Introduction
The Copenhagen weekly-published newspaper, Politivennen (The Police Friend), published in 1831 the following report describing a scene from the inner-city fish market:
No properly dressed wife or husband can, except with disgust and fear, in the morning approach a wagon on the fish market, in order to buy some fish; because the wagons are surrounded by shabby-dressed men, who with hooting and screaming offer the fish for sale, fight and curse with their dear female friends, the hefty fish women, who, when the wagons arrive, flock around these, in order to get a good buy.Footnote 1
The newspaper’s sarcastic style conveys an image of swearing mongers, persuading passers-by to purchase their goods in a place of noise and din. The place is Gammel Strand (Old Strand), one of the oldest marketplaces of Copenhagen. For centuries, fishmongers have gathered here to sell herrings, shrimps and eels to Copenhageners, using a central canal for landing the catch. The profane language, yelling and hailing was an integral part of the daily practices and have been reported on in a wide range of sources dating back to the seventeenth century.
In 1818, a few years earlier than the example above, the same newspaper published another complaint about the yelling and noise emanating from the fish sellers. In this piece, however, another particular group of women, the so-called Amager women,Footnote 2 was mentioned as an exception, as a group with ‘a tolerable voice’:
About the screams of salesmen and saleswomen, with goods…It has often been found highly unfair that the ears of Copenhageners should be tormented by the above-mentioned music [cries and yelling] every day, not even with the exception of Sunday during the service. The only ones among these vocal musicians who have a tolerable voice are the Amager women, the others are generally so unpleasant that one cannot imagine anything more disharmonious.Footnote 3
The contrast between the depictions of the fish sellers and the Amager women recur in contemporary sources. In a report in the popular newspaper Aftenbladet in 1920, we find this portrayal:
The autumn fog can settle as close as it wants over the city’s streets and squares, at Højbro there will always shine strong and luminous colours through. Here are gathered mighty bouquets of all the colourful flowers of autumn, while the bronze-golden foliage of the forest forms the finest setting around all these flower crowns, and behind them peep out the pleasant Amager women, who offer all this glory and splendour.Footnote 4
The scenes at Gammel Strand stand in sharp contrast to this description of the adjacent flower and vegetable marketplace, Højbro Plads (High Bridge Square). Unlike the foregrounding of noise at Gammel Strand, this depiction of Højbro Plads mentions nothing directly about the sounds. Indirectly, however, the mentioning of ‘autumn fog’ and ‘the bronze-golden foliage of the forest’ creates an image of a quiet place with noiseless vendors; ‘the pleasant Amager women’ who ‘peep’, but do not shout, behind the flowers they want to sell.
Over centuries, the Amager women as well as the women in the fish market became iconic figures that embodied the life and routines at Højbro Plads and Gammel Strand.Footnote 5 Besides contrasting with each other, they also formed an oppositional figure against the Copenhagen elite residents, also present in this area. This was not only underlined by visual tokens such as their dresses and head scarfs. They also spoke in rural dialects remarkably distinct from standard Copenhagen speech.
This article explores the people and practices that made up the semiotic spaces of the two adjacent marketplaces, Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads. We place particular focus on the social meaning and functions of sounds – including dialect, yelling and hailing – as we argue that sound played a central role in constructing the place-specific identities of the two squares. Thus, we employ the concept of ‘sonic territories’ to incorporate sound holistically in the analysis together with the architectural materiality of the squares, the cultural practices of the marketplace vendors together with the ways they were perceived by people in Copenhagen. The study focuses on the period after Højbro Plads was established in the 1790s, until around 1940 when most market trading had disappeared, leaving only a few traditionally dressed sellers who oriented their business towards tourists. Thus, the article contributes to urban history scholarship by integrating sound as one of the core senses in investigating the changing experience and representation of prominent public spaces over time. More broadly, it adds to the study of a Nordic capital, Copenhagen, by providing perspectives on the cultural history of urban markets, bodies and social stratification.Footnote 6
The article is structured in three main parts. In the first section, we present the historical background of the Copenhagen marketplaces with particular focus on the fish and flower/vegetable markets at Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads. In this section, we argue for a semiotic approach to the analysis of urban soundscapes. We advocate conceptualizing ‘sonic territories’ to incorporate both the architectural materiality and cultural practices of the city together with their perceptual interpretation. In so doing, we combine insights from linguistics and semiology with recent soundscape studies. The second section provides an account of the women (and men) from Amager and Skovshoved who over centuries practised a lifestyle closely connected to the trading of goods in Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads. We describe the tokens that made them recognizable as ‘Amager’ and ‘Skovshoved’ women in the marketplace; that is, their dresses, dialects and manners. The final section presents the analysis of Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads as sonic territories, opening on to a discussion of the co-constituent functions of the two sites in focus.
