The Tower at Fåborg

FYN, alias Funen, alias the fairy tale island because Hans Christian Andersen was born in the town of Odense on a north coast fjord, is a roughly circular territory separated from Jutland on the west by a strait known as the Little Belt and from Zealand on the east by a strait called the Great Belt. The car ferry across the Great Belt takes about an hour, which is long enough to reveal the principles of ferry travel in Denmark.

When Danes go aboard a ferry, they eat. Before leaving a ferry, they eat. In between, they pass the time eating. This rule holds throughout Scandinavia, with certain alcoholic additions where the ferry runs between two separate countries. I do not know what effect rough water has on this system, because when I set foot on a ferry, a flat calm ensues.

I drove off at Nyborg somewhat coffee-logged. Fyn immediately supported its reputation by displaying a golf course on which, in a shimmer of dew, mist, and thin sunlight, two deer and a bevy of pheasants posed at about the fifth tee. I stopped by the roadside, convinced that the creatures had been tethered out for the tourist trade, but when the pheasants ambled off to another fairway and the deer trotted away to the woods, I surrendered to fact. Although Fyn, with its fearless wildlife and its roads lined for miles with lilac hedges fifteen feet high, is obviously too good to be true, it is perfectly real.

Since Odense is the island’s principal city and reputed to be a bustling commercial town as well as a literary monument, I turned south toward Fåborg. The southbound route is a compromise between modern efficiency and antique convenience, for while there is a main highway that scoots directly to its goal, there is also an old road which loiters between rather than through the villages that pepper the low green hills and wooded hollows of Fyn.

These villages, set a mile or so back from the traffic on gravel lanes, usually contain no more than six or seven flower-smothered houses and are connected to each other by more gravel lanes, which follow the boundaries of old fields and forests. It would be possible to work all the way down the coast on these quiet unmapped roads, provided one had the leisure to get lost every five miles. I made a loop toward the beach to look at a couple of villages and a wood overhanging the sea, and met only one farm truck and three bicycles. There was also a glittering, bad-tempered cock pheasant who ordered me out of his way.

On the map, the road from Nyborg to Svendborg to Fåborg is dotted with tiny red flags; these indicate old castles and manor houses which are sporadically open to the public in order that the noble owners may pay their taxes. Socialist Denmark is making a lackadaisical effort to starve these people out, but with small sign of success. The Rosenkrantz family (there seem to be no Guildensterns) still owns its castle in Jutland, and a whole string of estates in Fyn continue in business — as usual, except for the parking lot, the gate where visitors buy tickets to view the gardens, and the curio shop in the old stables. They are rather likely to continue in business, for the Danish gentry have always been, on the whole, an able and industrious lot.

This is not to say that they are exactly tame. I heard of one nobleman who struck up a friendship with some Copenhagen refugees settled in a village bordering his large estate. He was a hunting-squire type, and became quite fascinated by the urban oddities that came to visit his new friends. One party ended in what is, for Denmark, positive disaster. A drunken guest slipped out of the house with a female friend, started up a car, and drove off looking for privacy. At dawn, the police discovered the trio — car, drunk, and lady — comfortably comatose in a ditch.

Now, the Danish laws against drunken driving are truly terrifying. One can be arrested for merely standing by the car. key in hand and tipsy. As for actually injuring someone while navigating under the influence — it would probably be safer to shoot the Prime Minister on the steps of the parliament building. And when a drunk drives away from a party, the host who first got him drunk and then turned him loose is considered an accessory to the crime and is duly persecuted by the police.

In this case, tradition prevailed, and the police went first to the local baron, who naturally failed to remember anything about the drunk, or the party, or indeed anything much since last St. Swithin’s Day. As soon as the police left, he telephoned the Copenhagen couple with warnings and shrewd advice on what sort of tale should be offered to the cops. Then he added, disapprovingly, “I don’t understand these city friends of yours. When I get drunk, I only drive on my own place.”

It was true. Happily elevated, the baron and his lady would go out in their brace of sports cars and race each other, at top speed and two in the morning, over back lanes, lumbering tracks, pastures, and frozen lakes in season, driving with one hand on the wheel and the other on the horn. Their tenants, I was told, had learned to sleep right through it, and the law had nothing to say, for no amount of liquor had ever blurred the baron’s memory of his own property lines.

