Travel Sketches 3
Branches: a Danish Homecoming
All the same a human race had lived on this land for a thousand years, had been formed by its soil and weathers, and had marked it with its thoughts, so that now no one could tell where the existence of the once ceased and that of the other began.
Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), “Sorrow-Acre,” Winter’s Tales
Day 1
In early January 2016 I woke up well before dawn and while it was still dark took a train from Canterbury East to London Gatwick Airport, where I would board a short-haul flight across the North Sea to Denmark, the homeland of my maternal ancestors. The combined artificial fragrances of soaps, shampoos and conditioners on my fellow passengers’ freshly showered bodies overwhelmed me with a chemical sweetness that, strangely enough, still lingers in my memory. I boarded the plane with the unique, unreproducible excitement of a first voyage to a new country.
After finishing a book of William Carlos Williams’ poems on the short and somewhat bumpy flight I looked down as we descended and took in fjords and bays cutting into dark forested coastlines and lakes shining like pools of mercury in the glare. Another train took me from the airport to Copenhagen Central Station (København H), a short walk from the two-star hotel where I would be spending the next four nights and sharing a bathroom with other guests.
I put down my luggage, opened the hotel room window and stuck out my ungloved hand to feel the falling snow, which settled on the pavement not as a thick white blanket but as almost foamy patches that reminded me of the flocking on old-fashioned Christmas trees. As a Southern Californian, snowfall does not signify the drudgery of shoveling driveways or installing tire chains. Instead, snow was and remains for me an almost magical thing, glimpsed only on trips to the mountains or to Europe. It evokes these experiences and, above all, Christmas, conjuring images of Dickensian London on Christmas cards or of Jimmy Stewart running down a snowy street with the energy of a life renewed, yelling “merry Christmas, you old lamppost!” (I must admit that after a few days of Danish winter I sought out the local botanical gardens’ palm, orchid and desert rooms the way a lizard finds a warm rock to sun itself on.)
That afternoon I walked past the gates of Tivoli Gardens, which was closed for the winter. I looked above its enclosing wall to see its towers and the spires of its roller coasters. Walt Disney himself had visited this historic theme park and had brought more than a little inspiration back to California. (Tivoli would go on to return the favor, as I discovered on my second trip to Denmark in 2019 – an indoor ride retelling Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales bears the unmistakable influence of Disneyland’s Peter Pan’s Flight and It’s a Small World.)
My first destination was the Carlsberg Glyptothek, an art collection and indoor garden funded by Denmark’s biggest beer fortune. I had the strongest reactions to an ancient Greek statue of Nemesis, a true survivor standing proud despite missing both her head and arms, and to Vincent Van Gogh’s View from Saint-Remy with its writhing, turbulent foreground of grass. The Glyptothek also boasted and boasts a nearly complete collection of imperial Roman coins, bearing busts of emperors from Augustus onward and thus enabling a kind of vicarious time travel. Following the Danish custom I had coffee and tea in the café in the central garden and still remember the lemon meringue tart’s tartness.
That evening I drank Carlsberg and ate one of the quintessential Danish dishes, roast pork and red cabbages served with crispy pork skin.
Day 2
The next day I got up early and enjoyed a hotel breakfast of cheese, cold cuts and smoked salmon on rolls and dark rye bread, with tea. Then I walked the short walk to København H, passing streetside sausage vendors, and bought a ticket for Helsingør – Shakespeare’s Elsinore – on the island’s northern coast. I saw neat little suburbs on the outskirts of Copenhagen as the train picked up speed, suburbs with cute little houses that seemed almost like model railroad decorations or tins holding assorted shortbread cookies. After these houses came stubbly fields and a procession of bare trees, and beyond them a straw-yellow band of morning light between the horizon and cloudy gray sky. Having just William Carlos William’s Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems my mind saw in the landscape around me the world of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow, which inspired a poem by Williams. Denmark in January had the same whites, grays and dark browns.
The winter light through the bare trees reminded me of Canterbury Cathedral’s rose window and brought to mind a passage of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s that I had read before coming to England and which haunted me throughout my English year:
The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation of the forest trees, with all their boughs, to a festal or solemn arcade… In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which the Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest.