Marketplaces as sonic territories
Research on squares and marketplaces has been approached from different perspectives as sites of bounded sensibilities. While Eisenlohr emphasizes the ‘urban atmosphere’ as simultaneously an emotional and navigational space closely related to materiality, Stiegler, in his analysis of public music in New Orleans, proposes the notion of ‘acoustic territories’ as a way to connect more closely power and the negotiation of space.Footnote 7 These notions correspond with other studies such as Wakeman’s in outlining the sonic demarcations of revolutionary Paris, and Karapostoli and Votsi’s, who, in their examination of contemporary Thessaloniki, describe a more complex set of ‘sonic territories’, all of which expand on the more traditional concept of soundscape. Coined by Schafer, the concept of soundscape is an attempt to grasp larger constellations of sounds in a social context, and it has been both influential and contested in sound studies and sound history.Footnote 8
As argued by Otter, Stobart and Toftgaard, among others, in the modern development of urban retail spaces, especially the spectacle of display provided by modern shop fronts and street advertising, vision became a driver of consumption. In the marketplace, however, sound remained a central part of the sense-scape.Footnote 9 From the mid-nineteenth century, specialized shops appeared in Copenhagen, forming shopping streets in which individual merchants promoted their wares at the expense of the open-air square market. In the process, a social distinction arose between the shop owners and their customers, on the one hand, and the market sellers, on the other hand, who together with their mixed audience became regarded as less civilized, being an object of complaints from shopkeepers.Footnote 10
In the first half of nineteenth-century Copenhagen, however, open-air commerce still dominated the streets and squares. Varying supplies and competition made it possible, and even necessary, to construct distinctions between different sellers, places and products. Sounds formed integral parts of such processes. Karapostoli and Votsi argue that ‘music, sound and noise form both spatial and temporal territories; thus, particular categories of soundscapes might have profound effects on the patterns of social association, physical movement and interactions’.Footnote 11 Sounds and other sensory signs have performative effects in the sense that they prompt people – buyers and sellers – to move and act in specific ways. In the case of Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads, while street cries and yelling were regarded as disturbing noises by some urban citizens, they formed a functional part of the semiotic soundscape in framing the urban marketplace. Karapostoli and Votsi go on to state that ‘noisy soundscapes play a crucial role in the formation of urban character’.Footnote 12 In line with this, we argue for a view on meanings and effects of street cries and yelling in the urban marketplace as a tripartite combination of materiality, practice and perception. The architectural frame, the surrounding buildings and material surfaces constituted the materiality of the place within which vendors and merchants carried out their daily routines selling and buying goods. Here is where merchant identities were acted out and the practices that shaped the semiosis could be interpreted and used as signs for navigating and interacting with urban space. Together, this combination of materiality, practice and perception form sonic territories – a term we employ to analyse the Højbro Plads and Gammel Strand soundscapes. As mentioned above, the concept has been used by Karapostoli and Votsi to emphasize that different territories emerge in relation to each other, stimulated (among other factors) by contrasts of noise and silence. These points are relevant for our following argument. The notion of the territorial emphasizes important relations of power between sound, power and urban space, as proposed by cultural historians Chartier and de Certeau, in the sense that the making of local noise can be seen as acts of claiming or appropriating space. Thus, with the territorial perspective, we aim to shift the analytical attention from other sonic concepts, including Schafer’s soundscape, to territorial bordering.Footnote 13
Central to this understanding is our view of materiality, practice and perception, appearing as signs, in Barthes’ terms, forming a semiology of the city.Footnote 14 The city consists of multiple material expressions such as buildings, roads and signposts, but also sound (or sound waves) from traffic, people and animals. People attribute social meanings to these expressions, which thereby become distinguishable signs. Through the interpretation of the city’s various signs, people experience and categorize them – buildings, roads, streets and so on are experienced as, for example, new, old, exciting, closed, official or private. The same goes for sounds. Some sounds are heard as noise or as annoyances, others as pleasant or as attractive. The city’s expressions become meaningful in and through our experiences, practices and lived life in the city. These together make up the semiology of the city, which is open for interpretation, reinterpretation and change. Thus, in the article sounds are viewed as signs that, together with an entirety of other signs, make Højbro Plads and Gammel Strand ‘readable’ in the sense that they become possible to navigate between sellers, goods and so on.
