The collections of the Library of Congress contain thousands and thousands of books from and/or about Denmark, and/or in the Danish language, as well as many hundreds from and/or about Denmark’s autonomous territories of Greenland and the Faroe Islands. The Library has about 3,500 titles from and/or about Greenland. Half of these books are in English, 25% are in Danish, 10% are in German, and 5% are in French. The remaining 60 or so of these books are in Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic, an Inuit language). Nearly 1,500 titles in the Library are from and/or about the Faroe Islands. Of these books, 40% are in Faroese (a Germanic language closely related to Icelandic), 30% are in Danish, 15% are in English, and 15% are in other languages. (Separate guides on Greenland and the Faroe Islands will be forthcoming. For the time being, see Icelandic and Faroese Collections at the Library of Congress). In addition, the collections include hundreds of books on the former Danish West Indies of St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John, which were sold to the United States in 1917 and became the U.S. Virgin Islands. (See the Library of Congress' U.S. Virgin Islands: State Resource Guide). The collections also hold nearly 10,000 titles on or from Iceland, which was under the Danish Crown until 1944.
With the exception of clinical medicine and technical agriculture, which are covered by the National Library of Medicine and the National Agricultural Library, the Library of Congress encompasses all disciplines in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. (This universal knowledge policy applies to Danish collections, as well as to all others). Generally, these disciplines are represented in the general collections, but legal, musical and cartographic materials are served in the Law Library, the Performing Arts Reading Room, and the Geography and Map Reading Room. The general collections are particularly strong in Danish history, language, and literature.
Most books published between 1801 and the present are held in the general collections, although an exception is made for the early editions of world-famous writers like Søren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen. These are served in the Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room, along with the eighteenth-century editions of the Dano-Norwegian Ludvig Holberg and the Dane Jens Baggesen (who wrote in Danish and German). There are a great number of books by and about Andersen from the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries in the Jean Hersholt Collection of Hans Christian Andersen, within Rare Book and Special Collections.
Otherwise, in the general collections one will find a number of first and contemporaneous editions of the major authors of the Danish Golden Age (ca. 1800–1850): Adam Oehlenschläger, Steen Steensen Blicher, Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, Bernard Severin Ingemann, J. L. Heiberg, Christian Winther, Henrik Hertz, Johanne Luise Heiberg, and Meïr Goldschmidt. Early collected works and later critical editions can sometimes also be found for these authors, as well as the past and present secondary literature on them. Authors whose reputations have changed over time, such Thomasine Gyllembourg and Mathilde Fibiger, can only be found in the original Danish in posthumous editions.
Four of the leaders of the Modern Breakthrough (ca. 1870–1890) in Denmark are also represented in the general collections by many first and contemporaneous editions in the original Danish, and sometimes by later editions, English translations, and criticism, as well: Georg Brandes, Holger Drachmann, Herman Bang, and Henrik Pontoppidan. In addition, copies of the earliest Danish editions of the major authors of roughly the first half of the twentieth century are in the general collections, as well: Martin Andersen Nexø, Johannes V. Jensen, Jeppe Aakjær, Marie Bregendahl, Tom Kristensen, Kaj Munk, Kjeld Abell, Paul la Cour, Hans Christian Branner, Martin A. Hansen, and Karen Blixen, otherwise known in English as Isak Dinesen. From the second half of the century, one finds first and other early editions in the original Danish of Tove Ditlevsen, Elsa Gress, Thorkild Hansen, Cecil Bødker, Benny Andersen, Villy Sørensen, Inger Christensen, and Henrik Stangerup. The Library of Congress continues to add to the general collections the books of Danish authors from the turn of the century to today, such as Svend Åge Madsen, Peter Høeg, Josefine Klougart, and Olga Ravn, in both the original Danish and in English translation.
In the fields of philosophy and theology, one finds many works by and about not just Golden Age thinkers like Jakob Peter Mynster and Hans Martensen, but also those by and about twentieth-century intellects like K. E. Løgstrup and Johannes Sløk.
Danish art and design are well represented in the general collections by studies of particular periods in art history, as well as by multiple monographs on individual artists, from Nicolai Abildgaard to Bertel Thorvaldsen, C. W. Eckersberg to Johan Thomas Lundbye, Anna Ancher to Arne Jacobsen, and Asger Jørn to Olafur Eliasson.
The collection of works by and about Danish scientists is also notable. While the Library’s seventeenth-century editions related to the great astronomer Tycho Brahe are held by the Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room, dozens of their nineteenth- to twenty-first-century counterparts can be found in the general collections. The only contemporaneous edition of the work of the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted in the general collections is in German, Der mechanische Theil der Naturlehre; however, in addition to a number of modern, critical English translations, the general collections contain several scholarly monographs on Ørsted, including some about his groundbreaking discovery of electromagnetism in 1820. The paleontologist/archeologist Peter Wilhelm Lund, who revealed the first evidence of coexistence between human beings and extinct megafauna while excavating in Lagoa Santa, Brazil, is also a presence in the general collections. Lastly, many works by the atomic physicist Niels Bohr are available in Danish or English.
The Library has more than 6,000 titles pertaining to Danish history, beginning with a reproduction of a twelfth-century Latin work: Chronicon Roskildense [Roskilde chronicle]. Another Danish history, the more ambitious, multi-volume Gesta Danorum [Deeds of the Danes], written by Saxo Grammaticus in the early thirteenth century, is available in the original Latin and in Danish, French, and English. The Library has many periodicals devoted to history. For instance, its run of the Danish Historical Association's journal, Historisk tidsskrift, is fairly complete from its first year in 1840 through the 2000s. Historisk tidsskrift is now also available on the free Web External , but recent issues are behind a moving wall.