I WAS too early in the year to visit Hesselagergård, which opens only when assured of a fairly lavish supply of tourists, but Egeskov was available. This place, half manor and half castle, is surrounded on three sides by a lake which laps directly against the foundations of the building. The rose-gray walls, the pointed towers, the delicate wrought-iron bridge which hangs where a drawbridge and portcullis ought to be are reflected in the still, steel-blue water as sharply as in a mirror. The lake originally surrounded the house completely, for Marshal Frands Brockenhuus had a well-founded fear of assault and pillage by local hinds.

The early sixteenth century had been a period of social upheaval and reshuffling in Denmark, and when the marshal built his fine new house around 1550, he had it set on oak piles in the lake. Hesselagergå built in the same period, has a moat for the same reason. None of these handsome Renaissance establishments on Fyn were true fighting castles; they could not have endured the royal artillery for hall a day. But they were quite strong enough to deter bucolic revolutionaries.

Egeskov changed hands several times; it seems to have attracted unlucky courtiers and men who couldn’t quite afford to keep it. At present, the park and gardens are maintained only with the help of three horticultural firms which wish to preserve a fine relic of Renaissance Denmark and incidentally to display their plants in a flattering eighteenthcentury setting, for the pleasure gardens are much younger than the house. The gardens circle about half of the landward shore of the lake, and their most striking feature, to my eye, was the maze of hedges made, I think, of clipped beech, (Or could they be lime trees?) Danish beech trees grow to enormous size, but these trees had been stunted by two centuries of pruning. Inside the screen of foliage, the trunks were gnarled, mutilated, hollow with rot, and writhing as grotesquely as trees in a Rackham drawing. From the middle of the path, however, they looked as fresh as spring itself, all their little jade-green leaves jeweled with dewdrops and quivering in a breeze I could not feel.

An old gardener with a wheelbarrow was gathering up stray twigs and fallen leaves, and three guinea fowl paraded on the grass along the water’s edge. We shared the place happily among us, but the arrival of a carload of quiet, respectable travelers was too much. The gardener retreated to the surrounding woods, the guineas stamped off, cursing, to the farmyard, and I took a guesswork route back to the coast.

Astray down a side lane in the neighborhood of an invisible town called Gudme, I came by accident on Mariana’s moated grange. It stood in a hollow filled with the improbable Danish beech trees; they have thick, straight trunks with a green patina on the silvery bark, delicate drooping branches, and tiny peacock-green leaves, and they create, in their shade, a diaphanous blueness and mats of small white flowers. In the center of this enchanted wood lay a black pond fringed with reeds and spotted with lily pads, and out of the pond rose the low simple house, its brick walls faded to a muted shade between terra cotta and cerise. It was smaller than Egeskov, less ornate, and possibly later — something about the brickwork suggested the seventeenth century, but I am no expert on architectural detail. It was certainly more beautiful than Egeskov, or any other house that I saw on Fyn. Every line of the place had a gentle, unpretentious perfection. Everything about it was silent, and everything was motionless except for a swan which drifted among the lily pads, trailing a hint of wake — thin silver wires slanted across the dark water, rippling the green reflection of the woods and throwing flashes of pink light against the walls of the house. There were two tree-muffled lanes leading around the moat and arriving, I presumed, at an entrance to the building, but I never found out, for both lanes were marked with large signs saving “PRIVAT,” which I translated as “trespassers will be prosecuted.”

FÅBORG on the south coast proved to be precisely what the tourist literature suggested: an old fishing and shipping port, preserved in amberine detail and picturesque almost beyond endurance. The waterfront, with modern ferries in action, looked awake, but one block up the inland slope, antiquity flourished undisturbed.

Low half-timbered brick buildings with red-tile roofs surrounded a cobbled square in the lee of a squat white tower. Potted plants bulged from windowsills and half blocked the steps of the tourist office, and wide gateways revealed courtyards thick with blooming trees — apple, pear, and chestnut were all in flower. Immense lilac bushes, heavily budded, overtopped the high garden walls, and a colony of rambler roses filled every inch of space left unoccupied by trees and shrubs. The courtyards and most of the streets off the square are paved with cobbles. One dog-leg street toward the west can be converted into a stage for historical plays simply by cutting off traffic, for with the removal of interlopers in modern dress, the area becomes pure seventeenth century. Except for the town hall, presumably erected during the Age of Reason, there isn’t a straight line in the place. Chimneys tilt, roofs sag, houses lean confidingly against each other, and the discreet little shop signs hang subtly askew.

The hotel on the corner (Hans Christian Andersen once stayed in it, vainly courting a Fåborg girl) had floors that slanted like a sail loft and a particularly well-framed copy of the fire rules that decorate bedrooms in all Danish country hotels. They come in three languages, two of which I will not presume to discuss. The English version reads, in part,

If possible alarm the hall porter by telephone, by fire alarm push button verbally. . . .