It is our conviction that to understand the complexity of materiality, practice and perception in relation to Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads, we need insights into the wider context in which people have developed the practices and routines that characterized life on the two squares. The overall developments of the city as well as the people who create life in the marketplaces are part of communities and life forms, which outline the ramifications for their movements and activities on Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads. The social meanings and perceptions that form part of the places as sonic territories are embedded in these contexts. Thus, the following two sections present an outline of, first, the history of Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads as marketplaces and, second, a description of the fish and vegetable sellers – the Skovshoved and Amager women – and their backgrounds.
The Copenhagen fish and vegetable markets: Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads
The analysis of marketplace sonic territories focuses on two adjacent squares, Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads (Figures 1 and 2). From Copenhagen’s western city gate ran a series of crooked, but connected, streets eastwards to the seventeenth-century royal parade plaza, Kongens Nytorv. Over time, this passage became straightened out, serving as a central artery called ‘the Route’. To the east, was the area of Amagertorv, connecting Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads with the inner city. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, wealthy burghers lived and traded there, and the elite presence remained visible through a small number of renaissance buildings. It was also a quarter for selling goods, especially textiles, hence the area’s name, the ‘Inner Clothstalls Quarter’. The area was delineated by the central canal, Slotsholmskanalen. Across the canal, the first castle of the city had been built on the island, now called Slotsholmen, and as the town grew, bridges were built to connect it to the mainland. By one of these bridges, the Høj Bro (meaning High Bridge), was first Højbro Plads and then the old fish market, Gammel Strand, on the edge of the channel.
Figure 1. Contemporary map of Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads, the canal and bridge ‘Højbro’. Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen.
Figure 2. Højbro Plads and Gammel Strand, the canal and High Bridge. Without date, probably 1920s. Museum of Copenhagen.
Thus, there were already market activities here when Copenhagen entered its industrial wave of urbanization during the eighteenth century, which continued to accelerate over the following century.Footnote 15 Due to colonial trade and the royal court’s presence in the city, an affluent elite settled in quarters near Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads, where they closely mixed with the servants, peasants and poorer groups who also inhabited the area. As Langen and others point out, yelling associated with poor, uncivilized people was widespread in the area during the eighteenth century. The upper and middle classes were repulsed by the women and boys, who walked around ‘barelegged’ to sell printed ballads, news and other publications from the area’s many printing houses.Footnote 16
As noted, the small strip of Gammel Strand was an early trading place in the city, and this was also the case for Amagertorv. Højbro Plads, however, only came into being in the late eighteenth century, following the second of two devastating fires, in 1728 and 1795. In 1795, around 900 houses burnt to the ground and a major part of the medieval city disappeared, making way for more open space in the crowded capital, and among these was Højbro Plads. Over time, the new place became part of the official market square system in the city, specializing in the sale of flowers and vegetables.Footnote 17
This spatial reorganization around Amagertorv, Høj Bro and Gammel Strand also affected the sonic territories of the area. This is evident from various public complaints made by burghers in newspapers. For instance, in the newspaper Politivennen in 1826, a complaint was made about a dog that howled each time a fishmonger woman shouted out: ‘If [the woman] could not be changed, then one hopes that the dog owner is so thoughtful as to kill the dog’, the offended correspondent wrote.Footnote 18 Some complaints also pointed directly to the specific marketplace, as when it was suggested that the market at Gammel Strand was removed, or at least that the yelling was restricted: ‘Is every man not entitled to demand such a woman’s yell erased from 10 o’clock at least? – One remembers that such shouting on the corners is forbidden even during the day.’Footnote 19 For centuries, in Copenhagen as in other Danish towns of royal privilege, market activities had to be kept within city walls, and at certain sites in the city. Markets were important meeting places for citizens and visitors, and since medieval times the city had tried different ways to regulate market activities, both at the established, permanent marketplaces, and at temporary, ‘extra’ markets, where a festival-like atmosphere would often loosen daily regulations of behaviour.Footnote 20 However, the formal system of markets, with its own hierarchies and rhythms, changed with the Free Trade Act in 1862, which abolished the guild monopoly and introduced a multitude of options for selling and buying in the city. Market activity was spurred, giving way to new shops and trade practices throughout European cities, and, with the Nordic countries establishing free trade almost simultaneously, urban markets changed. However, in the specific situations of urban space, another cause can be connected to the emergence of specialized shops and shopping streets, as a consequence of the liberal regulation. We also see how, during the growth of Copenhagen, new open-air markets were neither established nor promoted, as happened for instance in London.Footnote 21 Instead, the existing markets shifted towards wholesale, supplying the specialized shops, and among these wholesale sectors, meat and fish tended to be centralized in controlled halls in the decades around 1900, where from the 1870s, slaughterhouses were increasingly segregated and regulated.Footnote 22 An exception to this development was the fish market at Gammel Strand where fresh fish was sold daily until the construction of the Metro city line in 2008.
