From Fictional Bog lands to Castles: A Short Trip to Arhus

Someday I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap….
(Seamus Heaney, The Tollund Man)
It will not be far-fetched to imagine certain commonalities between travelling and writing. The adage of inscribing our footprints on the sands of time speaks volumes about the physical mobility in travelling which can be poetically read as ‘ecrits a la pays’. May be it is precisely due to this instinct of literarily coalescing the physical and mental travails in travelling, that people write when they travel. Of course, if not everyone, at least most of us try to record strange lands, stranger peoples and cultures in our mind and the awe, shock, wonder and fascination that new landscapes and new faces provide, are immense and enlightening. When the British wrote about the ‘ghastly’ Indian summers and the ‘unrecognizable, homogenous, khaki chunk of Indian people’, it was nothing but the inscription of their peripheral confrontation (and incomprehension) with a totally different set of cultures, clime and people. It is the same curiosity and interest in people and cultures that make me write about all the places I travel as well. In this article, I shall be exploring Arhus, a small city in Denmark, where I happened to stay for a few days and feel at home as never before. To quote Heaney’s poetic paradox yet again, “lost, unhappy and at home”.

Arhus, meaning the river mouth, was one of the oldest cities of Scandinavia, and now the second largest city in Denmark. It is almost in the geographical centre of Denmark and when the plane touched down the airport at nine pm, on a lovely August evening, I was almost surprised to see twilight spreading over the scarred islands on the sea. The sky and sea were two distinct shades of grey and on the ground spread a greasy dappled land which took a deeper greyish hue. To accentuate the dullness, there was this blizzard which cut into my skin, the very moment I set foot on Arhus air port. This was my first experience; I could see fellow passengers run for cover mumbling that this is most unusual in August (Danish summer). From the airport it was a 45 minutes bus journey to my hotel and in the warm interiors of the hotel I snuggled on to my quit, dreaming and missing the warmth of my children beside me.

The morning was fresh and promising, I was just near the port and I took a long walk to the University of Arhus, after a fresh shower. I was walking a neat small town, lined with brick buildings over grown with ivy. The traffic was not very heavy though all the vehicles blaring past came to an astounding halt the moment I stepped off tangent on to the road, in my typical hap-hazardly Indian manner. No road-rage at all, though I came close to being spread out like a streak of viscous honey on tarmac. I got a few polite nods asking me to be more careful. I realized that it was the left hand drive and traffic that confused me and stopped my frantic search of directions whenever I reached a zebra path. I just moved on majestically at red lights, as the traffic stopped with a graceful ease; I felt as if the world stopped for me as I moved.

Almost all the Danes I spoke to knew English, though there were a few working class people who didn’t. In my racial confusion, I could not make out, who is who and the first person whom I asked for directions, knew no English at all. Still he stopped to help. He was a puckered young man, with shoulder- length hair and denim jacket, straight out of the hippie 60s. He could catch ‘university’ from my query and though he was carrying a huge gunny bag, he shoved it on his back and guided me through a road that sloped upwards to the horizon without panting at all. It was a pleasant sunny day; he stopped and pointed at the university. It was a sprawling green space lined with trees that filtered the diaphanous veil of sunlight and brick buildings centered with an artificial pond with frolicking geese. I could see students relax and study near the green, mossy pond with a book or two in hand. My escort left me there with a smile and indicated that he has to go the opposite direction and I was left with a meek and apologetic ‘Mange tak’ (thank you so much), for having inconvenienced him.

Hamlet’s Grave

I couldn’t wait for the evening, when the seminar organizers were supposed to take us on a Hamlet tour. According to history, the birthplace of Prince Hamlet was Denmark, and as any lover of literature, I was curiously looking forward to the tour to visit Hamlet’s grave. I had an excellent guide Inger, who was a student of the University, whose versatility and historical precision were heartening. An amazing thing about her was the way she interspersed self critique and sarcasm into her narratives, that she had all the tourists on the splits throughout the tour. Like everyone else, I was looking forward to see a huge sarcophagus with the embellishment and grandeur of fame to mark the glory of Prince Hamlet.

