Denmark

Around 965 AD, Harald Bluetooth, king of Denmark, raised a massive runic stone at Jelling to honor his parents and announce his own achievements. The inscription reads, in Old Danish runes, that he won for himself all of Denmark and Norway. The word he used was tanmarkaR, the earliest surviving written form of the country's name.

The Dan- in Denmark refers to the Danes, a Germanic people whom the Gothic historian Jordanes named Dani around 551 AD. Where the name came from before that is uncertain. One strong argument connects it to Proto-Germanic denu-, meaning low ground or valley, describing the flat terrain of Jutland. Another traces it to a legendary ancestor named Dan, as Saxo Grammaticus preferred in his 12th-century chronicle.

The -mark element is from Proto-Germanic marko, meaning borderland or march. The same word appears in Mark Brandenburg and in the English march meaning a border region. The Frankish empire used similar march-names for all its frontier zones, from the Spanish March to the Ostmark in what became Austria. Denmark was, in this naming, the boundary land of the Danes, where their settled world ended.

English inherited Denmark from Old Norse through medieval trade and seafaring contact. The poet John Gower used Denmarke in the late 14th century, and Shakespeare set Hamlet in this northern kingdom three centuries before anyone verified whether Elsinore matched Kronborg fortress. The name crossed into English without translation, as navigational names tend to do.