The saleswomen from Skovshoved and Amager
The fish and vegetables sellers who populated Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads came from small villages outside of the city centre. The Amager women in Højbro Plads came from the island of Amager about 10 kilometres south of the centre of Copenhagen, and a large group of the female fish vendors at Gammel Strand came from the small fishing village of Skovshoved around 10 kilometres north of Copenhagen (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. Map of Copenhagen with surrounding areas, the island of Amager, Øresund and Sjælland, eighteenth century. The blue circles indicate the locations of the fishing village Skovshoved (north) and area on Amager where the Amager women lived (south). Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen.
Until approximately a century ago, the lifestyles and social organization of the Amager farmers and the Skovshoved fishers stood out in contrast to the lifestyles of the urban Copenhagen population. Their way of living was organized around farming and fishing, respectively, and going to the centre of Copenhagen to sell their products was an integral part of this lifestyle.Footnote 23 This section presents a brief outline of the historical context of the people, places and lifestyles of the sellers from Skovshoved and Amager.
Skovshoved
Over generations, families in Skovshoved developed a lifestyle that was closely connected to and reliant on selling fish to the Copenhagen population. Life in Skovshoved was in many ways tough and dependent on fluctuating supplies of natural resources. It required perseverance and not least a tight-knit collaborative community to sustain everyday living. There were periods with very few fish in the sea, and in severe winters, the sea was frozen which rendered fishing impossible.Footnote 24 The history of the people in Skovshoved shows various periods of critical times without access to fish or money. Thus, to sustain a living, everyone – men and women, children and the elderly – had to work together to catch and sell fish. There was a traditional and clear division of labour between men and women. The men caught the fish and managed the boats, and when the catch had to be sailed to Copenhagen, it was the men who took the helm. Women helped with the fishing nets, and most importantly they were responsible for selling the fish to the Copenhageners. Children too, from an early age, performed duties: the boys were taught to fish and the girls to sell the fish. The elderly, who were too old to go fishing or selling, helped maintain and tie new fishing nets, which was a never-ending laborious job.Footnote 25
The women from Skovshoved were not the only ones selling fish in Copenhagen. Female Copenhagen citizens bought fish wholesale from fisher boats and sold them in Gammel Strand. From around 1750 onwards, it was the people from Skovshoved who came to dominate the fish market at Gammel Strand, and the fish selling women became known as ‘Skovserkoner’, which approximately translates to ‘Skovshoved wives’.Footnote 26 The ‘Skovserkoner’ were visibly identifiable in the Copenhagen streets and markets by their local dresses. Before going to Copenhagen, they put on the characteristic white headscarf, and a green dress with a sewn-on ribbon at the bottom of the skirt. Young, unmarried girls wore red ribbons, while blue ones signified the older women. The attire also included a robust apron, which could withstand getting filthy from the many fish that had to be cleaned and handled throughout the day. For many years, a basket on the back to carry fish was also a regular part of the equipment (see Figure 4).Footnote 27
Figure 4. Three Skovshoved women in Gammel Strand, approximately 1920. Museum of Copenhagen.
From interviews with Skovshoved women, as well as from written sources, it is clear that the women were perceived of – and perceived themselves – as tough, hardworking and even crude.Footnote 28 Their aprons were dirty and they undoubtedly smelled of fish. Moreover, several sources report how the Skovshoved women used coarse language as they hailed customers.Footnote 29 Altogether, their appearance as well as manners in the streets of Copenhagen stood in sharp contrast to the citizens of Copenhagen (see, for example, Figure 5).
Figure 5. A Skovshoved woman selling fish at Gammel Strand, time indication unknown. Museum of Copenhagen.
