Atten Guleroeder: A Song History
The Danish title “Atten gulerødder” means “eighteen carrots.”[1][2] The tune is a sønderhoning, the couple dance of Sønderho, a village on the Danish island of Fanø.[3][4] It is printed in 358 Danske Folkedansemelodier, where it is no. 36 and carries only the plain heading “Sønderhoning I.”[4] None of the sources consulted here explains where the carrot title came from.[3][4] A 1983 work by John Bæk, as cited on Laine Ruus’s folk dance pages, counts about 90 sønderhoning tunes, most of them in 2/4 time.[3]
Vincent van Gogh, Peasant Woman Kneeling and Pulling Carrots, black chalk and brush and wash, 1885. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown in fun for the tune’s title; it has no connection to the music.
According to Trap Danmark, Fanø’s fiddle and dance tradition has continued without a break for more than three hundred years, something few parts of Denmark can match.[5] The island’s two traditional dances, the sønderhoning and the fannik, take their names from the people of Sønderho and Nordby.[5] The same article likens them to a Swedish polka, while noting that the fiddling behind them calls for an unusual technique and that the tunes are hard to play.[5] The music has been passed from one generation to the next without written notation.[5] Every July, Nordby and Sønderho mark these traditions with Fannikkerdagene and Sønderhodag, and the article, published in 2020, describes a small group of island children, the Fanø Fiddlers, who play the old Fanø music.[5] “Atten gulerødder” is one of the sønderhoning tunes in the online tune collection of the Danish players’ group Folkets Hus Spillefolk.[4]
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