Hygge,
a Danish quality of “coziness and comfortable conviviality,” is making
inroads with an international audience and is the subject of a crop of
new books.Photograph by Valentyn Volkov / Alamy
The
Oxford Dictionaries’ 2016 “word of the year” shortlist was heavy on
neologisms that one wishes didn’t have to exist: “alt-right,”
“Brexiteer,” and this year’s winning term, “post-truth.” Among the finalists, though, there was one bit of solace: “hygge,”
a Danish term defined as “a quality of cosiness and comfortable
conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being.”
Pronounced “hoo-guh,” the word is said to have no direct translation in
English, though “cozy” comes close. It derives from a sixteenth-century
Norwegian term, hugga, meaning “to comfort” or “to console,”
which is related to the English word “hug.” Associated with relaxation,
indulgence, and gratitude, hygge has long been considered a part of the Danish national character. In a 1957 “Letter from Copenhagen” in The New Yorker, the writer Robert Shaplen reported that hygge was “ubiquitous” in the city: “The sidewalks are filled with smiling, hyggelige
people, who keep lifting their hats to each other and who look at a
stranger with an expression that indicates they wish they knew him well
enough to lift their hats to him, too.”
In the
past year, this concept of Scandinavian coziness has made inroads with
an international audience. At least six books about hygge were published in the United States this year, with more to come in 2017. (At the Guardian, Charlotte Higgins has done an investigation into the U.K.’s hygge
publishing craze.) Helen Russell, a British journalist who wrote “The
Year of Living Danishly,” defines the term as “taking pleasure in the
presence of gentle, soothing things,” like a freshly brewed cup of
coffee and cashmere socks. Signe Johansen, in a cookbook and wellness
guide, “How to Hygge: The Nordic Secrets to a Happy Life,” links hygge
to food and drink like cardamom buns, muesli “ne plus ultra,” and
triple cherry gløgg, a Scandinavian mulled wine with cardamom pods and
star anise; she calls it “healthy hedonism.” Louisa Thomsen Brits, the
author of “The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Contentment, Comfort,
and Connection,” calls it “a practical way of creating sanctuary in the
middle of very real life” and “a cure for SAD”—seasonal affective
disorder—“in book form.”
Winter is the most hygge
time of year. It is candles, nubby woolens, shearling slippers, woven
textiles, pastries, blond wood, sheepskin rugs, lattes with milk-foam
hearts, and a warm fireplace. Hygge can be used as a noun, adjective, verb, or compound noun, like hyggebukser, otherwise known as that shlubby pair of pants you would never wear in public but secretly treasure. Hygge
can be found in a bakery and in the dry heat of a sauna in winter,
surrounded by your naked neighbors. It’s wholesome and nourishing, like
porridge; Danish doctors recommend “tea and hygge” as a cure for the common cold. It’s possible to hygge alone, wrapped in a flannel blanket with a cup of tea, but the true expression of hygge
is joining with loved ones in a relaxed and intimate atmosphere. In
“The Little Book of Hygge,” the best-selling of the current crop of
books, Meik Wiking, the C.E.O. of a Copenhagen think tank called the
Happiness Research Institute, shares a story about a Christmas Day spent
with friends in a woodsy cabin. After a hike in the snow, the friends
sat around the fireplace wearing sweaters and woolen socks, listening to
the crackle of the fire, and enjoying mulled wine. One of his friends
asked, “Could this be any more hygge?” Everyone nodded when one woman replied, “Yes, if a storm were raging outside.”
Like many of the best things from Scandinavia, hygge
might seem, to some Americans, to come with a whiff of smugness. The
term is often mentioned in the same paragraph that reminds us that Danes
(or, depending on the year, Norwegians and Swedes) are the happiest people in the world. Perhaps Scandinavians are better able to appreciate the small, hygge
things in life because they already have all the big ones nailed down:
free university education, social security, universal health care,
efficient infrastructure, paid family leave, and at least a month of
vacation a year. With those necessities secured, according to Wiking,
Danes are free to become “aware of the decoupling between wealth and
wellbeing.” “After our basic needs are met, more money doesn’t lead to
more happiness,” he told Elle UK. “Instead, Danes are good at focusing on what brings them a better quality of life.”