Amager
At Højbro Plads, next to the Skovshoved women in Gammel Strand, the farmers from Amager sold their produce to Copenhageners. The Amager farmers, too, had for centuries benefited from the Copenhagen marketplace trade.Footnote 30 Their history and social situation, however, differed from the Skovshoved fishmongers. The majority of the Amager farmers who sold their goods on the market in Copenhagen were descendants of Dutch immigrants who settled in Denmark in the sixteenth century at the behest of the Danish King Christian II (1481–1559). Christian II knew from his own experience in The Netherlands that the Dutch farmers were skilled producers of vegetables, eggs and butter. Thus, he decided to invite a group of Dutchmen to Denmark. The plan was for them to colonize the entire island of Amager where they could grow vegetables for the royal court.Footnote 31 In the sixteenth century, most Danish farmers were self-supplying and there was little market-oriented vegetable production in Denmark.Footnote 32 The king wished to stimulate the Danish economy, and the Dutch farmers were therefore also part of a plan to realize a more market-oriented agriculture. The Dutch farmers never colonized the entire island of Amager as was the king’s plan, but a group of about 24 Dutch families settled in the village of Store Magleby where they were granted farms and land as well as a church.Footnote 33 The king furthermore gave the Dutch settlers ownership and inheritance rights over the farms and fields as well as a number of other privileges such as almost tax-free status.Footnote 34 These privileges, including exclusive rights to sell vegetables to the court, not only made the Dutch farmers well-off compared to other Danish farmers, the privileges also prompted them to preserve and pass on from generation to generation their ‘Dutch-ness’; that is, their way of life, rituals and certain linguistic practices.
It is unclear exactly when the Dutch Amager farmers started to sell their goods to the public in Copenhagen, but from at least the seventeenth century they regularly travelled on horse-drawn carriages to the town with fresh supplies to the Copenhageners. Their products became known to be of the best quality, and they probably also offered a much more varied assortment of vegetables and flowers than other (Danish) farmers at the time (Figure 6).
Figure 6. Man buying asparagus from Amager women at Højbro Plads, approximately 1910. Museum of Copenhagen.
From old etchings and later photographs, it is apparent that the Amager farmers stood out and looked different from the Copenhagen citizens (and indeed the Skovshoved fishmongers). The Amager farmers had brought with them traditional clothing from The Netherlands (which was used on festive occasions up until the twentieth century). The men’s costume consisted, among other things, of the characteristic baggy trousers and the large ‘floss hat’. The women’s dresses changed according to the occasion. They had dresses for celebrations, weddings, funerals and for working in the market. Although created for work, the Amager women’s ‘market dress’ was decorative (compared to the robust dresses of the Skovshoved women) with the long skirts, pleated aprons and bonnets with a headscarf tied around (Figure 7).
Figure 7. Two Amager women at Højbro Plads, approximately 1930. Museum of Copenhagen.
Despite the fact that the Amager farmers and the Skovshoved fishmongers had in common that their lifestyles were centred around selling their products at the Copenhagen markets, their history and life situations were quite different. In addition to the different lifestyles connected to farming and fishing, their histories, in particular the history of the Dutch farmers, coupled with the differences in how economically well-off they were, became visible markers in their appearances and also in their behaviour and language, as we shall demonstrate in the next section.
The sounds of two squares
The fishermen’s wives shouted that here were the thickest plaice, the fattest eels, the freshest fish, or the cheapest, and then it was about keeping their ears stiff, for there was fierce competition. The housewives then went with chip-braided shopping baskets over their arms for all their shopping. At noon, the market time was over. Everyone packed up, cleaned up and the square inspector (who we had a lot of respect for, we kids) rinsed the square clean.Footnote 35
This memoir by Edel Petersen takes the reader down Gammel Strand through the eyes and ears of a child, probably sometime around 1920, but remembered in 1995. It illustrates some key elements in the sense- and soundscapes of the fish market in the era when the voice was still a significant part of the urban sonic pattern. Possibly amplified by the distance in time, the memoir conveys a sense of the rhythmic, repetitive character of life in the market, changing from a vivid, noisy atmosphere in the morning to a clean, empty and silent square at noon.Footnote 36 The experience of such a routine rhythm accompanied with shouting and yelling is a recurring aspect across several memoirs and narratives about Gammel Strand. In the night or early morning, with the arrival of the fishing boats from Skovshoved, the first, probably more silent, phase, the market day began. The women would arrive ‘as clockwork’.Footnote 37 Tradition had it that they walked the 10 kilometres to Copenhagen to arrive in time for setting up their stalls. At this point, the shouting would begin, lasting until noon, when all traces of the fish market disappeared until the next morning. The stalls, the yelling and the ‘fierce competition’ would thus play out on a prolonged area along the channel, where the women from two rows of stalls would yell their prices and products out in the air between the open space over the water and the hard brick facades of the houses and fishmongers delineating the square.
