Kattegat

The Baltic Sea

The Kattegat (Danish), or Kattegatt (Swedish), is a bay of the North Sea and a continuation of the Skagerrak, bounded by Denmark and Sweden. The Baltic Sea drains into the Kattegat through the Oresund and the Danish Straits.

Geography

Waterways that drain into the Kattegat are the rivers of Göta älv at Gothenburg, together with Lagan, Nissan, Ätran and Viskan from the province of Halland on the Swedish side, and the river of Gudenå from Jutland, in Denmark.

The main islands of the Kattegat are Samsø, Læsø and Anholt, where the latter two, due to their dry summer climate, are referred to as the Danish desert belt.

Name

The name Kattegat derives from the Dutch and Middle Saxon words Kat (cat) and Gat (hole). It refers to the medieval navigation, where captains spoke of this area to be as narrow as a cat's hole, since there are several flats in the sea, which made navigation difficult.

The second segment of the name is of greater antiquity, appearing, for example, as Codanus in Pliny's Natural History (4.13.96). It is described as a sinus (bay) between Scandinavia and Jutland. Julius Pokorny (Page 423) repeats the hole derivation, listing the Proto-Indo-European root, *ghedh-, "to defecate, hole".

In keeping with sailors' well-known use of the language of bodily functions, one might paraphrase the concept by stating that, to seafaring men who must use it, the Kattegat has always been the anus of the Baltic. "Cat's hole" does not mean a cat's den. More formal but less accurate (in this respect) reference works sometimes substitute other parts of the cat's anatomy, leading to some confusion.

See also: Scandinavia

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