacre. The text also contains two instances of the soft N-word used in a non-bigoted context. I have retained them for the sake of accuracy.

Travels in the Soviet Union

Table of Contents

Chapter 8

The Russian aircraft smelled of soap and cleaning agents as well. Clean white canvas covers were spread over the padded seats, and there was the usual profusion of small, meticulously arranged curtains with borders and fringes; even up in the aircraft’s ceiling, where there hardly seemed any pressing need for them, sky-blue velvet curtains had been hung in neat folds. There was no lack of paintings on the wall either: a portrait of Stalin, and colour reproductions of Repin’s “Letter to the Tsar”  and of Vasnetsov’s painting of the three warriors who served in the retinue of Vladimir the Holy and, in the time of Gorm the Old[1], defended Kiev against the nomads of the steppes.

We celebrated Carlo Hermansen’s birthday at an altitude of 2,500 metres and drank to his health in pink soda. Beneath us, Russia spread out like a map we could not read with white roads and dark forests and ploughed fields and yellow rain gullies; a tiny train moving very slowly down there gave me a feeling of homesickness for the solid ground and more old-fashioned means of transport. The flat land with the high horizon was like a bowl to fly over. Then came clouds, and we floated over shining white cotton-wool quilts, and then came holes in the clouds, so you could see patches of dark-green forests and light-green fields and more rain gullies and a gleaming river and again a little train, travelling peacefully on the good solid ground. We read a little, and we dozed a little, and every time the machine bounced, Evald Rasmussen and I fell to talking about how cozy the Russian railway carriages are, and how safe and comfortable you travel down on the ground, and how nice it is to have plenty of time and to move from place to place in a natural and organic manner. We also remembered the good ship “Nordstjernen”, which had brought us from Stockholm to Turku, and concluded that the delegation really ought to study Russian river transport, and that there had to be a steamer from Moscow to Stalingrad, which we were to visit the following week. The clouds turned into small cotton tufts, which cast shadows on the map, and then the cotton tufts disappeared, and the view became boundless, the earth rose up to meet us, so that we could see houses and onion churches and buses on the roads. Erik Stahl, who knew the country’s geography, declared that a silver-shining river far off must be the Dnieper. A mountainous ridge rises up on the river’s western bank, and on these hills lies Kiev between green gardens. Then we swung out over the river, and the land rose in an unnatural way and became a wall outside the window, and on this wall you saw houses and streets and factories and trams. Evald Rasmussen maintained that some white stripes up above must be an airfield, and so they were; a few minutes later the ground was level once more, and you felt, with relief, that the machine was running on the ground from which you cannot fall.

I had expected to find Kiev in ruins, and that was how John Steinbeck had seen the city two years earlier. They had said to him then: Come back in a couple of years, and you will see what we have accomplished. They have accomplished the incredible in those two years. They have rebuilt a metropolis the size of Copenhagen. We drove through a very beautiful city with white houses set among gardens and flowering chestnut trees in the broad avenues. The streets had the same teeming energy as in Leningrad and Moscow, but the city seemed gentler, more southern in character. It is called the “city of gardens.” Trees line every street, and a very large part of the city’s area is parkland; it is the greenest city I have seen. You pass from one garden to the next, you walk kilometre after kilometre through very beautiful and varied grounds; on the 200 metre high bluffs toward the river there are paths and promenades at different levels, and you have the most wonderful view over the broad gleaming river and the flat green land that stretches for miles. Everywhere there were small music pavilions and open-air theatres and cafés, and in the evening the promenades were illuminated, and one of the city council members told us that Kiev’s youth had passed a protest resolution the year before against the excessive light, which disturbed the young people when they dallied through the warm summer nights.

In a park a statue has been raised to the Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko, and on a high hill by the bank of the Dnieper outside Kyiv lies his grave. He died in 1861. In his poem Zaporit — “Testament” — he addresses the coming generation:

Oh bury me, then rise ye up

And break your heavy chains

And water with the tyrants’ blood

The freedom you have gained.

