SECRETS OF DENMARK

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 47, 19 November 1926, Page 6

SECRETS OF DENMARK

WONDERS IN A CASTLE When the golden knight came blazing through the wood at Elsinore, at the head of his comrades, on that tourney Sunday of 1569, which was recently re-run, they had armed a halfhour earlier in a building worthy of any time or land. That was Kronborg Castle, which guards the entrance to the Sound.

This and Rosenborg Castle and King Christian IV. are, above all else, the great secrets of Denmark, long hidden from Europe by the wareliousekeeps of Giant Bacon and the vast yellow pile in which lives good Fairy Butter.

It was on the battlements of Kronborg that his father's ghost appeared to Hamlet. The actual spot is still pointed out, and is a very lovely one, with wrought-iron gratings round the castle windows and a large elder-bush spreading luxuriantly against its walls. Not many Danes believe that Hamlet is buried near Kronborg, but they like to believe that Shakespeare may have been there. A good many English players did come over to Denmark, and among them a known companion of Shakespeare’s, and there is nothing inherently impossible iu the idea.

There is no such lofty beauty as Kronborg’s at Rosenborg, which lies in the centre of Copenhagen, in delightful gardens. But Rosenborg is a lovely red-brick palace, full of corbels and corners and turrets, and has as much the character of a dark rose as anything in red-brick can have. Rosenborg is a palace in which the Kings of Denmark have lived and died, where king ater king, departing, has left a room, a hall, a gallery, filled with his and his queen’s most precious and personal things, and adorned in the manner of his day and his taste. Many of them have never been moved since the day they came there. In Christian IV.’s study are six porcelain Chinese figures, as the King ordered them to. be put, over the two doorways of the room, on a shelf. This was 300 years ago, and they have not been moved, save for dusting, since. They were brought by a Dutch sailor of the day, and two, at least, were old when they were brought from China. Gladstone, when he visited Copenhagen, I am told, cried out in amazement at one of these, which exhibits features prior to the Mongol invasion of China, writes J. M. N. Jeffries in the “Daily Mail.” In 1709 King Frederick IV. visited Venice, where he was received in great state by the Doge Mocenigo, who presented him with a wonderful collection of glass, referred to as rare and costly even -in those days. He brought it back to Copenhagen, and there it is, filling a tower room at Rosenborg, as he himself arranged it. The glass and the porcelain are but two examples chosen at random.

It would be hopeless to attempt to describe a tithe of the wonders of Rosenborg, the presents from Queen Elizabeth down to every sovereign in succeeding history, the portraits, the beakers, the' manuscripts from Christian IV. (who lias left 4500 letters, wise and witty, iu his own hand), the praver-books ' which Lave been wept over by princesses, the swords, the diamonds, the crystals. In the very cellars is wine with an astounding lineage. Placed there by Queen Sophie iu 1596—there were, of course, barrels upon barrels of it then, and tlie careful Queen’s bill from the Rhineland is preserved—it remained, save for supplying a royal table, till 1658. Charles' X. of Sweden, in the course of a war, managed to get hold of most of the now celebrated wine, but the Danish sailors in the vessel which was taking it to Sweden succeeded in making the rather insufficient Swedish guard drunk, and threw them into the sea, and brought the wine secretly back to Copenhagen, now in safety.

T* ere it lias, iu a sense, stayed ever since, though the custom has been to reinvigorate the ancient stock every now and then with a vintage worthy of it. Some new wine has been added in the last' twenty years. Professor Bering-Lusberg, the devoted curator of Rosenborg, tells me that it is a trifle acrid, and is served with a pinch of sugar on state occasions at the table of King Christian.