Jelling Out Loud

It doesn’t get the big headlines or headliners as such major Danish events as Roskilde or Skanderborg but the 32,000 per day who attended this year’s Jelling Festival made it Denmark’s third-biggest outdoor.

“We’ve been hidden here for years,” explained Lars Charlie Mortensen, who manages the team of volunteers that produces the annual gathering near the eastern coast of Jutland, about 200 kilometres west of Copenhagen. The town of Jelling has less than 3,500 inhabitants but it’s close to the Østjyske Highway and the Central Jutland Motorway.

The festival has grown steadily throughout its 23-year history and six years ago organisers bought the site from a local farmer.
This year’s attendance wasn’t a record, as twice in recent years it’s pulled 34,000, but Mortensen says the organisers are more interested in having a good festival than a big one.

This year’s four-day tickets went on sale Dec. 1 and were discounted for that day, shifting 11,000 of them. The remainder of the 25,000 four-day tickets were gone by May 1; 7,000 people per day bought one-day tickets.

The acts at this year’s Jelling Festival May 26-29 included Jean Micheal Jarre, DAD, Thin Lizzy, Alphabeat, Turbo Weekend, Rasmus and Black Sun.