And he ends the poem thus:

And in the great new family,

The family of the free,

With softly spoken, kindly word

Remember also me.[2]

Shevchenko was a poet as well as a painter. His father was a serf, and the hatred of slavery runs through all of his poetry. When the English Negro actor Aldridge[3] was in Russia in the 1850s, Shevchenko painted his portrait. They could not speak with each other, but they sang, Aldridge sang the songs of the Negro slaves, and Shevchenko the songs of the Ukrainian serfs. For his poems Shevchenko was sentenced to ten years of exile and service as a soldier. The Tsar added in his own hand to the sentence: Should be kept under the strictest surveillance and forbidden from writing and painting!

Saint Sophia's Cathedral, Kiev 1950

High upon the tallest summit stands a statue of Saint Vladimir, looking out over the Dnieper, braced against an enormous cross. It was Vladimir who brought Christianity to thee land and drove out the devil and baptized the entire population of the city in the river — “rich and poor, beggar and craftsman” — and the monk Nestor from the Pechersk Monastery in Kiev, who wrote his chronicle at roughly the same time as Saxo Grammaticus[4], tells us that “all of the people went to the river with joy.” But the pious Nestor was mistaken when he thought that Vladimir had driven out the devil on that occasion. When the Germans came to the city in 1941, they rounded up 70,000 of the city’s civilian inhabitants in the great ravine that runs down to the river, and shot them all, men, women, and children. This work took the Germans two days. Six million of the Ukrainian republic’s civilians were murdered by the Germans — that is fifteen percent of the population. If you include the fallen soldiers, the number grow considerably larger. When the Germans withdrew from Kiev in November 1943, they burned down and blew up all public buildings, all cultural institutions: the university, the opera, the theatres, the libraries, the schools, the museums, the cathedrals. They went about the work with Teutonic thoroughness and considerable technical skill. The historical museum’s eight buildings were blown to pieces, the famous museum of folk art was torched, and its 60,000 artefacts destroyed. All of the university’s beautiful buildings and institutes were systematically destroyed, the university library with its 1,300,000 volumes was burned, the Academy of Sciences was burned, and its 320,000 books carried off to Germany. With great expertise engineers and technicians destroyed the entire city centre, the beautiful main avenue, the thousand-year-old monasteries and cathedrals. The famous Uspensky Cathedral, built in the time of Harold Bluetooth[5] and a pilgrimage site for a thousand years, was levelled. Saint Sophia Cathedral, on the other hand, they did not quite manage to destroy. It will undoubtedly offend some of my countrymen when I say that German prisoners of war were later set to clean up after themselves, and that we saw, in Kiev, a work detail of former SS soldiers working at a building site. Since an international convention forbids putting captured officers to such work against their will, we were presented with the strange sight of SS officers playing handball or sunbathing in their camp.

Yaroslav the Wise with his family, Saint Sophia's Cathedral, Kiev

All the Russian rivers have a high and steep western bank, while the eastern bank slopes evenly. The cities tend to lie on the steep western bank; such is the case with Kiev, Smolensk, Dnipropetrovsk, Mogilev, Rostov and Stalingrad. The cities were laid out so they were easy to defend against the Tatars, who came from the east. But defending against an enemy coming from the west was very difficult, you fought with the river at your back, and the recapture of these cities proved immensely difficult. The Dnieper at Kiev is almost a kilometre wide, and the 200-metre-high banks are steep as cliffs. The cost of recapturing the city in 1943 was terrible. Yet even as the war raged on, reconstruction began at once.

The Intourist hotel where we were staying stood directly opposite the beautiful classical main building of the Academy of Sciences. We thought it had been spared by the Germans, but were told that it had been rebuilt in its old form. It is the centre for a host of scientific institutions in the Ukrainian republic, where they have rebuilt 160 universities in total, which now have more than 150,000 students. Kiev is an old cultural centre, an ancient city founded by Greeks and Scythians before the birth of Christ. For centuries it was the religious capital of Old Slavonic culture, until Saint Vladimir had the wooden image of the god Perun cast into the Dnieper; later the mother city of Christian Russia, a place of pilgrimage for a thousand years. We enlightened Danes actually know very little about the history of other countries. And yet Ukraine is a country with as many inhabitants as Great Britain, an independent republic with its own language, its own flag, its own government and its own foreign representation. Erik Stahl questioned some ten-year-old Russian schoolchildren about what they knew of Denmark; a little boy thought it was a republic. But what do we know of Ukraine, which is ten times as large?

