Around 1800 the Danish state was a medium-sized multinational, absolutist, Protestant empire. It consisted of the Kingdoms of Denmark and Norway, the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, and the dependencies of Greenland, Iceland and the Faeroe Islands, and held colonies in the Caribbean, India and on the Gold Coast. Most historians wrote under royal auspices, and censorship curtailed any direct criticism of state and society. The late-18th-century Danish histories by Ove Malling and by Peter Frederik Suhm were commissioned by the court.

Well into the 19th century, many history books proclaimed that all inhabitants of the empire had a common fatherland and a shared past. Another common theme was that the introduction of absolute monarchical rule had secured equality within the state, since the aristocracy had lost its political role and many of its privileges. Absolutism was portrayed as a progressive force, allegedly guided by public opinion. This prevailing state-patriotic and dynastic perception of the empire and its history, however, was challenged and defeated in the course of the new century by a new, national master narrative.

The national master narrative had its roots in the 18th century, when, inspired by Montesquieu, the Swiss-born royal Danish historiographer Paul-Henri Mallet launched the idea of a proto-democratic Nordic society of freeholding peasants in the Dark Ages. Suhm and Tyge Rothe developed these notions further in the 1770s and 1880s, resulting in the so-called “Nordic Renaissance”, which, lasting well into the 19th century, inspired not only historians, but also philologists (Rasmus Rask), writers and artists (Adam Oehlenschläger) and the influential priest/poet N.F.S. Grundtvig.

Following defeat in the Napoleonic wars and the humiliating loss of Norway, the rise of Romanticism and cultural nationalism stimulated interest in “nationally” oriented history, literature and folklore studies (Just Mathias Thiele). Whereas earlier generations had mainly focused on a Nordic golden age in the Dark Ages, the generation after 1814 focused on a Danish golden age. The so-called “Age of the Waldemars” (1157-1241) was used as template for the revitalization of the nation.

The “Danish Historical Association” was founded in 1839, chaired by Christian Molbech, and with a charter that clearly marked the shift from a state-patriotic to a national focus; its organ was the (still-existing) Historisk Tidsskift. Within the new national paradigm (which relied on the underlying essence of a Danish Folk as an organic whole with a distinct character, history and culture), two main variations were to be found, which differed in their perception of the impact of foreign influence, European civilization and immigration on the Danish nation. A classicist narrative saw Denmark as a European backwater, in need of cultural and intellectual stimulation from European civilization. The other, dominant version of the national narrative tended to view European influence negatively, in that a free and equal golden age society had been adversely affected by foreign-imported factors such as feudalism, the Catholic Church, languages like Latin, French and German, as well as a German population influx. This decline was only stopped by the Reformation, the introduction of absolutism (curtailing the feudal powers of the aristocracy), the agrarian reforms of the late 18th century and the introduction of the Estate Assemblies in the 1830s. This narrative saw the peasant population as the nation’s core as it had been the least affected by foreign ideas. Unsurprisingly, this narrative was promoted by the Grundtvig movement and by opposition historians such as the national-liberal Carl Ferdinand Allen (Haandbog i Fædrelandets Historie, “Handbook for the fatherland’s history”, 1840; De Tre Nordiske Rigers Historie, 1497-1536, “The history of the three Nordic kingdoms”, 5 vols, 1864-72).

Although Danish historiography was deeply influenced by German historicism, Germans were viewed with deep antagonism by Danish patriots. The politicization of cultural nationalism from the 1830s onwards exacerbated this trend, especially when Danish nationalism clashed with the regionalism of the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein as supported by German nationalists. In the two Schleswig Wars (1848-51 and 1864), Danish historians and academics actively supported Denmark’s historical claims to Schleswig and promoted an anti-German, nationalist narrative.

With the 1864 defeat in the Second Schleswig War, Denmark lost the German Duchies of Holstein and Lauenburg and the nationally contested Duchy of Schleswig, and, short of these German-speaking territories, became a nation-state. On the one hand, this solidified the notion that Danish history was the history of the Danish nation as imperial memories receded; the small nation-state of post-1864 was projected back upon earlier Danish history. On the other hand, the National Romanticism that had hitherto prevailed in Danish academia was challenged in the wake of “1864” by a younger generation of modern Realists spearheaded by Georg Brandes. In history-writing, Kristian Erslev and others marked the professionalization of the discipline and (so it is traditionally alleged) its adoption of source-critical methods. While Erslev is still regarded as the father of modern Danish historiography, his position is complex, inspired as he was by both the German Historical School and by French positivism. His students gravitated to the latter, resulting in a highly empirical orientation in Danish historiography until the 1960s.

Although the social-liberal historians like Erslev saw Danish history through a national prism, they had a pro-European outlook and challenged many of the ideas of National Romanticism as promoted by Allen and the Grundtvig movement. This outlook became dominant in the last decade of the 19th century and has to some extent remained so ever since. Even so, the National Romantic counter-narrative survived amongst conservatives and within the Grundtvig movement, leading to a long-lasting culture war between a centre-left/social-liberal narrative and a conservative/centre-right narrative of Danish national history.