Though Inger promised us a big surprise at the place of the grave, I was not ready for what I saw. The grave was nothing but a huge tomb stone erected on a sprawling land, which was part meadow and part bog land. Inger strode on confidently to the stone and narrated the story to all of us whose jaws dropped beyond belief. She told us the story of Prince Hamlet, which was different from that of the protagonist who was dramatized by Shakespeare. The real Prince Hamlet lived around 7th century AD and of course he had a step father, his mother’s paramour, who had murdered Hamlet’s father. But, of course the real Hamlet’s life had less masala than Shakespeare had imaginatively depicted. Hamlet is supposed to have killed his step-father without any qualms and of course he seems not to have doubted or in the least have had any dilemmas about: “Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer/ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, /And by opposing end them?” The legends say that Prince Hamlet supposedly overcame all the impediments he faced with an iron hand and ruled the country until his old age. According to Inger, the large hewn stone epitaph of Prince Hamlet also had a hilarious anecdote behind it as it stands as a lampoon on the touristic curiosity and culture of any traveller. According to Inger, the historical fact that Hamlet’s fort existed in Arhus once upon a time, invited many a curious travellers to Arhus. In 1930, there was this particular American tourist who was in search of the relics of Hamlet. The local people seem to have capitulated fast on this element of curiosity and they are supposed to have erected a large menhir-like monolith with an epitaph inscribed on it. This was the story of the fake tomb stone of Hamlet, which everybody knew as fake, and due to its sheer outright forgery and duplicity won considerable authenticity and tourist attraction over a period of time. Instead of being disappointed, we went back amused and full of awe in the way history was blatantly doctored to challenge the touristic impulses.




Rosenholm
Our next destination was Rosenholm, the seventeenth century castle which belonged to Rosencrantz. The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern we know are again characters straight out of Shakespeare’s Hamlet; they were the sycophantic courtiers who were the Prince’s childhood friends, who were dispatched with a letter to murder Hamlet. In the play, Hamlet finds the letter and rewrites it in such a manner that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are in turn killed by the King of England. Though sources say that Rosencrantz was a common name among the nobility of Denmark during the Seventeenth century, Shakespeare borrowed the name from one particular Rosencrantz who was a noble man who owned the castle Rosenholm. It was built around a magnificent moat with green lawns.

Imprimis, the castle reverberated with many an unsung song of the heroics and fame the nobility had tried to build up as beau monde over the ages. The tapestries in the castle were priceless, so were the curios, medallions and trophies which were preserved right from 16th century onwards. In one of the drawing rooms, hung with Persian tapestries, Inger turned to us unexpectedly and asked if any of us felt invisible or the touch of a cold snout on our feet. At the mention, most of us felt something spooky and shifted on our feet uneasily. That reaction was psychological, yet almost instinctual, because Inger was good at the dramatically sensationalizing ‘stories’. Apparently, what was to be told by Inger was a gory tale which could not be easily digested. She told us about a particularly gory ritual, prevalent in Denmark, which was supposed to augur well for the Kingdom as such. According to the belief, whenever a new fortress was constructed, Virgin blood was used to congeal the mortar to reinforce the strength of the fort. This belief emanated from the basic belief that a virgin’s blood ensured the impenetrability of the fort. Rosencrantz’s daughter’s blood was mixed with Rosenholm’s mortar. For the public, she was slain for reinforcing the safety of the fort. But the inner circles knew that as she had an affair with a courtier and was impregnated with his child, Rosencrantz ruthlessly slew her in order to preserve the family honour. When she was killed, her pet dog was also killed along with her and it is believed that in that particular drawing room where we stood, their ghosts still roamed about and the pet dog often rubbed its cold snout against people’s ankles.

A pleasant twilight was setting in around Rosenholm. Despite the speechless grandeur the castle provided; there was also this gruesome, unsettling account of cruelty that remained hand in glove with the magnificence of fame and glory. It was indeed disturbing to face these dual propensities of glory and gore mixed together, but often attractions like fame, honour, grandeur, etc often speak about the power games and subtle politics that take devious and circuitous route to cruelty and oppression as well.

