All people crave recognition, and Scandinavians have a particularly liking for recog-nition in the form of a medal or a title. In the case of Orders of Knights you get both and that is perhaps why the Danes established their Order of the Elephant already in 1462. The other Nordic countries soon followed suit. Iceland came last with its Order of the Falcon in 1921.

The establishment of Orders of Knights goes back many centuries. Many spiritual orders were set up in the Holy Land during the Crusades to promote and defend Christianity and protect the pilgrims. Despite their religious nature, these orders eventually became more civilian and were often led by kings. Napoleon Bonaparte shocked the European royal houses when he founded the French Legion of Honour in 1802, to bestow knighthood on common citizens who had given exceptional services to the nation.

It has been stated that the four symbols of an independent nation are its flag, its coat of arms, its national anthem and its decorations. Today most countries have some kind of order of recognition. In Europe it is only Switzerland and Ireland that no longer hand out decorations.

In the Nordic countries it is the head of the state who bestows the order on deserving persons, such as visiting heads of state. In most of the countries decorations are also granted to deserving citizens that often receive them automatically with a promotion.

A medal is often beautiful as a piece of jewelry with real gold and precious stones. The medal itself is generally only a loan and should be returned after the bearer has deceased, but many medals (and the miniatures carried at informal occasions) often appear at auctions.

A person may also be deprived the right to wear an order if he or she has been found guilty of an offence. Sweden fought hard to get back its medals from Rumanian dictator Ceaceasceau during his lifetime.

In Finland the medal remains the property of the person who has received it as he or she has to pay for the actual material cost.

The decorations are often criticized for being undemocratic and therefore undeserving of a modern country. The orders have an aura of being secret and in some cases this is true with the members being bound by an oath of silence. There are secret ceremonies, passwords, and symbols and you can never question the reason for a particular selection.

Most orders divide their members in various ranks such as Knights of the Grand Cross, Commanders or just Knights, but seldom according to merit. The level of decoration you receive depends on your social standing. All the same recipients are uniformly happy to receive an order and very seldom are they declined. For a country it is a very inexpensive way to award happiness.

DENMARK

Denmark has two exclusive orders with a maximum number of knights of 30 respec-tively 50, excluding the sovereign and his or her sons.

The Order of the Elephant was founded together with the Society of the Mother of God when King Christian I built a burial chapel at Odense Cathedral. The upper story of the chapel was called the Knight’s Hall and here the members met until the Order started lapsing in pace with Catholicism just before the Reformation in 1536. The originally Catholic order was back in business at the coronation of Frederik II in 1559 when the Order of the Elephant was once again awarded. With time the Order has become increasingly exclusive, now only being awarded to heads of state and members of royalty with such notable exceptions as the nuclear physicist Niels Bohr in 1947. In 1958 Frederik IX ruled that women should have an equal right to the award. The coat of arms of the knighted are hung in the Knight’s Chapel of Fredriksborg Palace Chapel. On Queen Margrethe’s birthday and on the Orders Day January 1st, the knight must rent a special gold chain with alternating castles and elephants to hold the insignia as the chain does not come with the decoration. On other occasions such as royal weddings, knights wear a silver star with no elephant on a blue moiré sash over the left shoulder.

Knights of the Order of Dannebrog are often called "white knights" to distinguish them from the "blue knights" of the Order of the Elephant. They wear a white sash instead of the blue and their cross insignia varies according to which class of eight they have been awarded. The most beautiful is the decoration of the Commander First Class that is only awarded to sovereigns. The Order of Dannebrog was instituted in 1671 but it has been postulated that it must of course originally have been founded by Valdemar II when the Danish national flag descended from heaven in 1219.