I suppose I’d better start with a really quick biography of Hans Christian Andersen. He was a Danish writer, born in Odense in 1805 responsible for about half the fairytales you know. The Brothers Grimm, who were German, wrote the rest. To be honest, you’ll probably know most of his stories from Disney. He wrote the Little Mermaid and the Snow Queen (whose Disney adaptation ended up being called Frozen). There are also shorts of the Ugly Duckling and the Little Matchgirl, part of Fantasia 2000 were based on the Steadfast Tin Soldier and you’ll also know Thumbelina and the Emperor’s New Clothes.
Ugh. It always makes me feel slightly dirty to have to explain that “this thing you know from Disney is actually culture and literature that defines a nation”. Hans Christian Andersen is a Danish national treasure and to reduce him to “he’s the inspiration behind a cutesy film from a money-grabbing multinational megacorp” is not how he’d want to be remembered. Mind you, the way he’s often remembered online is that he stayed with Charles Dickens and overstayed his welcome – Dickens’ daughter called him “a bony bore”, Dickens wrote on the spare room mirror “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks – which seemed to the family AGES!” and although I can’t find it, there are multiple stories about him lying on the floor crying hysterically. I’m not sure he’d want to be remembered that way either.
If you want to learn more about Hans-Christian (as he was apparently known in his life – Dickens calling him plain Hans was also very upsetting to him), the best place is probably his birthplace in Odense, which is an hour and a half from Copenhagen by train, and the second city on my 2012 Backpacking Denmark trip. I didn’t go all that way out this time and I didn’t visit the birthplace in 2012 but it sounds like a better option than anything I really came across in Copenhagen. Nonetheless, if you’re an HCA fan, there are places you should probably incorporate into your visit to Copenhagen.
The Hans Christian Andersen statue
The first thing I found, back in 2012, was completely by accident and it’s his statue on the street named after him, H C Andersens Boulevard, on the side of Rådhuspladsen, Town Hall Square, and the main entrance to the Tivoli Gardens. The statue is right by the Town Hall itself and it’s probably going to have a small crowd gathered around it. There’s a QR code on the statue’s plinth that allows you to listen to a recording from Hans-Christian himself. Knowing that I planned to write this post, I have no idea what possessed me to decide not to bother listening to it.
The Hans Christian Andersen Experience
On the other side of the very same square is Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, which I tend to assume is tourist rubbish but it has a Hans Christian Andersen exhibit which is worth it if you’re not going to Odense. It costs 89kr, so £7-8 and it’s a little walk through his life and his stories. The first couple of rooms tell you about his early life and then there are dioramas of the fairytales, starting with the Little Mermaid (which cuts off very suddenly without telling you how it ends!), then A Little Matchgirl, Thumbelina, the Steadfast Tin Soldier, the Swineherd and finishing with the Emperor’s New Clothes. I stood and listened to every story and a group overtook me and had vanished by the time I got round the next corner so how long it takes depends on how interested you are. Is it worth it? If you’ve heard the name but don’t really know who he is or what he did, then probably. If you’re already a fan, you can probably skip it.
The Flying Trunk
I’ve already mentioned this in an earlier post but this is a ride in the Tivoli Gardens, where you sit in a trunk which carries you around a world of his stories. You don’t get the full story here, just an outline, and it’s got something of Disney’s It’s a Small World about it, except that it’s about fairy tales which are, as always, probably darker than the version you know in the 21st century. If you’re already in the Tivoli, do pop by. Don’t make a special journey for it.
Nyhavn
Now, everyone who goes to Copenhagen is going to end up at Nyhavn at some point. It’s the pretty canal with the colourful houses and the really expensive restaurants along one side where all the tourists want to eat. But it’s also where Hans-Christian lived for much of his life.
He lived at number 20 for a few years and it was here that he was living when his first stories were published. That window with the plaque underneath it, he might have looked out of it at Nyhavn. Of course, I have no idea whether he had rooms at the front at the back, only that he was lodging in two rooms on the second floor with widow Karen Sophie Larsen and apparently it was really cold there. Scandinavia’s cold anyway but Denmark’s the furthest south and it seems really weird to me that it could get so cold here that Larsen could pour water on the floor and it would freeze so her children could ice skate on it. Andersen moved to a hotel after that.