A policeman dancing in the street in Kiev

One morning Stahl and I went to see Saint Sophia’s Cathedral, now restored after the Nazis’ moronic vandalism. It is a vast building crowned with some ten domes; within, a labyrinth of galleries, vaults, and columns with marvellous Byzantine mosaics. What do we know of the great prince Yaroslav the Wise, who built this church around the year 1000 — back when Sweyn Forkbeard[6] was king of Denmark? He had married a Swedish wife; he was father-in-law to Harold Hardrada of Norway; Norse Vikings served in his court; and you find Old Norse ornamentation together with the Byzantine art in his mighty edifice. He triumphed over the Tatars and made Kiev an ecclesiastical centre, and he was so zealous in his faith that he had his slain pagan uncle exhumed and baptised, that the man’s soul might be saved.

Thatched peasant houses in Ukraine

I do not know whether the people of Kyiv are friendlier than other people, but they are very friendly; nor do I know whether it is true that the girls in this city are more beautiful than elsewhere, but we saw that they are very beautiful and smiling. Our hosts were cheerful, good-natured people, and in a strange way you felt at home in this green city and could well imagine staying there forever. May Day celebrations stretch across several days, like the Bastille Day in Paris, and Kiev was ablaze with festivity when we arrived. The Ukrainian flag waved everywhere, and the houses were decorated. In the evening we saw there were neon lights on the buildings, not advertisements, but simply lights, red and green and blue arabesques, glowing poppies and sunflowers on the house façades. We were invited to the Shevchenko Opera on the first evening, where a Polish opera was being performed, but a couple of us, who were not musical and were quite fed up with opera, left after we had seen the beautiful auditorium and the first act, and looked instead at the city’s nightlife. We drifted slowly out along the broad park promenade along the river and watched the people, and we stopped at some of the many small charming open-air restaurants and drank alternately wine and beer and yellow soda. There was dancing and celebration everywhere; people were dancing in the streets as well, and many young people had musical instruments with them. At one point I saw a cheerful sailor suddenly strike up his accordion for a policeman on a street corner, and I expected that law enforcement would take action. It did indeed: to my astonishment I saw the policeman begin to dance the Russian dance. A soldier and two young girls joined in, and then they performed a ballet the like of which I have never seen. The policeman and the soldier leapt wildly about with movements like roosters, and the girls moved with tiny little steps, so it looked as though they were gliding on roller skates. A circle of onlookers clapped there beat, while the sailor played until the accordion was about to burst. It was wonderful and magnificent dancing; they leapt like cockroaches, and they spun like tops, and they stomped and gesticulated wildly, and puffed themselves up like turkeys. It was a grand performance and high art and a captivating outpouring of merriment. I saw that on my first night in Kiev, and I shall never forget it.

Original Danish text

Rejse i Sovjetunionen

  • Hans Scherfig, 1950

VIII.

Også de russiske flyvemaskiner lugter af sæbe og rensemidler. Over de polstrede stole er der lagt rene hvide lærredsbetræk, og der er den sædvanlige overflod af små sirligt arrangerede gardiner med borter og frynser; selv oppe i flyvemaskinens loft, hvor der ikke syntes at være strengt behov for det, var der anbragt himmelblå fløjlsgardiner i nydelige folder. Der manglede heller ikke skilderier på væggene: Et portræt af Stalin og farveproduktioner af Repins »Brevet til tsaren« og af Vasnetsovs maleri af de tre kæmper, som tjente i Vladimir den Helliges hird og på Gorm den Gamles tid forsvarede Kijev mod steppernes nomader.

