The Gefion Fountain

This fountain tells a story, and it is worth hearing the whole of it. The Norse goddess Gefion came to Gylfi, the king of Sweden, and he made her a promise he probably thought was both generous and safe: she could have all the land she managed to plough in a single day and night. Gefion went to the land of the giants. There she had four sons by a giant, and the sons of a giant are not ordinary boys. She turned them into oxen, yoked them to the plough and set to work. They pulled so hard and cut so deep that the plough did not merely turn the soil. The whole piece of land tore loose from the ground. She dragged it out to sea and let it go. That piece of land is Zealand, the island you are standing on. The hole left behind in Sweden filled with water and became Lake Vänern, and if you lay the two maps beside each other, they fit together rather well. Anders Bundgaard carved the figures between 1897 and 1899. The water was turned on in July 1908. It was a gift to the city from the Carlsberg Foundation, marking the brewery's fiftieth anniversary. The red brick church beside it is St Alban's, the English church in Copenhagen, consecrated in 1887.