The Flag Denmark Confiscated, and the One Iceland Got Instead
Julio Song · · 10 min read
On 12 June 1913, a young man named Einar Pétursson took a small boat out into Reykjavík harbour with a blue flag on it. The flag carried a white cross. The captain of the Danish coast guard ship Islands Falk saw it, arrested him and confiscated the flag.
Soon Reykjavík was full of blue-and-white flags.
Five and a half years later, the same ship sat in the same harbour and fired a 21-gun salute to an Icelandic flag. It wasn't the flag Einar Pétursson had flown. That one lost. How it lost, and why the flag that replaced it looks the way it does, is a story about a poet, a museum keeper, a stubborn king and a country that kept asking until the answer changed.
Before the cross, a falcon and a dried fish
Under Danish rule, Iceland's coat of arms was a crowned stockfish. A dried cod. Icelanders took it badly, and FOTW notes they saw it as a humiliating Danish invention.
The painter Sigurður Guðmundsson pushed a replacement: a white falcon with spread wings on a blue field. Students loved it. It flew widely at the 1874 celebration of a thousand years of settlement, and in 1903, the year Iceland won home rule, the falcon replaced the stockfish in the arms.
Parliament once tried to put the falcon on a flag. An 1885 bill proposed a red cross with white borders, a white falcon in each of three blue quarters, and a Danish-style red canton in the fourth. The bill never got a full debate, but it put blue, white and red on the table for the first time.
Then a poet simplified everything. On 13 March 1897, Einar Benediktsson wrote in his journal Dagskrá that Iceland's colours were blue and white, and that the cross was the most common and convenient flag emblem. His proposal was a white cross on blue, and he argued that the falcon flag broke with international tradition. The design got a name, Hvítbláinn, "the white-blue". Nationalists flew it unofficially from 1897 until 1915, according to Wikipedia's history of the Shetland flag, which we'll come back to.
A museum keeper adds fire
Nine years after the poet, a second design appeared. On 27 September 1906, Matthías Þórðarson, later Keeper of National Antiquities, showed the Reykjavík Students' Association a white cross on blue with a red cross inside the white. Blue for the mountains. White for the ice. Red for fire. That's the meaning the government still gives for the colours.
Here's an odd footnote. A Swedish maritime museum holds a sketch from Calicut in India, drawn for a book by Captain Mathias Gustaf Holmers of the East India Company between 1740 and 1750. Next to a Danish flag sits a blue flag with a red-in-white cross. Same layout, more than 150 years early. As far as the government history knows, Þórðarson wasn't familiar with it, and nobody spotted the match until Pétur Sigurðsson, director of the Icelandic Coast Guard, noticed it in 1957.
In 1906, though, the public didn't want Þórðarson's tricolour cross. They wanted the poet's white-blue. And then Denmark gave them a reason to want it more.
What happened in the harbour
The details of 12 June 1913 depend on who tells it. FOTW says Einar Pétursson rowed around the harbour flying the flag. The Icelandic government says the boat was part of a rowing competition. Both agree on the outcome. A Danish naval vessel took the flag off an Icelandic boat in Iceland's own capital.
The response was fast. According to FOTW, blue-and-white flags went up across Reykjavík. When the Danish captain came ashore to pursue the case, he had to walk back to his ship between rows of them. A public meeting passed a resolution protesting what he'd done and demanding an official flag for Iceland.
Think about what the captain was trying to prevent. Until 1915, the Danish flag was required in Icelandic waters. A blue-and-white flag on a boat looked like a claim to separate status, which is exactly what it was. By seizing it, he turned a student symbol into a national grievance. The government history puts it plainly: the incident turned the flag question into a heated political issue.
"Too much like Greece"
Prime Minister Hannes Hafstein moved within months. At a meeting of the Danish State Council on 22 November 1913, he asked King Christian X for a special Icelandic flag by royal decree, skipping legislation. The king agreed. His decree said that "for Iceland, a special flag shall be sanctioned by law," with the design to follow once the Prime Minister had found out what the people of Iceland wanted.
There was a catch, and the king said it out loud. He assumed the new flag would not look noticeably like any other country's. He was alluding to a complaint from the flag debate: the white-blue cross looked too much like the flag of Greece.
Hafstein set up a flag committee on 30 December 1913. It included the surgeon general Guðmundur Björnson as chairman, the painter Þórarinn B. Þorláksson, and Matthías Þórðarson himself. At the committee's request, the Prime Minister asked the king directly whether he would approve the blue-and-white flag. He said no, because it resembled the Greek flag too closely.
A study by the principal of the Maritime College raised a second worry. In poor visibility, a white cross on blue looked a lot like Sweden's yellow cross on blue. So the committee dropped the white-blue and sent two alternatives: Þórðarson's red-in-white cross on sky blue, or a white flag with a sky-blue cross.