Yelling was an integral part of experiencing Gammel Strand and of being a Skovshoved woman. An indicative example can be drawn from a National Danish Radio archive recording, where in 1942 journalist Aksel Dahlerup interviewed Oline from Skovshoved who had been selling fish since she was a young woman in the 1890s. Dahlerup says that when one is thinking of the fish market at Gammel Strand, it is the picturesque women, sitting side by side, that comes to mind, along with the language, the shouting. To this Oline answered:
Oline: yes, that [the shouting] is part of it. If you don’t yell and shout while you’re sitting there, you won’t get anything sold. The mouth must go incessantly…I shout MADAM, come here and buy, these are nice things today, the very best.
Dahlerup: Is it at Blomstertorvet [Højbro Plads] that they say ‘Ladies’, ‘come here ladies’?
Oline: Yes, most likely.
Dahlerup: It’s not you [at Gammel Strand]?
Oline: No, we don’t [say lady].Footnote 38
Here, shouting is presented by both the journalist and the Skovshoved woman as a common and general characteristic of Gammel Strand. Oline explains that shouting is necessary in order to get the fish sold. She demonstrates an example, ‘MADAM, come here and buy’, using the noun madam (in Danish ‘frue’), which Dahlerup is contrasting to ‘lady’ (in Danish ‘dame’), a term considered more elegant and of higher status than madam, thus indicating the general opposition between Gammel Strand as more plebeian and Højbro Plads as more bourgeoisie.
The language and linguistic behaviour of the Skovshoved women is mentioned in many different types of sources across centuries. The women are recurrently described as noisy and malodorous with a coarse language filled with swearing and profanity. One of the first instances indicating this image is from 1751 in a dictate published by the Copenhagen police director, Erich Torm. In order to prevent trouble and misbehaviour a set of rules (including a description of severe consequences if not obeyed) was written on a poster that was nailed to a wall on the Gammel Strand:
In order to prevent the disorder that the fisher wives are making with drawing sent servants, they are warned not to subject themselves to forcing anyone or drawing someone’s servants to them to buy, less take their bucket or anything else, nor take money from anyone before they have agreed and received what is demanded, not least to attack those [servants] sent with profane language, for should anyone thereafter do the same, they must face arrest and other punishment.Footnote 39
One can imagine the quarrels and noisy scenes that took place at Gammel Strand which caused the police director to publish these rules. The fisher women appear from this text as a group which would shout in coarse language at servants, tug at their buckets and even grab the money out of the servant’s hand before they agreed on the price.
We also find examples of this type of image of the Skovshoved women as loud and rough with improper language in the weekly newspaper Politivennen (see the quote in the introduction). In an article published in 1830, the voice of the fisher women is even referred to as a compound noun, ‘a Gammel Strand voice’: ‘a rattling Gammel Strand-voice, poured out the coarsest and most rabble-rousing swearwords’.Footnote 40
The fisher women’s loud linguistic style is only one side of how they sounded. Another was their dialect, which was different from Copenhagen speech at the time. The Skovshoved dialect was spoken by fisher families north of Copenhagen by generations born as late as the 1890s. Today, there are no dialect features left in the speech of Skovshoved inhabitants who speak in the same way as most people in Copenhagen. However, the Dialect Archive at the University of Copenhagen contains recordings, collected during the 1980s, of men and women from Skovshoved who were aged between 80 and 90 years at the time of recording. Despite the fact that the Skovshoved dialect in the 1980s was more or less diluted, these recordings demonstrate some of the features that characterized the Skovshoved dialect. Some of the linguistic features that marked the dialect as different were similar to other east Danish dialects, which were spoken by people who lived by the coasts of Øresund (e.g. Amager and Skåne) and the Baltic Sea (Bornholm). These features included the intonation, that is a certain ‘melody’ different from typical Copenhagen intonation, beside a specific pronunciation of some vowels (e.g. raised ɑ ➔ ɛ in e.g. strand) and omitted glottal restriction (‘stød’) on some words. These features are to some extent similar to the Amager dialect and come across in many people’s ears as ‘Bornholmian’, which is a distinct Danish dialect spoken presently on the island of Bornholm. Moreover, besides the east Danish dialect features, the Skovshoved dialect shared features with inland Zealand rural dialects (features that the Amager dialect did not have). These included, for instance, prolongation of some short vowels and glottal stop (‘stød’) on the second element in some words like fiskehandler (fishmonger).Footnote 41 Overall, these dialect features meant that the fisher women’s voices sounded distinct from the other people at Gammel Strand, not least the Copenhagen bourgeoisie whose dialect was characterized by other linguistic features at the time. From dialect research in general, we know that speakers of rural dialects are typically looked down upon as they are perceived as foolish and yokels.Footnote 42 Thus, combined with the loud and rough speech style, it is most likely that the voices of the fishmongers in Gammel Strand were perceived as markedly different in contrast to the Copenhagen townsmen and bourgeoisie – and also in contrast to the sellers from Amager at the adjacent Højbro Plads, although a differently sounding dialect was also a marked feature of the Amager farmers there.