I was moody on my way back and of course was lucky to be seated near Constance Keinf, an Associate Professor who taught Business English at the Business School at the University of Arhus. We began talking about the upheavals and hazards that we faced in the profession, and then we got into personal details. Connie was betrothed a Danish gentleman, though she was originally American (of Jewish-German parents). She promised to take me to her fiancé’s house that evening. I was not in the least reluctant, for I wanted to go to a Danish house and probably enjoy the local hospitality. In the evening, Connie led me to a two-storied house, which opened to a warm and cozy interior. The house was full of smiling people, reminding me of the old joint families we had almost twenty years back. There were grandmothers and grand pas and grand aunts and an ageing mom and dad, shadowed by three sons and a daughter. I wondered if all Danish houses had such big families living inside them and Connie told me yet another story of family and relationships in Denmark. She said that the Danish have this ‘let-go policy’ for youngsters and teenagers. Once when the youngsters are in their teens and early youth, they are given a lot of freedom to choose their path and way of life. They are let free to find their own path through mischief, experimentation, trials and errors. Due to this unrestrained freedom given in the teens, Connie swears, most of the youth take a turn coat return to family and values related to fidelity and stability in the late youth. Once they return to the security of familial ethos, it seems there is no turning back.

The next day, our first destination was the Moesgaard museum and then the Women’s and Children’s Museum in Arhus. The Moesgaard museum was a delight for all kinds 0f avante garde architectural skills. Moesgaard also had this well preserved bog body of the Grauballe Man, preserved in the most acute of mummified corpse right from 4th century BC. The Grauballe Man was astonishingly well-preserved; he has his head and hair intact and just that his skin and hair were discolored because of the passage of time. This man was supposed to have died at a very young age of thirty and he was supposed to have been either executed or murdered because he had a fractured head and he seems to have been likely to have been drowned in quagmire as either a sacrifice or as part of effacing evidence. After seeing Grauballe Man, and after being breathtakingly overwhelmed in his ancient presence that mingled pre history, shreds of speculative history on the lives and times of ancient cultures, societies, etc, I made a quiet exit from the museum. I was overwhelmed at the sight of the ironic immortality of death staring right on my face.

Kvindemuseet i Danmark

From here, I went to Women’s Museum, Kvindemuseet i Danmark, a museum dedicated exclusively for women and children. This is one of the few women’s museums in the world and it’s a national museum focused on women’s lives and work through the last 200 years, but also with lines to the more distant past. The museum had many exciting games for children specially designed to kindle their interest in the past artifacts and details. It also had a varied display of items which ranged from their cradles, their chastity belts, the wedding trousseaus, health pads, kitchen utensils, art objects and scientific equipment either discovered or used by the women of yore. Every item had a secret history as well the user’s personal history entwined to it. Every item historicized the past of the women and children who lived ahead of us, their joys, struggles, achievements and contributions which have in fact led an easy path towards our present. I loved the way each and every small item of the women of the past were taken care of, listed and well preserved for posterity. Most of things we take for granted as mundane and quotidian in our grandmothers and mothers’ lives were treated with outmost respect and concern in the Museum. The best part of the museum visit was that, I was in the company of two exemplary women, Anne and Karla, from Finland and the Czech Republic, who were there with me telling us about their countries and the women’s spaces couched within those worlds.

My last day in Arhus was a memorable one, I had to catch a flight at 7 am and from the city the air port was a good 45 minutes away. There was a bus that left for air port at 5.00 am. I was up quite early and walked to the bus stop. But for a few cars which sped across, I had no company whatsoever. It was a lovely pre-dawn, with a light, bone-chilling drizzle, the streets were quiet and I was the only person who walked on the streets with such an assurance and feeling of safety which I could hardly feel in my home town. I reached the bus station and waited till 4. 45 and still there was no sight of the bus as well as other co-passengers. For the first time I started I looked at my ‘loneness’ with distaste. Suddenly a bread truck stopped opposite to me and the delivery man got out for opening his shop and delivering bread. I went to him and asked him where exactly I could find the bus to the air port. The man turned and looked at me disconcertedly and shook his head “No English, English No!” This was the wrong time to meet a person who knew no English and I desperately tried to choreograph a plane by opening my arms wide. Then he opened his truck door and indicated that I get in. After a moment’s hesitation, I was in and he drove me to a bus which was waiting impatiently to take passengers to the air port, I found out that I was waiting in the wrong bus station for the right bus! There I was, I shook his hands and bowed to him and said ‘TAK’, ‘Thanks a lot’. The bus departed within minutes of my taking seat inside and I remembered this bread delivery man as my savior, if I hadn’t taken this bus there would have been no other transport for another hour and I would have definitely missed my flight to Copenhagen to reach home. When I kissed good bye to Arhus, I had only good memories and more of a traveller’s itch to travel, explore the unknown and thus know more about oneself.