Odense was one of the more important stops of our journey across Funen, and we passed through its area more than once. Our travel log records four different places that we checked around the city: Rugårdsvej and Christiansgade during the earlier part of the route, followed later by Langagervej and Davinde Søvej on the eastern side of Odense. That already made our experience here rather different from a quick visit to a small Danish town. We had to work out where a motorhome could reasonably be left, while the city itself turned out to have far more history than the usual association with Hans Christian Andersen suggests.
Rugårdsvej was one of the places we checked for access to the centre. The saved information describes it as a city parking area capable of taking larger vehicles, although the arrangement of the spaces was not particularly clear and the price could vary according to the payment app used. Christiansgade was considerably closer to the centre. It was small, paved and poorly shaded, and parking was chargeable, but its position made it a practical option for reaching central Odense on foot. Access was also slightly awkward because the car park could only be entered from the east.
Later in the trip our review trail brought us back to the Odense area, this time away from the centre. At Langagervej we checked a gravel parking area beside a very large dog park and a beach, where overnight parking was permitted free of charge. Davinde Søvej was completely different again: a quieter, greener location surrounded by trees and small lakes, but without motorhome services. These were not substitutes for a central parking place, but they show how quickly Odense changes once you move away from the dense urban centre.
The city is much older than Hans Christian Andersen. Odense is one of Denmark’s oldest urban settlements, with roots extending back more than a thousand years. Its name is generally connected with the Old Norse idea of Odins Vi, meaning a sanctuary or sacred place associated with the god Odin. The river was important from the beginning, providing a route through the landscape and helping trade and settlement develop here during the Viking period.
One of the most remarkable pieces of that early history is almost invisible today. Beneath modern Odense lies Nonnebakken, a circular Viking fortress associated with King Harald Bluetooth and built around the late tenth century. Its outer diameter was about 180 metres. Unlike the other surviving Danish ring fortresses, Nonnebakken became absorbed into a living city, so most of it is now hidden underneath streets and buildings rather than standing visibly in open countryside. Together with Aggersborg, Fyrkat, Trelleborg and Borgring, it forms part of Denmark’s UNESCO-listed Viking Age ring fortresses.
Odense also witnessed one of the events traditionally used to mark the end of Denmark’s Viking age. In 1086 King Cnut IV, later known as Cnut the Holy, was killed in St Alban’s Church during a rebellion. He was later canonised, and his remains now lie in the crypt of St Canute’s Cathedral. The medieval cathedral therefore connects a modern Danish city with the period when royal authority, Christianity and the formation of the Danish kingdom were still closely intertwined.
But the name that dominates Odense today is obviously Hans Christian Andersen.
He was born here on 2 April 1805, into a poor family. His father, Hans Andersen, was a shoemaker; his mother, Anne Marie Andersdatter, came from an even poorer background and later worked as a washerwoman. The familiar little yellow house in Hans Jensens Stræde is traditionally identified as Andersen’s birthplace, although the historical evidence is slightly less simple than the tourist version suggests. His parents did not yet have a permanent home of their own when he was born, and Andersen himself later expressed doubts about the exact building that had been identified as his birthplace. The house is nevertheless very probably the correct location.
The house where he actually spent most of his childhood was in Munkemøllestræde. It was extremely modest: essentially one small room containing his father’s shoemaking workshop, the family’s bed and the bench where the young Andersen slept. Yet books, pictures, songs, theatre and storytelling seem to have mattered enormously inside that very small space. His father was intellectually curious and read to him, while his mother’s world contained traditional beliefs, superstition and the oral stories of ordinary people. Those two very different influences — books on one side and popular storytelling on the other — later reappeared repeatedly in Andersen’s writing.
His childhood was not an easy route from poverty to instant literary success. His father died in 1816, when Hans Christian was only eleven. His schooling in Odense had already been irregular and became still more uncertain afterwards. This matters for another interesting part of the Andersen story: his spelling was sometimes imperfect throughout his life. The Hans Christian Andersen Centre specifically notes that this was not the result of dyslexia, as is sometimes claimed, but was connected with the limited and rather inconsistent education he had received as a child.
