Cimbricae Chersonesi, Jordan, 1552

Kort over Danmark

Danish National Mapping

Before the fifteenth century there was little geographical knowledge of Denmark, except for sketchy details of Scandinavia from Cresques Abraham’s Catalan Atlas of 1375. It was not until 1427 that Claudius Claussøn Svart, a Dane who spent most of his life in Italian universities, provided the first somewhat tolerable outline of Scandinavia in the 1427 edition of Ptolemy’s Cosmographia. It would be another 100 years until the earliest examples of Danish cartography appear, with Marcus Jordan’s Cimbricae Chersonesi in 1552. However, even after that, most maps of Denmark were published in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Paris or Nuremberg.

Regni Daniæ, Hugo Allardt, Amsterdam, 1665

The next major Danish cartographer was Johannes Mejer, a mathematician and geographer to the court of King Frederick III. He published a number of maps, including a survey of Schleswig and Holstein¹ (1638-1648) which was published in Danckwerth’s Atlas “Newe Landesbeschreibung der zwey Hertzogthümer Schleswich und Holstein.” Mejer’s maps would remain the standard in Danish cartography for another century and were widely used in other European atlases, including Johann Blaeu’s seminal Atlas Major of 1665.

Hertzogthumbe Schleswieg, Mejer, 1650. From Danckwerth’s Atlas¹

The first complete triangulation and planetable mapping of Denmark was begun in 1762 by the Videnskabernes Selskab (the Danish Royal Society) and would take more than 60 years to complete. In the meanwhile, the Danish military, dependent on these surveys for obvious reasons, could not accept this leisurely pace and in 1808 the Generalstaben (General Staff), under the direction of Artillericapitain O. N. Olsen, began their own survey. The 1:20,000 scale military maps were never made available to the public, but in 1841, in association with the Videnskabernes Selskab, a 1:480,000 scale map was published. It was the first official map of the country.

Detail, Kongeriget Danmark, Olsen, 1841

In 1842 the Generalstaben and the cartographic part of the Videnskabernes Selskab were combined into the Generalstabens topografiske Afdeling. This new department began a new survey of the Kingdom (1842-1895) using more advanced methods. These ordinance surveys, the Hoje Målebordsblade, became the first complete 1:20,000 scale mapping of the country, and were published as lithographs beginning in 1864.

Hoje Målebordsblade² (top) and detail³ (bottom), 1842-1899

On 31 March 1928, the Generalstabens Topografiske Afdeling and Den danske Gradmaaling were merged into a new department, the Geodætisk Institut. The Institut continued to periodically survey the country and publish new topographical maps. A second ordinance survey, resulting in the Lave Målebordsblade, was completed between 1901-1971 (with complete sets of maps published in the 1930s and 1950s) and the 4cm-kort (also published as the 2-cm kort and 1-cm kort) was produced between 1957-2002.

On 10 Sept 1987 the Geodætisk Institut was combined with Matrikeldirektoratet and Søkortarkivet to form Kort & Matrikelstyrelsen, which is responsible for the current official topographical maps, the Top10dk.

Billund,⁴ Denmark from the Hoje Målebordsblade, Lave Målebordsblade, the 4-cm kort and the Top10dk

1. Kongeriget Danmark, or the Kingdom of Denmark, consists of the Jylland (Jutland) peninsula and the major islands of Fyn (Funen), Sjælland (Zealand) and Bornholm, as well as some 440 smaller named islands and the territories of Færøerne (the Faeroe Islands) and Grønland (Greenland). At various times in its history the Kingdom also included Iceland, major parts of Norway, Southern Sweden and the Northern German province of Schleswig-Holstein.

2. The Hoje Målebordsblade, as it is presented here, is a mosaic consisting of several hundred individual map sheets reassembled by yours truly, along with a separately constructed outline of the surrounding land masses of Germany and Sweden. N.B.: Bornholm has been shifted significantly southwest to minimize the map size.

3. Which brings us to the issue of screen resolution. The computer screen is decidedly low-resolution (typically 72-163 ppi, the latter being an iPhone/iPod Touch) and these maps are decidedly high-resolution, see: Tufte, Edward. Envisioning Information. Cheshire, Connecticut. Graphics Press. 1990. To get an idea, the original maps, scanned at 508 dpi (by KMS, I wouldn’t scan something at this arbitrary resolution) and at 24-bit color, would be more than two TB, or at a standard 8-bit LCD color depth, would be 67 GB. As a point of comparison all of the data needed to build a 777, Boeings first commercial aircraft designed entirely on a computer, is four TB and the estimated capacity of the human brain is around 10 TB.

4. The home of Lego, which has twice been voted the “Toy of the Century.”

10 Nov 2008 ‧ Cartography