Was the Greek problem real? The Icelandic government doesn't think so. Its own history argues that the spirit of independence behind the white-blue flag "undoubtedly played more part in the Danish king's rejection of it than its resemblance to the Greek flag," and adds a dry detail: Greece itself expressed no reservations.
The white-blue didn't vanish, by the way. In 1969, Roy Grønneberg and Bill Adams designed a flag for Shetland, marking 500 years since the islands passed from Norway to Scotland. It's a white cross on blue, practically identical to Hvítbláinn. Scotland's Lord Lyon granted it officially on 1 February 2005. A near twin of Iceland's rejected flag now flies over somebody else's islands.
The king says no, then yes
You'd expect the committee's report to settle things. It didn't. Iceland's parliament argued over the options through the summer of 1914, including one version with a large white star in the canton, which lost a vote 20 to 18.
By then Hafstein was out and Sigurður Eggerz was Prime Minister. On 30 November 1914, Eggerz asked the king to ratify the tricolour cross. Christian X refused, even though he'd earlier said he'd accept either committee design. The refusal had little to do with colours. The king and Iceland's parliament were fighting over a new constitution and over whether Icelandic business belonged in the Danish State Council. The king rejected the constitutional bill, then the flag. Eggerz resigned on the spot.
His successor, Einar Arnórsson, got the decree. On 19 June 1915, the king approved the exact design he'd refused seven months earlier. The text is precise:
- Sky blue with a white cross and a bright red cross inside it
- The white cross 2/9 of the flag's width, the red cross 1/9
- A width-to-length ratio of 18:25
That's from the 1915 decree as quoted by the government. The geometry hasn't changed since.
What the decree gave was limited. The flag flew on land and in Icelandic waters only. On Government House in Reykjavík, the 1913 decree required a Danish swallowtail flag to fly "in no less worthy or smaller a place" than the Icelandic one. So in the summer of 1915, two flagpoles went up behind the building, one for each. Iceland had a flag. It didn't have sovereignty.
A salute from Islands Falk
The next fight was over the sea. In 1917, Iceland's parliament unanimously asked for a full maritime flag. On 22 November 1917, exactly four years after Hafstein's meeting, the king rejected it after the Danish prime minister, C. Th. Zahle, had already turned it down flat.
A year later the whole relationship changed. The Act of Union between Iceland and Denmark was ratified on 30 November 1918. Iceland became a sovereign kingdom sharing a king with Denmark. A provisional law that same day said that from 1 December, no Icelandic ship was allowed to fly any national flag but Iceland's.
At noon on Sunday, 1 December 1918, a swallowtail state flag went up over Government House on a new pole above the door. The two old poles stood bare. Sigurður Eggerz, now Finance Minister and acting Prime Minister, told the crowd that "the flag is the symbol of our sovereignty." And out in the harbour, the Danish coast guard vessel Islands Falk fired a 21-gun salute. Its captain, Victor Lorenz Lorck, gave a speech.
Same ship. Same harbour. Different flag, and a whole new attitude to it.
1944: the flag gets a law
The flag still had no statute of its own. It lived in royal decrees. In 1944 parliament noticed something embarrassing: Icelandic law punished people for insulting foreign flags but set no penalty for defaming Iceland's.
That spring, Icelanders voted on ending the union with Denmark. Between 20 and 23 May 1944, 99.47 percent of valid votes backed abolition, 71,122 to 377. Parliament passed a flag bill on 15 June after four days of hearings. On 17 June 1944, at Þingvellir, Iceland became a republic, and the new president, Sveinn Björnsson, signed the Flag Act as his first piece of legislation.
The Act on the National Flag, No. 34/1944, describes the flag as sky blue with a snow-white cross and a fiery-red cross inside it. The old word "ultramarine" was gone, and the blue got darker once it was. Article 12 says no one is allowed to dishonour the flag "in word or in deed," and bars using it as a company or personal emblem. Break that rule and you face a fine or up to a year in prison.
Someone in that 1944 debate suggested switching to the white-blue one last time. The member who raised it, Jörundur Brynjólfsson, declined to table an amendment. The red cross stayed.
Why the seized flag still matters
If you look at Iceland's flag today, you see Matthías Þórðarson's 1906 design, fixed by a 1915 decree, made sovereign in 1918 and protected by law in 1944. Nothing in it shows the rowboat.
The rowboat is why it exists, though. The 1913 seizure took a flag that students waved and made it a cause. Within five months a Prime Minister was raising it with the king. And it handed Christian X a choice he never wanted: approve the flag the crowd loved, or approve a different one. He picked the second, and Iceland flew it anyway.
The white-blue's twin flies in Shetland. The red cross went up the pole at Government House. And the Danish ship that seized the first flag fired a salute to the second.
Julio Song
Writer
Julio is a staff writer at FlagDB. He studied Mathematics at the University of Madrid and has a passion for vexillology.
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