A white cross on a red field: the oldest national flag still in use and the model for all the Nordic crosses.
Every fact about the flag, each with what it means.
Normal flagFIAV symbol: the form of the flag.
Civil, on land and at seaFIAV symbol: who may fly the flag.YesIt carries the coat of arms on the cloth.The flag in the words of vexillology and heraldry.
It is a rectangular field with a 28:37 ratio, red, with a white cross shifted towards the flagpole (the type called a Nordic cross).
Each element and how many of the 1,390 flags in the catalogue carry it. In yellow, the rarest.
How it was born, how it has changed and what it means.
The flag of Denmark is red with a white cross. The Danes call it the Dannebrog, which means “cloth of the Danes” or “red cloth”. It is the oldest national flag still in use today and the model from which all the other Nordic flags came.
Nobody knows exactly when it began to be used. The oldest evidence is a fourteenth-century Dutch book of coats of arms, the Armorial Gelre, which draws a red standard with a white cross next to the arms of the king of Denmark.
Tradition tells another story. On 15 June 1219, in a battle in Estonia, the troops of King Valdemar II were losing when the flag fell from the sky and gave them victory. It is a legend: nobody wrote it down until the sixteenth century, nearly three hundred years later. Historians think the cross comes from the Christian standards carried by the crusaders of that time.
The colours have been the same since the Middle Ages; what has changed is the position of the cross.
14th century
At first the cross is in the centre, as in many medieval standards.
1748
Over time the vertical arm has moved closer to the mast and the horizontal one has lengthened towards the other side: it is the Nordic cross. A rule fixes the thickness of the cross and the size of each red rectangle.
1893
A slightly longer version is allowed, the one with a 28:37 ratio, which is now the most usual.
No law gives it a meaning, but its elements are understood as follows:
White cross
Christianity, as on the standards of the medieval kings and crusaders.
Red
the ground of the old war standard of the Danish kings.
Cross shifted towards the mast
the drawing that Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands later copied.
The Guinness Book of Books recognises it as the national flag used without interruption for the longest time, at least since 1625.
In 1834 private citizens were forbidden to fly it: it was a thing of the army. In 1854 the ban was lifted. Today the Danes put it on birthday cakes and, since the mid-nineteenth century, also on the Christmas tree.
From 1915, flying the flag of another country on Danish soil was forbidden, with a few exceptions. The rule was lifted in 2023, after a ruling of the Supreme Court.
The Danish Navy uses a darker red than the flag flown on land.
Where it is and what borders it.
Test what you have read about the flag of Denmark.
Text based on the article “Bandera de Dinamarca” from the Spanish Wikipedia, published under the licence CC BY-SA 4.0.
Sources consulted:
Flag image: Madden and others, Wikimedia Commons · Public domain.
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