This vision of restrained pleasure harmonizes with a related Swedish concept, lagom, which refers to a kind of moderation. Pronounced with a hard “G,” the term is said to come from the Viking phrase laget om,
or “around the team,” meaning that you should take only a sip of the
mead that’s being passed around so that no one is left without. Lagom
means “adequate,” “just right,” or “in balance” and it is said to have
burrowed deep into the Swedish national psyche, if not that of all
Scandinavians. It encourages modesty and teamwork and discourages
extremes. It is related to fairness, the need for consensus, and
equality. Lagom is how a Swede might respond when someone asks how much milk you want in your tea or if things are going well. Hygge shares lagom’s
reverence for measured experience: indulging in a piece of cake, but
not outright gluttony; a dinner with friends at home, but nothing fancy.
Some Scandinavians argue that lagom,
instead of promoting virtues like humility and moderation, encourages
the kind of bland conformity that Nordic countries are often accused of.
In the 1933 novel “A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks,” the Danish-Norwegian
author Aksel Sandemose wrote about the forced group mentality in a
small fictional town called Jante. He lists ten soul-deadening rules by
which the townspeople live, including “you are not to think you are
special,” “you are not to think you are good at anything,” and “you are
not to convince yourself that you are better than we are.” In an article
in T about his youthful dreams of fame, Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote about his own experience of what is known in Scandinavia as “the Law of Jante.”
As an adolescent in Norway, he wrote, “it didn’t take much more than a
slightly outlandish hat or a pair of unusual trousers before people told
you off, laughed at you or, in the worst case, ignored you. ‘He thinks
he’s special’ was the worst thing anyone could say about you.” Jante presents the more insidious side of lagom.
Rather than celebrating modesty, it perceives individuality as a threat
to the group. Robert Shaplen’s “Letter from Copenhagen” quotes one Dane
saying, “A foreigner shouldn’t be too different from us if he wants to
be liked. . . . We want everybody to be the way we are, because it gives
us confidence in ourselves.”
Louisa Thomsen Brits, a British-Danish writer, casts hygge
as a state of mindfulness: how to make essential and mundane tasks
dignified, joyful, and beautiful, how to live a life connected with
loved ones. Her “Book of Hygge” focusses on the concept’s philosophical
and spiritual underpinnings rather than its quirky objects. She explains
that many households in Denmark still have a copy of a folk songbook
that they sing from to “affirm the ideas of simplicity, cheerfulness,
reciprocity, community, and belonging.” Danes, she says, prefer to
gather in small groups “to emphasize the unity of their inner circles.”
She admits that this can make them appear “intimidating and
impenetrable.” These tendencies lend hygge its contradictions:
what many see as humble, decent, and community-oriented may appear to
others as insular and a rejection of what’s different and unfamiliar.
Scandinavia has a reputation for tolerance, but all three countries are
tense over immigration these days and have seen surging support for
far-right groups. Bo Lidegaard, a Danish historian, told the Times
in September that many Danes feel strongly that “we are a multiethnic
society . . . but we are not and should never become a multicultural
society.” Hygge encourages its practitioners to shelter, cluster, and enclose.
The most striking thing about hygge,
though, might be how its proponents tend to take prosperity for
granted. All the encouragements toward superior handicrafts and
Scandinavian design, the accounts of daily fireside gatherings and
freshly baked pastries assume a certain level of material wealth and an
abundance of leisure time. As a life philosophy, hygge is
unabashedly bourgeois, and American readers of a certain stripe will be
familiar with its hallmark images—still-lifes of hands cradling a mug,
candles lit at dusk on a picnic table, bikes with woven baskets and
child safety seats leaning against a colorful brick wall. Artisanal this
and homemade that, fetishizing what’s rustic as authentic, what’s
simple as sophisticated: urban American sophisticates already know this
aesthetic; we’ve aspired to it for a long time.
What
many Americans do not aspire to is Scandinavia’s high taxes or
socialist ideas. When transferred to the United States, the kind of
understated luxury that Danes consider a shared national trait starts to
seem like little more than a symbol of economic status—the very thing
that Scandinavian countries have sought to jettison. Still, there are
some lessons from hygge that Americans might heed. There’s the
Nordic insistence on knowing how to do practical things and doing them
well, on taking care of your body with time outdoors every day. The
hard-earned lesson of frigid Scandinavian winters is that there’s no
such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothes—that all you really
need to get through difficult times is shelter and sustenance, kith and
kin.
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