If the fire alarm sounds, leave the room if possible. If passage through the corridors or stairways is impossible on account of smoke, stay in your room, keep the doors closed, preserve calmness and presence of mind and signify your presence to the fire brigade through the window in a composed manner.

This good advice has delighted travelers for years, and survives, I believe, precisely for that reason. So many Danes are adept with English that the peculiar stylistic charm of Fire Brigade prose cannot have gone unnoticed by the authorities.

Fåborg is spoken of in Copenhagen as a tourist center of varied attractions, but the Fåborgians evidently put only intermittent faith in this Johnnycome-lately status. There is no pox of new hotels in the town, and the tourist office was candidly amazed at the arrival of a foreigner in mid-May, especially one inquiring for prehistoric burial sites. Such things exist, it was conceded, and after consultation, directions were produced, of the “try Joe Doakes’s woodlot” variety.

So I trespassed for several happy hours in the woodlot of Doakes (at least, I thought it was), and also, to judge by the number of farm dogs complaining in the distance, those of Smith, Jones, and Brown as well. These woods were beautifully clear of undergrowth, like all Danish woods, and well supplied with delicate miniature flowers in white, blue, and pale pink. I came out with a fine nosegay, but no better off for prehistoric burials. The tourist office was apologetic and unsurprised. “You really need a guide, and we won’t have one until the schools close. I never saw those things myself, and I know I couldn’t find one.” The museums were recommended as a findable alternative.

The historical museum is an old merchant’s house just off the square. It is painted white inside and out and consists of a square of buildings around a central court. Living quarters fronted on the street, work and storage rooms filled the side wings, and the back of the square was occupied by the stables and a large gate giving on a garden, from which Merchant Ploug had a fine view of the harbor and the doings of his ships. Ploug seems to have been promiscuously prosperous, but another burgher of Fåborg is remembered as Poul Kinafarer — Poul Chinatraveler.

Two youths were in charge of the museum when I came through the main gate. They looked about thirteen years old and were enjoying temporary status as responsible men of the world. In this role, they had set up a small table on the cobblestone courtyard and brought out wicker chairs and cups of coffee, over which they were flourishing cigarettes in an aggressively adult manner. I hated to disturb the comedy, but it was the only way to get a ticket.

The front of the house contained an interesting display of formal furniture, mostly of the eighteenth century, embroideries, chinaware. foggy mirrors in elegant frames, and iron stoves that looked like ancestors of the atom bomb. A side wing was full of neighborhood farm furniture, simply designed but often brilliantly and charmingly painted with stiff little people and dashing flowery scrolls. There were cupboards and chests and wardrobes and tables and chairs and box beds, very short and piled with fat lace-covered pillows because the Danes used to sleep sitting up. All this rural furniture was supervised by a couple in antique local costume. When I approached them, they turned out to be manikins.

Somewhat unnerved, I went on to the stables, which still smell consolingly of hay, harness oil, wood smoke, horses, and the sea. The walls here were dark wood, the stone floor sloped erratically, and the lighting consisted of whatever sunlight managed to find its way in from the court. This place was evidently a repository for everything that didn’t quite fit elsewhere in the museum. It contained smith’s tools, farrier’s tools, rusty old plows and hoes and scythes and pickaxes, a broken-down sleigh, a decayed dugout, and what is probably the largest collection of milking stools ever assembled under one roof. I went about stroking them admiringly, for the polish on a well-used milking stool is one of the finest achievements of the human frame.

Fåborg’s other museum is a source of much municipal pride, and it is indeed remarkable for a town of this size. It is very much a local affair. Around the turn of the century, Fåborg was inhabited by a group of painters of exceptional energy and mutual goodwill. It was also inhabited by Mads Tomato, an art-loving businessman whose real name was Mads Rasmussen. (Fåborg is full of Rasmussens, running all sorts of enterprises. Mads, one gathers, began in the fruit and vegetable trade.) Having been friend and patron of the Fåborg painters for years, Rasmussen finally gave his collection to the town, along with a building to house it.

The building is low and white with a proper redtile roof, the whole structure calculated to harmonize with the old bell tower tip the street. The architect succeeded so well in his ambition not to violate the established style of Fåborg that I invaded four neighboring courtyards before locating the museum’s door. It was locked, but much bellringing aroused a female custodian, who was, like the tourist office, politely amazed by my presence.