Tipsy on such Romanticism I imagined the wintry landscape around me as a kind of giant open-air cathedral.
Statues of Hamlet and Ophelia stand right outside the train station and greet the visitor to Helsingør. I walked through the town, which faces Helsingborg in Sweden on the other side of the sound, passing the town hall and a memorial to its Danish Resistance members on my way to the castle. “Ah, bitter chill it was!” The water pouring from the castle’s drainpipes had frozen in midair and hung in icicles above the ice-covered moat. I heard the cawing of ravens as I walked across the drawbridge to Kronborg Slot.
My mind’s eye and Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film had prepared me for a more medieval Elsinore, for the kind of bare, rough-hewn stone castle that I had seen in ruins at Rochester. (Shakespeare, who probably never left England in his life, imagined his own Castle Elsinore.) It disappointed me on first glance just by being an ornate Northern Renaissance structure rather than a medieval Viking fortress but I soon grew to appreciate its history and incredible presence, which now seems to perfectly compliment Shakespeare’s play. (Hamlet, which I revisited during my second trip to Denmark, remains inexhaustible and seems to metamorphosize into a new play with every new reading; it is, to quote Polonius, a “poem unlimited.”)
Built and rebuilt between the 15th and 17th centuries, Kronborg Slot guards the narrowest point of the Øresund strait between Denmark and Sweden; I walked past cannons aimed at the Swedish coast, which I could see, fog-shrouded, across the agitated, furrowed sea. These cannons allowed the Danes to control ship traffic through the straight and by extension trade between the North and Baltic seas. Tolls enforced by these guns filled the Danish coffers, funding the construction of royal palaces with elaborate gardens as well as the maintenance and expansion of Kronborg Slot itself.
The castle interior had a northern Protestant sparsity and the Danish winter’s color palette: white, black and brown, which were sometimes accompanied by the faded reds, blues and greens of centuries-old tapestries. The floors had a chessboard pattern, like Dutch golden age interiors, and footsteps upon them echoed down hallways. While perhaps lacking in Viking roughness it seemed, all in all, like an appropriate place for Hamlet’s existential crisis.
Hamlet, feigning madness with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, describes the world as a prison “in which there are many confines,/ wards, and dungeons” and Kronborg Slot – to its great credit – boasts a truly exceptional dungeon or, more properly, a casemate. A statue of Holgar Danske, sleeping like King Arthur until his country truly needs him, guards the entrance to this gloomy labyrinth of gun emplacement, empty storage rooms and living quarters lit only by candles or torches. Hamlet is of course a ghost story and the casemate seemed to be by far the most haunted part of the castle. (I have to think that a Shakespeare who had actually visited Helsingør would have set the encounter between Hamlet and his father’s ghost here rather than on the ramparts.) One could almost feel the presence of the soldiers and servants who lived and worked in this shadowy subterranean world for weeks at a time.
Day 3
I had many more adventures in Denmark, both that January and in 2019: the skeletons of sunken Viking ships at Roskilde; Karen Blixen’s grave and writing desk at her country home, Rungstedlund; a chilly October night at Tivoli Gardens warmed by hot chocolate and the company of a nice Danish girl. But my most memorable Danish experience happened somewhere far from more tourists’ itineraries, Jelling in southern Jutland (Jylland in Danish), population about 3,600. My mother’s maiden name is Petersen because two brothers left that small town for the new world more than a century earlier.
That day’s train journey took me west from Copenhagen, across the island of Zealand to a long bridge – the Great Belt Fixed Link or, more Danishly, the Storebæltsforbindelsen – that links it to mainland Europe. I observed snow on every passing roof as the scenery outside changed to bands of white ground and off-white sky interrupted by dark silhouettes of trees that emerged from and then faded back into the fog.
I had read a few stories by Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) en route to Helsingør and her Denmark enchanted my own even more so than Brueghel’s painting or Emerson’s prose. Back in England I had looked for a Danish book to read on my trip and had found a Danish author who wrote in English and whose work had inspired two Oscar-winning films in the 1980s. The title of one of her books, Winter’s Tales, had both Shakespearean and seasonal evocations so I checked it out of the University of Kent library and brought it with me to Denmark, where it became my constant companion on train journeys.