He nevertheless had an extraordinary belief that he was meant for something outside ordinary working life. He was interested in theatre, singing, acting and writing. At the age of only fourteen, in 1819, he left Odense and travelled to Copenhagen with very little money and no secure career waiting for him. He initially tried to enter the theatrical world, studying singing and dancing and attempting to have his dramatic work accepted. It did not immediately work. Eventually, however, people around the Royal Theatre recognised that there was something unusual about him. Jonas Collin became particularly important and arranged for Andersen to receive a proper education.
That education was itself difficult. Andersen attended grammar school in Slagelse and later Helsingør under the headmaster Simon Meisling, an experience he remembered as deeply unhappy. He was substantially older than many of the other pupils and found the rigid school environment difficult. In 1827 Jonas Collin finally arranged for him to leave the school and study privately in Copenhagen. Andersen passed the university entrance examination in 1828.
His first significant literary success was not a fairy tale. His career began to gain momentum around 1829, and he wrote novels, plays, poems, travel writing and autobiographical works as well as the stories for which he is now famous. In 1835 he achieved a major breakthrough with the novel The Improvisatore and published the first instalment of the fairy tales. The fairy tales eventually became the part of his work that travelled furthest beyond Denmark. The recognised collection contains 156 fairy tales and stories.
The important thing is that Andersen did not simply collect old folk tales and write them down. Only a very small proportion of his 156 tales are direct reworkings of traditional folk stories. Most were his own literary creations. Everyday objects could become characters: a tin soldier, a needle, a teapot, a street lamp or a fir tree. Animals could expose human vanity. Children’s stories could contain loneliness, death, class anxiety, satire and disappointment that adults understood perfectly well. That is one reason tales such as The Ugly Duckling, The Little Mermaid, The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Snow Queen, The Little Match Girl and The Princess and the Pea continued to work long after the social world in which Andersen wrote them had disappeared.
His own life inevitably became mixed with interpretations of the stories. The Ugly Duckling, for example, is often read partly as a reflection of Andersen’s own transformation from an awkward poor boy in provincial Odense into a celebrated writer moving through European high society. It would be too simple to treat every fairy tale as disguised autobiography, but Andersen repeatedly drew material from his experiences, fears, ambitions, relationships and memories.
He was also a remarkable traveller. Once successful, he spent enormous amounts of time away from Denmark, travelling through Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Switzerland and other parts of Europe. He met writers, artists, scientists and members of royal families. His international reputation grew very quickly, particularly in Germany and Britain, and translations made his stories familiar to readers who could not read a word of Danish. He eventually became one of the rare nineteenth-century Danish writers whose characters became part of international popular culture during his own lifetime.
There is another side of Andersen that is easy to miss if you know only the fairy tales. He drew, made elaborate paper cuttings and collages, kept diaries and wrote an enormous quantity of correspondence. Paper cutting was not simply a children’s amusement for him. He could sit talking and telling a story while folding and cutting paper, then open it at the end to reveal a complicated symmetrical picture. Many originals survive in the Odense collections.
And then there is the Danish writing itself, which makes original Andersen manuscripts particularly interesting.
Modern Danish uses the Latin alphabet but has 29 letters, ending with æ, ø and å:
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z æ ø å.
The three final letters are genuine letters of the Danish alphabet, not decorative variations of a, o and a. In dictionaries and alphabetical lists they come after z in exactly that order: æ, then ø, then å.
Æ has been used in written Danish for roughly a thousand years. It entered Scandinavian writing through the medieval Latin-writing tradition and probably through Old English influence. Ø is likewise an independent Danish vowel, rather than simply an o with a line through it. Together, æ and ø immediately make written Danish recognisable even to somebody who cannot understand it.
