Denmark as depicted in new maps

Summary

This article reviews the first volume of Atlas over Danmark and a related economic-geographical map, presenting them as major advances in the geographical investigation and cartographic representation of Denmark. Produced by the Royal Danish Geographical Society with state, foundation, and institutional support, the first volume, authored by Axel Schou, focuses on Danish landforms. Its principal products are a hypsometric map and a geomorphological map compiled from topographic sheets, geological materials, and field-based morphological research. These are supplemented by palaeogeographical maps, seventy genetic block diagrams, twenty-six large-scale topographic extracts, contour analyses, and photographs of representative landscapes. Together, they explain the distribution and development of Denmark’s glacial, meltwater, valley, coastal, dune, bedrock, and basalt landscapes. The review particularly values the atlas’s detailed differentiation of soils and coastal forms and its integration of scientific documentation with highly effective visual and pedagogical materials. It nevertheless notes conceptual and cartographic limitations, including an overly narrow use of the term “landscape” and the omission of explicit categories such as terminal moraines and drumlin fields. The economic-geographical map classifies agricultural land according to productivity, crops, and livestock while representing transport, mining, industry, settlements, and fisheries through an extensive symbol system. Its weaknesses are that industrial symbols do not reveal absolute employment and large urban symbols obscure nearby land-use patterns. Overall, the atlas is judged comparable to the leading national atlases of Europe. Its morphogenetic approach, rich empirical foundation, and coordination of atlas sheets, wall maps, explanatory text, and photography give it exceptional research, educational, and public-instruction value while establishing a foundation for later volumes on settlement, population, economy, and transport.