Vi fejrede Carlo Hermansens fødselsdag i 2500 meters højde og drak hans skål i lyserød sodavand. Nedenunder så vi Rusland som et uforståeligt landkort med hvide veje og mørke skove og pløjejord og gule regnkløfter, et lillebitte tog som bevægede sig ganske langsomt dernede, gav mig en følelse af hjemve efter jorden og mere gammeldags trafikmidler. Det flade land med den høje horisont var som en skål at flyve over. Så kom der skyer, og vi svævede over skinnende hvide vat-dyner, og så kom der huller i skyerne, så man kunne se stumper af mørkegrønne skove og lysegrønne marker og flere regnkløfter og en blank flod og igen et lille tog, der kørte fredeligt på den gode faste jord. Vi læste lidt, og vi blundede lidt, og hver gang maskinen hoppede, kom Evald Rasmussen og jeg til at tale om, hvor hyggelige de russiske jernbanevogne er, og hvor trygt og behageligt, man rejser nede på jorden, og hvor rart der er at have god tid og bevæge sig fra sted til sted på en naturlig og organisk måde. Vi mindedes også det gode skib »Nordstjernen«, som havde bragt os fra Stockholm til removed og fandt, at det egentlig var delegationens pligt at studere den russiske flodtrafik, og at der ganske sikkert gik damper fra Moskva til Stalingrad, som vi skulle besøge i næste uge. Skyerne blev til små vat-totter, som kastede skygger på landkortet, og så forsvandt vat-totterne, og udsigten blev umådelig, og jorden kom nærmere op imod os, så vi kunne se huse og løg-kirker og rutebiler på vejene. Erik Stahl, som kendte landets geografi, forkyndre, at en sølvskinnende flod langt ude, måtte være Dnjepr. Et bjergagtigt højdedrag rager op på flodens vestlige bred, og på disse bakker ligger Kijev mellem grønne haver. Så svingede vi ud over floden, og landet rejste sig på en unaturlig måde og blev til en væg uden for vinduet, og på denne væg så man huse og gader og fabrikker og sporvogne. Evald Rasmussen hævdede, at nogle hvide striber foroven måtte være en flyveplads, og det var det også; nogle minutter senere var jorden atter plan, og man følte med velbehag, at maskinen kørte på jorden, hvorfra man ikke kan falde nogen steder.

Jeg havde ventet at se Kijev i ruiner, og sådan havde John Steinbeck også ser byen for to år siden. Man sagde dengang til ham: Kom igen om et par år, så skal De se, hvad vi har udrettet. Man har udrettet det utrolige i de to år. Man har genopbygget en storstad som København. Vi kørte gennem en meget smuk by med hvide huse mellem haver og blomstrende kastanier i de brede gader. Der var det samme mylder på gaderne som i Leningrad og Moskva, men byen virkede blidere, mere sydlandsk. Den bliver kaldt for »havernes by«. Der er træer i alle gader, og en meget stor del af byens område er park-areal, der er den grønneste by, jeg har set. Man går fra den ene have til den anden, man går kilometer efter kilometer gennem meget smukke og afvekslende anlæg, på de 200 meter høje skrænter mod floden er der stier og promenader i forskellig højde, og man har den mest vidunderlige udsigt over den brede blanke flod og det milevide flade grønne land. Allevegne var der små musikpavilloner og friluftsteatre og cafeer, og om aftenen var promenaderne illumineret, og et af byrådsmedlemmerne fortalte os, at Kijevs ungdom i fjor havde vedtaget en protestresolution mod der meget lys, som generede de unge mennesker, når de sværmede i den lune sommernat.

I en park har man rejst en statue af den ukrainske nationaldigter Taras Sjevtjenko, og på en høj bakke ved Dnjeprs bred uden for Kijev er hans grav. Han døde i 1861. I sit digt Zaporit — »Testamente« henvender han sig til den kommende slægt:

Når I har begravet mig, rejs jer da,

slid lænkerne af jer

og gød friheden

med den forbryderiske fjendes blod.

Og han slutter digtet sådan:

I den store familie,

den nye, frie familie,

glem mig ikke, giv også mig

et godt og stille ord.

Sjevtjenko var både digter og maler. Hans fader var en livegen bonde, og hadet til slaveri går igennem hele hans digtning. Da den engelske neger-skuespiller Aldridge i 1850’erne var i Rusland, malede Sjevtjenko hans portræt. De kunne ikke tale med hinanden, men de sang, Aldridge sang negerslavernes sange, og Sjevtjenko de ukrainske livegnes sange. For sine digte blev Sjevtjenko dømt til forvisning og soldatertjeneste i ti år. Tsaren føjede egenhændigt til dommen: Bør holdes under strengeste opsigt og forbydes at skrive og male!

