Holger Danske
The stone hero sleeping in the casemates.
ArildV — CC BY-SA 4.0 · ArildV — CC BY-SA 4.0 · ArildV — CC BY-SA 4.0 · ArildV — CC BY-SA 4.0
No evidence — but English actors from his circle worked at Kronborg's court (1580s) and returned with tales of the grand new castle on the sound, which he borrowed for Hamlet a decade later. The castle adopted the fictional Danish prince gratefully: his statue, his festival, even a Hamlet room in the museum — its most famous resident who never lived there.
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Kronborg is the Elsinore where Shakespeare set Hamlet: a fortified Renaissance castle (1580s, UNESCO) on the narrowest point of the Øresund — four kilometres of water from Sweden — built by Frederik II to levy the Sound Dues on every ship passing between the North Sea and the Baltic: four hundred years of toll made it Denmark's richest castle. Inside is the ballroom (62 metres, Northern Europe's longest hall), the kings' tapestries and the wooden chapel that survived the fire — and the dark casemates where the stone Holger Danske sleeps: the legendary hero who will wake to save Denmark in its hour of peril. Every summer Hamlet is staged in its courtyard by world actors (Laurence Olivier, Jude Law, and a century before them) — and the ramparts show Sweden to the naked eye: from Copenhagen 45 minutes by coast train, and the Maritime Museum sunk into the dry dock beside it is Denmark's finest modern museum.
The stone hero sleeping in the casemates.
62 metres — the North's longest hall.
In the dry dock — Denmark's finest modern museum.
Kronborg 2C, 3000 Helsingør (day trip)