Å, however, has a different history. It is actually the youngest official letter in Danish. In Andersen’s nineteenth century, standard spelling generally used aa where modern Danish normally uses å. The letter å had supporters and was already being used experimentally by some writers and linguists, but it did not become part of official Danish orthography until the spelling reform of 1948. That is why older Danish texts contain forms that look unusual to a modern reader.
The 1948 reform changed more than one letter. Danish common nouns had traditionally often been written with capital initial letters, somewhat like German. The reform changed them to lower case. It also officially replaced aa with å in ordinary words and changed older past-tense forms such as kunde, skulde and vilde to the modern kunne, skulle and ville. This happened more than seventy years after Andersen’s death, so opening one of his original texts means seeing a Danish spelling system that is visibly different from the one used on Danish road signs and in books today.
The double-a did not disappear completely. Danish names can still retain Aa, and some towns deliberately use it. Aalborg and Aabenraa are familiar examples, while Aarhus returned to the Aa spelling in 2011. When aa represents the same sound as å, Danish alphabetical rules treat it as å for sorting purposes.
Andersen therefore sits at an interesting point in the history of the language. His Danish can look strange even before you deal with nineteenth-century vocabulary and sentence construction. Yet his literary style was important precisely because it often sounded more like somebody speaking than the formal literary language readers expected. He used interruptions, conversational expressions, humour, rhythm and direct addresses to the reader. His stories were written literature, but they retained something of somebody actually telling a story aloud. That helped make them work for children without making them exclusively children’s literature.
Odense has understandably built a large part of its modern cultural identity around him. The present H.C. Andersen’s House is far more than the little birthplace building. The new museum was designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma and combines exhibition spaces, gardens, architecture, sound and storytelling. Much of the museum is below ground, leaving gardens and low curved structures at street level. The original small house remains part of the larger complex rather than being replaced by it.
What I like about the story of Odense, though, is that Andersen does not have to erase everything that came before him. You can start with Odin in the city’s name, move to Harald Bluetooth’s fortress beneath the streets, follow Cnut the Holy into the medieval cathedral, and then arrive centuries later at the one-room shoemaker’s home where a boy with irregular schooling began imagining a life completely different from the one expected of him.
Our own route through Odense was much more practical. We were travelling with the motorhome, so our first problem was not literary history but where we could actually leave it. The records show us checking the urban options at Rugårdsvej and Christiansgade and later the much greener alternatives around Langagervej and Davinde Søvej. The exact text of our own reviews for those four places is no longer exposed in the archive, so it would be wrong to invent precise opinions about noise, safety or how long we personally stayed. What is certain is the sequence itself and the very different types of places we investigated: central paid parking, larger-vehicle parking, a free gravel stop by a dog park and beach, and a quiet lake-and-forest setting outside the centre.
That actually suits Odense rather well. It was not a place where one single motorhome stop defined the visit. We approached the city from different sides and at different stages of the journey, while Odense itself turned out to contain several completely different layers. It is a modern Danish city, a Viking site, a medieval religious centre and the childhood landscape of one of the world’s most widely translated writers.
Hans Christian Andersen left Odense as an ambitious fourteen-year-old with very little certainty about what would happen next. By the time he died in 1875, his stories had already travelled far beyond Denmark. Odense has changed almost beyond recognition since the poor shoemaker’s family lived there, and Danish spelling itself has changed enough that some of Andersen’s original words now look antique. Yet his name, the strange letters æ, ø and å, the Viking fortress beneath the streets and the small childhood house all still belong to the same city.
For us, that made Odense much more interesting than simply “the city of the fairy-tale writer”. Andersen is the obvious reason people know the name, but understanding the city properly means going further back than 1805 and looking at what happened to Danish society and even the Danish language afterwards. Odense contains all of it within a surprisingly small area: Odin, Vikings, a murdered king, medieval Christianity, nineteenth-century poverty, one of Europe’s most famous writers, a changing alphabet and a modern city built over more than a thousand years of history.