The Goddess and her fountain
“In Norse mythology, Gefjon or Gefjun (with the alternate spelling Gefion) is a goddess associated with ploughing, theDanish island of Zealand, the legendary Swedish king Gylfi, the legendary Danish king Skjöldr, foreknowledge, and virginity.”
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“The fountain depicts the mythical story of the creation of the island of Zealand on which Copenhagen is located. The legend appears inRagnarsdrápa, a 9th-century Skaldic poem recorded in the 13th century Prose Edda, and in Ynglinga saga as recorded in Snorri Sturluson's 13th century Heimskringla.
According to Ynglinga saga, the Swedish king Gylfi promised Gefjun the territory she could plow in a night. She turned her four sons into oxen, and the territory they plowed out of the earth was then thrown into the Danish sea between Scania and the island of Fyn. The hole became a lake called Lögrinn and Leginum (locative).
The fountain was donated to the city of Copenhagen by the Carlsberg Foundation on the occasion of the brewery’s 50-year anniversary. It was designed by Danish artist Anders Bundgaard, who sculpted the naturalistic figures 1897-99. The basins and decorations were completed in 1908. The fountain was first activated on July 14, 1908. It is the largest monument in Copenhagen and used as a wishing well.
The Gefion Family of Asteroids
An asteroid family is a population of asteroids that share similar proper orbital elements, such as semimajor axis, eccentricity, and orbital inclination. The members of the families are thought to be fragments of past asteroid collisions. An asteroid family is a more specific term than asteroid group whose members, while sharing some broad orbital characteristics, may be otherwise unrelated to each other. The families are thought to form as a result of collisions between asteroids. In many or most cases the parent body was shattered.
The Gefion or Gefionian family of asteroids is a grouping of S-type asteroids in the intermediate asteroid belt. Until recently, this family was known as the Ceres (Cererean) family or the Minerva (Minervian) family after 1 Ceres (the largest asteroid) or 93 Minerva. However, spectroscopic analyses showed that these largest members were in fact interlopers in their own family,[3] having a different spectral class from the bulk of the members. Other known interlopers are 255 Oppavia, 374 Burgundia, 2507 Bobone, and 2559 Svoboda.[4] This left the fairly minor asteroid 1272 Gefion as the lowest-numbered member.
1272 Gefion was discovered on October 10, 1931 by Reinmuth, K. at Heidelberg. Karl Wilhelm Reinmuth (April 4, 1892 in Heidelberg – May 6, 1979) was a German astronomer.
He discovered a total of 395 asteroids beginning with 796 Sarita in 1914, working at the Landessternwarte Heidelberg-Königstuhl astronomical observatory on the Königstuhl hill above Heidelberg, Germany from 1912 to 1957.
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