As described above, a large number of the Amager farmers originally came from The Netherlands. However, except for a few place and personal names there are no Dutch features traceable in their dialect. The Amager farmers’ dialect shared features with other Øresund dialects, including the Skovshoved dialect.Footnote 43 The recordings of the Amager dialect at the Dialect Archive demonstrate a remarkably distinct dialect – more distinct than the Skovshoved dialect. This is primarily due to the omission of glottal stop (‘stød’) in some words, combined with a marked intonation and diphthongization in certain words. These features make the speech sound somewhat like Bornholmian, a dialect that to most Danish ears is heard as ‘singing’ compared to Copenhagen standard speech (which is not perceived as ‘singing’ at all). The voices of the Amager women at Højbro Plads stood out as different from the voices of the native Copenhagener and have most certainly been noticed as different in the buyer–seller interactions. However, there is little mention of the Amager women’s speech in the sources, which indicates a much more low-voiced style compared to the fish sellers (see the example from Aftenbladet in the introduction).
Usually, urbanization and linguistic contact result in dialect loss and obsolescence.Footnote 44 Yet, in the case of the Amager and Skovshoved dialects, the contrary seems to have taken place. The Amager and Skovshoved women were in close daily contact with Copenhageners for centuries in the inner-city marketplaces. Still, there is substantial evidence that they spoke non-standard Copenhagen dialects until at least 1900. This was not the case despite urban contact, but exactly because of the women’s daily contact with inner-city Copenhageners. Dialects came to function as a valuable semiotic element in their appearance and performance as authentic Skovshoved and Amager people; that is, their voices became a part of their ‘brands’, blending into the overall sonic identities of Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads. In this sense, the women’s voices came to signify competition to attract customers. However, there may be another important element in this. Statements from the memoir data point to a fierce atmosphere among the Skovshoved women at Gammel Strand that made some potential customers avoid them. It is recalled how uncomfortable it was to walk between the lines of stalls, hearing the women shout or even mock customers that walked by without buying. For example, a woman remembers her mother would buy fish at Adelgade, a street only a few minutes’ walk from Gammel Strand. The mother would not go to the market at Gammel Strand because ‘the fish wives were too tough, even for her, who was certainly not lost behind a wagon’ (the last sentence meaning the ability to fend for oneself).Footnote 45 Compared with other statements from the Skovshoved women themselves it becomes difficult to ignore social class as an important factor constituting the sonic territories of Gammel Strand as well as Højbro Plads. The Skovshoved fishmongers were poor and were most likely perceived as being of lower social status compared to the Copenhagen bourgeoisie. In the memoirs of the Skovshoved women, their close-knit community stands out as particularly important in their narratives about life at the market squares. They do not express competition among each other, but, on the contrary, they help each other with selling. When all fish were sold, they could finish their work and return to Skovshoved in groups.Footnote 46 Thus, the loud fierceness may also be interpreted as a way of constructing and emphasizing the collectivity and solidarity of the Skovshoved women as a group – despite the fact that this style may have frightened some customers off.
The loudness and brute interactional style also broadly contributed to the semiotic demarcation of a space of consumption, which stood in stark contrast to the flower and vegetable selling women on Højbro Plads, whose sounds feature less frequently in the memoirs.Footnote 47 When the Amager women are mentioned in general, it is for the way they, together with their commodities, formed a decorative space, often with idyllic references, as we see in the introductory quote.