Reading “The Sailor-Boy’s Tale,” the first story in the collection, was like discovering a long-lost myth, like feeling a blast of cold air in a stifling room. I plan on devoting a future post entirely to her writing, which is overdue for rediscovery. The best way to quickly describe her fiction is that it gives Napoleonic and 19th century northern Europe the strangeness and sadness of Greek myth or Japanese Noh; uninterested in realism or modernity, she wrote tales closer to Poe, the Arabian Nights and Shakespeare’s late romances than to anything written by her 20th century contemporaries. Much of Winter’s Tales takes place in a half-historical, half-dark fairytale Denmark which enchanted the landscape of snow, pine, field and wave that I traveled through.
I have since read all of her stories as well as Out of Africa but Winter’s Tales still stands out as her absolute best work in my mind, doubtlessly because discovering it was one of the best reading experiences of my life, with a deep sympathy between the book and the world around me.
The train stopped once or twice on the Storebæltsforbindelsen, leaving us completely surrounded by the sea with no coastline on the horizon.
A blue-eyed Danish girl of an impossible elfin beauty sat across from me on the train, drinking Coke Zero and typing on her MacBook. She had drawn butterflies in the notebook that lay on the plastic foldout table between use. We talked for a bit and she told me that she was studying to be a veterinarian.
When we reached her destination I wished her luck in her career and told her that she was very beautiful, which lit up her face with blushing. I never learned her name but I still haven’t forgotten her.
I had to switch trains at Vejle and, with a few hours to occupy, explored the town, visiting an austere church with framed portraits of Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon. I had lunch at a pizza/doner kebab restaurant. My minimal Danish combined with their minimal English to make ordering somewhat more complicated than usual. Then I returned to the station and browsed its 7-11’s assortment of salt licorice. I had observed early on that 7-11s are as omnipresent in Demark as Starbucks are in Seattle and indeed I have never visited a Danish train station without one. As for Danish licorice, it is a true acquired taste and one unlike anything aimed the American palate: dense, more salty than sweet, as far from Red Vines as metal is from synth-pop.
I arrived at snowy Jelling and after a short walk came upon the scene you see above, which captures the strangeness of Europe’s deep history as well as any picture I’ve taken: children climbing up and sledding down a 10th century burial mound built around the tomb of the Viking king Gorm the Old. Just out of frame are two rune stones inscribed during the reigns of Gorm and his son Harald Bluetooth, who inspired the name of a wireless technology developed more than a millennium after his death. Harald’s stone commemorates
The stones lay in the churchyard of Jelling’s small church, my destination. I walked between the snow-covered hedgerows and from time to time cleared the snow off of a gravestone reading Pedersen. Jelling had buried many, many Pedersens over the centuries: my ancestors and relatives, however distant.
As I walked through the churchyard I felt connected to these dead people who I had never met and to this town where they had lived for generation upon generation. In that moment my life seemed like one chapter in a very long story that started in Jelling: the untold lives that began and ended a short distance from this church; two brothers’ fateful decision to leave their known world and seek opportunity in a distant land; their long voyage across the Atlantic and arrival, tempest-tossed, in the new world; the anglicization of Pedersen to Petersen at the immigration desk; the adaptation to a new language and to a new way of life; the hell of a world war, endured under the flag of their adopted country, that left one brother scarred for life; the descendants’ dispersal across America like winged seeds. (To say nothing of the other dislocations and emigrations in my family tree.)
Walking between those snow-covered graves gave me a sense of homecoming that I have never felt, before or since, and made me reflect upon the contrast between my stable, comfortable life and my ancestors’ Viking boldness, and upon the hope that I might recapture some of that boldness in my own life. When I think about it now I hear Van Morrison singing “Listen to the Lion” in my head:
And we sailed, and we sailed
And we sailed, and we sailed, and we sailed
Away from Denmark-
And we sailed, and we sailed, and we sailed
All around the world
And we sailed, and we sailed, and we sailed
Looking for a brand new start.