Between the 1840s and the 1860s, he lived at number 67, which is where he wrote a lot of ths better-known stories. That’s about all I can find out about it but I suspect if you’d ask him where he considered home over his life, Nyhavn 67 would probably have been it.
Then he spent the last few years of his life at Nyhavn 18 where he rented three rooms on the first floor from Thora Hallager, who’d been his landlady at a previous address. He shared the first floor with a pensioner known only as “Miss E Ballin”, possibly the mother of Clara and Caroline Ballin who were living there by the 1880 census. The building is now owned by the Bank of Denmark and contains seven residences available to foreign researchers and artists who are guests at Danish scientific or artistic institutions (and a souvenir shop on the ground floor). If you fancy staying at Hans Christian Andersen’s place for free, here’s the information – go apply!
The Little Mermaid
We all know the Little Mermaid statue is probably the most underwhelming tourist spot on the planet. It’s a very small bronze statue sitting on a rock just off the edge of the harbour where you can’t really get a photo of it from a good angle. It wasn’t even created during his lifetime. It’s an icon of the city and permanently surrounded by tourists and I know you’ll probably feel like you can’t skip it even if you know in advance you’ll be disappointed by it.It’s a total tourist trap, except the only real “trap” is the space on your phone or camera for the photo of it. There’s a kiosk there selling souvenirs and snacks but you don’t have to buy anything there, or even feel like you’re ignoring the pressure to buy anything there.
While you’re there, follow the coastline to the left, rounding the marina, and go up through the lines of warehouse-style newbuilds so that you’ve got the inner harbour on your left and a line of buildings separating you from the harbour. Up here you’ll find the Genetically Modified Little Mermaid, a similar size statue which my mum insists on calling “the new one”, as if this is the latest in a sequence of mermaid statues and designed to replace the famous one. It’s part of an exhibit called the Genetically Modified Paradise and the rest are on dry land, along with a fountain. It’s supposed to be a criticism of genetic modification and “the superficiality of vanity” and if you try to figure out why she exists, you’ll find lots of words like “modern unease” and “myth, science and spectacle”, “provocative”, “thought-provoking” and “commentary on post-modern societies” but no real answers. Personally, I think she’s just a bit of fun and I also can’t help thinking that Andersen would have thrown himself on the floor and wept at her.
Grave
Hans-Christian, having fallen out of bed and caused himself injuries and then exhibited signs of liver cancer, moved to a friend’s country house near Copenhagen where he died. I didn’t visit and even if I’d thought of it or had time, it was demolished 23 years later and replaced by an apartment building. Hans-Christian was buried in Asisstens Cemetery in Nørrebro. Even if you’re not a Hans Christian Andersen fan, I really recommend spending some time at Assistens. It’s a rambly, overgrown green wooded park with a fairly regimented system of graves down the middle and a sprawly mess of graves down each side. It’s a really nice place to escape the heat of the summer (or the Holocene extinction event) and it’s just a nice park to chill in. I saw a lot of people having picnics or just strolling down the avenues and I saw, frankly, too many people sunbathing. Lying on a blanket in a bikini is fine, none of my business, but I’m not sure a cemetery is the right place for it. It’s been like that for at least two hundred years, possibly minus the sunbathing. In 1805, instructions were issues prohibiting eating or drinking in the cemetery or playing music or “any other kind of cheerful behaviour”, so I guess sunbathing is just a continuation of a tradition of being inappropriate as old as the cemetery itself.
Wikipedia lists a huge number of notable people buried there, of which I recognise the names Søren Kierkegaard and Niels Bohr and that’s about it. Andersen’s grave is at the very opposite end to the most convenient metro stop, which is Nørrebros Runddel, in the north corner. Don’t rush through the cemetery, take your time enjoying the greenery and the unexpected old stone gravestones and the city workers who still make an effort to look after the hedges and the stones. The stone is a tallish red one with a decorative black iron fence around it and, when I was there, a couple of hundred cheap pens stuck into the ground in front of it, as well as three books of his stories in assorted languages.
In conclusion
If you’re a serious Hans Christian Andersen fan, make your way to Odense. If you’re wanting to learn more, head to the Hans Christian Andersen Experience. And if you really want to know, the HCA Experience and probably every bookshop in Copenhagen has his stories and probably translated into at least the major languages of tourists in Copenhagen – go and buy a book!