Not being visually clearly demarcated, Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads had their liminal area between them. The memoir archive contains an interesting story about women who positioned themselves in a space between the Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads. They sold shrimps and oysters very close to a woman who sold lemons, thus creating a sort of transition zone between the two squares: ‘In the summer there were always women carrying baskets with lids on the steps at Højbro (Plads) or just below. It was the Shrimp Women…On the opposite side stood a small woman selling lemons, (so) when people had bought oysters from fishmonger Frederiksen, they bought lemons from her’.Footnote 48 It seems to be the case that the small stretch between Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads had other practices of selling and marketing products. We can get an impression of this when we know that, in the late 1950s, there were 132 stalls to sell from at Gammel Strand. The fish women had the right to 67 of them, while the others were used by diverse traders, many of them related, like the shrimp wives.Footnote 49 These were feeding into or from the market activities, and we can see them as liminal or ‘edge’ practices.
Conclusion – Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads as sonic territories
Walking around the area today, it is difficult to imagine the life that characterized Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads when market trade dominated the squares. The stalls, the shouts and the women in their long skirts, aprons and headscarves are gone. Today, the site is characterized by the cobbled roundabout and the new metro station, which was opened in 2019. The routines and rhythms that characterized the daily life here for around 150 years, since the establishment of Højbro Plads at the end of the eighteenth century, was a consequence of, on the one hand, the Copenhagen street and market trade, which had emerged much earlier, and, on the other hand, the fishers’ and farmers’ particular lifestyles that centred around the sale of fish and vegetables on these two squares.
There are only a few steps to walk between Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads. One can easily see and hear from one end to the other. Despite the proximity, the two places appeared as distinct territories with an invisible border between them indicated by various signs that made it easy for customers to navigate across the area. We have argued that the two squares constituted sonic territories through their reciprocal relations, but also through relations to other locations. Gammel Strand’s role as a ‘rough’ sonic space was partly defined in relation to Højbro Plads and the broader neighbourhood of ‘civilized’ sounds, but also places further away had an impact. The fish and flower selling women were not locals. Their language and clothing were dependent on their places of origin at Skovshoved and Amager. They brought their dialects and visual appearance to the squares in a rhythm so stable that, in a sense, the territory they created outlasted their own linguistic and cultural ‘homeland’. Industrialization and gentrification changed the conditions and the traditional ways of life in Skovshoved and Amager. The men in particular gradually got other types of jobs as fishing and agriculture slowly became less affordable. Nevertheless, (some of) the women continued to go to the city centre in their traditional attire to sell fish and vegetables. For a period of time, they became tourist attractions which both Danish and foreign tourists came to see and photograph (Figure 8). Postcards and porcelain figurines portraying the women were produced and sold as souvenirs, and in 1940, an iconic statue of a Skovshoved woman was erected by the quay on Gammel Strand, signalling a figure that was already historic and about to disappear. A woman, Doris Marx, continued to sell fish on Gammel Strand until the metro construction started in 2008. However, she was not from Skovshoved and got her fish from wholesalers from other places. She was a tourist attraction in traditional clothes echoing the past.
Figure 8. Fisher wife being photographed by a tourist, 1939. Museum of Copenhagen.
Arguably, the continuation of trade with fish and flowers in Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads after trade in general had moved to indoor shops, and after the Skovshoved fishers’ and Amager farmers’ lifestyles had fundamentally changed, is to be found in the emergence of Højbro Plads and Gammel Strand as sonic territories during the nineteenth century. The combination of the materiality of the area, the lifestyles and practices of the interactants at the squares together with their perceptual interpretation of each other, their voices and appearances established the place as sonic territories. We get an impression of the conditions by which sound functioned in the pre-automobile city in the first half of the twentieth century, and how these small marketplaces became resilient to change as the cultural and social difference embedded in the sounds and language of the trading women turned into an attraction for Copenhageners and tourists. This development, that we have shown to be the product of internal as well as external difference in social semiosis, can more broadly inform urban historians about how cities transform from traditional market cultures to ‘experience economies’, and what the role of urban sensory and linguistic history can play in this.
Moreover, to the linguistic part of the study, these processes linked to the sonic territories help to explain why the Skovshoved and Amager dialects were spoken long after one would usually expect them to have disappeared due to geographical proximity and the linguistic contact with Copenhageners. The women’s voices played a part in the competitive environment of the marketplace in which their linguistic behaviour became performative tokens of their brands. The women’s yelling, hailing and dialects formed part of the sound semiotics, place-making and territorial place-claiming. In particular regarding the Skovshoved women, their rough and tough language became a marker of authenticity with performative effects creating alertness and disturbance. Thus, in sum, the marketplace soundscapes functioned as means of constructing customer-oriented semiotic spaces while negotiating territories and branding and selling products. The two sites, by virtue of their physical placement in conjunction with each other, reinforced the contrasts between them, hence co-constructing them as sonic territories.
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