Oppe på den højeste top står en statue af den hellige Vladimir og ser ud over Dnjepr og støtter sig til et vældigt kors. Det var Vladimir, som indførte kristendommen og udryddede djævelen og døbte hele byens befolkning i floden — »rig og fattig, tigger og håndværker«, og munken Nestor fra Petjoraklostret i Kijev, som har skrever sin krønike på omtrent samme tid som Saxo Grammaticus, siger, at »hele folket gik til floden med glæde«. Men den fromme Nestor tog dog fejl, når han troede, at Vladimir ved den lejlighed fik udryddet djævelen. Da tyskerne i 1941 kom til denne by, samlede de 70.000 af byens civile indbyggere i den store kløft, som går ned til floden, og skød dem alle, mænd, kvinder og børn. Arbejdet tog tyskerne to dage. Seks millioner at republiken Ukraines civile befolkning blev myrdet af tyskerne — det er femten procent af befolkningen. Hvis man regner de dræbte soldater med, bliver tallene betydelig større. Da tyskerne i november 1943 trak sig tilbage fra Kijev, brændte og sprængte de alle offentlige bygninger, alle kulturinstitutioner universitetet, operaen, teatrene, bibliotekerne, skolerne, museerne, katedralerne. De gik til arbejdet med teutonsk grundighed og megen teknisk kunnen. Det historiske museums otte bygninger blev sprængt i luften, det berømte museum for folkekunst blev brændt, og dets 60.000 museumsgenstande blev tilintetgjort. Alle universitetets smukke bygninger og institutter blev systematisk destrueret, universitetsbiblioteket med dets 1.300.000 bind blev brændt, videnskabernes akademi blev brændt, og dets 320.000 bøger ført til Tyskland. Ingeniører og teknikere ødelagde med stor dygtighed hele byens centrum, den smukke hovedgade, de tusindårige klostre og katedraler. Den berømte Uspenskij-katedral, som blev bygget på Harald Blåtands tid og i tusind år var valfartssted for pilgrimme, blev jævnet. Sofia-katedralen lykkedes det derimod ikke helt at få bugt med. Det vil utvivlsomt forarge nogle landsmænd, når jeg fortæller, at tyske krigsfanger senere er blevet sat til at rydde op efter sig. og at vi i Kijev så en arbejdskolonne af tidligere SS-soldater, som arbejdede på en byggeplads. Da en international konvention forbyder, at fangne officerer sættes til den slags arbejde mod deres vilje, kunne man præsentere os for det mærkelige syn af SS-officerer, som spillede håndbold eller tog solbad i deres lejr.

Alle de russiske floders vestbred er høj og stejl, og den østlige bred er jævnt skrånende. Byerne ligger gerne på den stejle vestbred, sådan er det med Kijev, Smolensk, Dnjepropetrovsk, Mogilev, Rostov og Stalingrad. Byerne var anlagt sådan, at de var lette at forsvare mod tartarerne, som kom fra øst. Men over for en fjende, der kom fra vest, var forsvaret meget vanskeligt, fordi man kæmpede med floden i ryggen, og tilbageerobringen af disse byer var uhyre vanskelig. Dnjepr er ved Kijev næsten en kilometer bred, og de 200 meter høje skrænter er stejle som klipper. Det kostede forfærdende meget at erobre byen tilbage i 1943. Men mens krigen gik videre, begyndte man straks på genopbygningen.

Det inturist-hotel, hvor vi boede, lå lige over for Videnskabsakademies smukke klassiske hovedbygning. Vi troede, det var skånet af tyskerne, men fik at vide, at den var genopbygget i sin gamle skikkelse. Det er centret for en mængde videnskabelige institutioner i den ukrainske republik, hvor man ialt hat genopbygger 160 universiteter, som nu har over 150.000 studenter. Kijev er et gammelt kulturcentrum, en ældgammel by, som blev grundlagt af grækere og skyther før Kristi fødsel. I århundreder der religiøse hovedsæde for den gammelslaviske kultur, indtil den hellige Vladimir lod guden Peruns træbillede kaste i Dnjepr; senere det kristne Ruslands moderby, valfartssted gennem tusind år. Vi oplyste danskere ved egentlig meget lidt om andre landes historie. Ukraine er dog et land med ligeså mange indbyggere som Storbritanien, en selvstændig republik med eget sprog, eget flag, egen regering og egen udlandsrepræsentation. Erik Stahl spurgte nogle tiårige russiske skolebørn ud om, hvad de vidste om Danmark; en lille dreng mente, at det var en republik. Men hvad ved vi om Ukraine, som er ti gange så stort?