The museum proved to be a pleasant, rather clubby affair, full of portraits by the painters of each other. The whole group, Christiansen, Hansen, Larsen, and Syberg, resembled one another in technique and stuck to a style that suggests strong influence by the French Impressionists. There are a number of very likable paintings of the Fyn countryside, a series of fine drawings of birds, and one terrible aberration — a huge and hideous historical canvas in the old melodramatic style, depicting King Knut ordering the tide to stop. In the entrance rotunda, there is a large statue of Rasmussen, done by Kai Nielsens.

Nielsens the sculptor seemed to me a bit livelier than his painting colleagues, and when I went to look at his statue Ymerbrønd on the square, I found that his work is stilt capable of arousing active response.

Ymerbrønd means Ymer’s well, and the piece represents part of the old Scandinavian creation myth. I cannot find a Danish version of it, but it was recorded in the Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson (an Icelander, but one cannot have everything). The translation is by Arthur G. Brodeur, and is a fair sample of the pitfalls of pagan theology.

And Thridi said: “Just as cold arose out of Niflheim, and all terrible things, so also all that looked toward Múspellheim became hot and glowing; but Ginnungagap was as mild as windless air, and when the breath of heat met the rime, so that it melted and dripped, life was quickened from the veast-drops, by the power of that which sent the heat, and became a man’s form. And that man is named Ymir, but the Rime-Giants call him Aurgelmir; and thence are come the races of the Rime-Giants. . . . Then said Gangleri; “Where dwelt Ymir, or wherein did he find sustenance?” Hárr answered: “Straightway after the rime dripped, there sprang from it the cow called Audumla; four streams of milk ran from her udders, and she nourished Ymir.” Then asked Gangleri: “Wherewithal was the cow nourished?” And Hárr made answer: “She licked the ice-blocks, which were salty; and the first day that she licked the blocks, there came forth from the blocks in the evening a man’s hair; the second day, a man’s head; the third day the whole man was there. . . .”

Nielsens’ sculpture is not a literal representation of this account of the birth of the father of the god Odin. The cow is licking, rather more plausibly, a small child. She is being suckled by Ymir, a Rime-giant of normal human size. He lies on his back, a posture which, in his unclothed condition, obscures nothing essential. This statue caused much scandal among the modest when it was unveiled, and despite the alleged freedom of conduct and lack of prudery in modern Denmark, I suspect there is still some objection to it. It was clear that poor Ymir had been strategically vandalized with red paint, which scrubbing had failed to remove.

I got into the medieval tower of St. Nicholas, as I got into the museum, by persistent bell-ringing, which eventually routed out a stout old gentleman who spoke no English. He wore a pair of loafers with the heels beaten forward to lie flat under his feet, a device that converted the shoes into a soft version of the wooden-soled, high-toed Danish clog. I pointed hopefully at the tower. The old gentleman grinned a little wickedly and produced a key.

If I had read the guidebook. I would have known better than to expect a church. The tower is absolutely all that survives, and there is nothing to do in it but climb. I found myself inside a white cylinder. A narrow dark-wood staircase with open treads and an irregular handrail scrimshawed its way uncertainly up the wall. Its destination could only be the little platform high among the bells and the works of the town clock.

Halfway up, I stopped and calculated, weighing the benefit of a bell-obstructed view over the town against the misery of the climb. It was my conviction that the whole stair creaked and quivered at every step, but this may have been a delusion; I suspect all ladders of intending to fall down, and this stair was, in my opinion, a ladder. It made a beautiful pattern against the white wall, though. It looked particularly well from the ground level.

Old loafers let me out of the tower with a knowing grin and shuffled back to his radio.

In a large courtyard near the museum, I found a little shop that sold pottery. The little shop turned out to be a whole cellar, for the pots were made and fired on the premises. The potter, a tall young man with a demure expression and a mischievous glitter in his eyes, explained that he makes darkblue pots and dark-brown pots and nothing else. Why? He likes blue and brown.

The pots were heavy and plain, highly attractive in their simplicity. I had noticed several other enterprises of this kind in Fåborg, one-man craftshops offering a limited but handsome output. Was this a principal support of the town?

“I’m not Fåborg,” said the potter. “I come from darkest Jutland.”

From what?

He went into a zany pantomime of firing from the hip — both hips, in fact. “Our little Texas. Shooting in the streets. Very violent place. So I have emigrated to civilization.”

Next morning I left civilization, armed with a blue pot and the belief that Jutland would be a place where nothing ever happens.