Stahl og jeg gik en formiddag hen og så på den hellige Sofias katedral, som er restaureret efter nazisternes tåbelige hærværk. En vældig bygning med en halv snes kupler, indvendig en labyrint af gallerier, hvælvninger og søjler med forunderlige byzantinske mosaikker. Hvad ved vi om den store fyrste Jaroslav den Begavede, som byggede denne kirke omkring år 1000 — dengang, da Svend Tveskæg var konge i Danmark? Han var gift med en svensk dame, og han var svigerfader til Harald Hårderåde i Norge, mange nordiske vikinger tjente i hans hird, og i hans vældige bygværk finder man gammelnordisk ornamentik sammen med den byzantinske kunst. Han sejrede over tartarerne og gjorde Kijev til et kirkeligt centrum, og han var så nidkær i troen, at han lod sin myrdede hedenske farbror grave op og døbe, for at hans sjæl kunne blive frelst.

Jeg ved ikke, om folk i Kijev er venligere end andre mennesker, men de er meget venlige; jeg ved heller ikke, om det er rigtigt, at pigerne i denne by er kønnere end andre steder, men vi så, at de er meget kønne og lattermilde. Vores værter var muntre og hyggelige mennesker, og man følte sig på en mærkelig måde hjemme i denne grønne by og kunne godt tænke sig at blive der altid. Majdagen bliver ligesom Bastilledagen i Paris fejret flere dage i træk, og Kijev var i fest, da vi ankom. Det ukrainske flag vajede overalt, og husene var udsmykket. Om aftenen så vi, at der var neon-lys på bygningerne ikke reklamer, men bare lys, røde og grønne og blå arabesker, lysende valmuer og solsikker på husfacaderne. Vi var inviteret i Sjevtjenko-operaen den første aften, hvor man gav en polsk opera, men et par af os, som ikke er musikalske og var ganske mætte af opera, gik efter at vi havde set det smukke teaterrum og første akt og kiggede i stedet for på byens aftenliv. Vi drev langsomt ud ad den brede park-promenade langs floden og så på folk, og vi prøvede nogle af de mange små hyggelige friluftsrestauranter og drak skiftevis vin og øl og gullig sodavand. Der var dans og fest alle vegne, også på gaden blev der danset, og mange unge mennesker havde musikinstrumenter med. Jeg så et sted en glad matros, som pludselig begyndte at spille på harmonika for en politibetjent på et gadehjørne, og jeg ventede, at lovens håndhæver ville træde i funktion. Det gjorde han også: til min forbavselse så jeg politibetjenten give sig til at danse russerdans. En soldat og to unge piger kom til, og så opførte de en ballet, som jeg aldrig har ser mage til. Betjenten og soldaten sprang vildt omkring med bevægelser som haner, og pigerne bevægede sig med små bitte skridt, så det så ud, som om de rullede på rulleskøjter. Udenom stod folk og klappede takten, mens matrosen spillede, så harmonikaen var ved at revne. Det var vidunderlig og storartet dans, de sprang som kakerlakker, og de snurrede som toppe, og de trampede og gesti ulerede, og pustede sig op som kalkuner. Det var en festforestilling og en kunstpræstation og et henrivende udtryk for munterhed. Det så jeg den første aften i Kijev, og jeg vil aldrig glemme det.

  1. Gorm the Old, king of Denmark from c. 936 to c. 958 ↩︎

  2. Translation from Ukrainian to English by John Weir, Toronto 1961 ↩︎

  3. Ira Frederick Aldridge (1807-1867) ↩︎

  4. Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1150 – c. 1220), Danish chronicler ↩︎

  5. Harold Bluetooth, king of Denmark from c. 958 – c. 986 ↩︎

  6. Swein Forkbeard, king of Denmark c. 986 – 1014,  king of England 1013 – 1014. ↩︎