Holger Danske, Asleep in Kronborg

Under Kronborg Castle at Helsingør, in the galleries the garrison once used, a bearded man in armour sits with his beard grown into the table in front of him: Holger Danske, who will wake when Denmark is in mortal danger. The story is told as one thing and it is three. Ogier le Danois is a minor baron in the Chanson de Roland, named eight times in the whole poem. He became a Danish hero through a chapbook that Christiern Pedersen, unable to read French, paid to have turned into Latin before writing his Danish from that; it was printed at Malmö on 30 January 1534. The sleeper under Kronborg is first legible in Just Mathias Thiele's Danmarks Folkesagn of 1843, where the table is stone and cracks right through when he lifts his head, and where Thiele himself files the tale beside Barbarossa in the Kyffhäuser and Arthur in England. Hans Christian Andersen turned the table to marble in 1845. The figure visitors photograph is younger than all of it: a concrete cast of 1985, after a plaster model of 1907.

Three different things are usually told here as one story, and they are three centuries apart. The first is a Frankish nobleman. The second is a chapbook printed in Malmo. The third is a plaster figure carried down into the casemates in October 1907. The oldest layer that can be pointed at is a man called Autcharius, a Frankish magnate of the late eighth century whose only recorded acts are that he was hostile to Charlemagne and that, after Carloman's death in 771, he went with Carloman's widow Gerberga and her two small sons when she fled to her father, the Lombard king Desiderius. He is mentioned in the ninth-century Latin chronicle written by the monk of St Gall. The philologist Kristoffer Nyrop set the chain out in 1893, in his introduction to a school edition of Ingemann's poem, and it is from him that the derivation Autcharius > Audgar > Ogier comes. After Autcharius the record goes quiet for two centuries, and the man reappears in French around the time of the First Crusade with a surname attached: le Danois. In the Chanson de Roland he is already there, and he is a small part. Counted in Joseph Bedier's edition of the Oxford manuscript, Ogier is named eight times in the whole Old French text, against 125 occurrences of Rollant. Charlemagne summons him to council under the pine: "Le duc Oger e l'arcevesque Turpin" (v. 170). Ganelon, asked who will ride the vanguard, answers "Oger de Denemarche: n'avez barun ki mielz de lui la facet" (vv. 749-750). One laisse, CCLVI, is his alone: "Li quens Oger cuardise n'out unkes", the count Ogier never knew cowardice. At the judicial duel that closes the poem it is he who formally carries the double challenge. Where the byname le Danois came from, Nyrop wrote in 1893, is not known, and every attempt to show that the man was of Danish descent had so far failed. Only in the following century, in La Chevalerie d'Ogier de Danemarche, does he become the protagonist and the son of the Danish king Gudfred, handed over to Charlemagne as a hostage. He came north twice. First through the Norse Karlamagnus saga, turned into the Danish Karl Magnus' Kronike, a manuscript of 1480 printed in 1509. Then, decisively, through a chapbook, and the chapbook's own preface records how it was made. Christiern Pedersen, canon of Lund, writes that he was "budet og befalet", bidden and commanded, to hunt down the old chronicle of Holger Danske, and that he was promised good pay for it; the commission is generally read as having come from King Christian II. He found the book in Paris, printed in French, under the title L'hystoire d'Ogier le Dannoys, duc de Dannemarche, probably during his stay of 1527. And here is the part that gets left out. Pedersen could not read French. In his own words: "Saa lod jeg hende vdsaette paa latine oc gaff der fore guld oc paenninge, thi jeg kunde icke selff forstande det Frantsoske tungemaall. Siden screff jeg hende paa danske effter latinen met stort arbeyde." He paid to have it put into Latin, and wrote his Danish from the Latin. The Danish national hero arrived in Denmark as a translation of a translation. The colophon dates the book to the day, once you do the arithmetic: "prentet i Malmo af Johan Hochstraten Den fredag nest fore Kyndelmosse Aar MDXXXIIII", the Friday before Candlemas, 1534. Candlemas is 2 February; in 1534, in the Julian calendar then in use, 2 February fell on a Monday, so the Friday before it was 30 January 1534. Pedersen's text insists that Holger was a real man, "Kong Gottricks Son og fodder her i Danmarck", the eighty-eighth king of the realm, and complains that Danes had forgotten him so thoroughly that ordinary people could say nothing of him except that he had beaten Burmand. The book then stayed in Danish cottages for three centuries. In 1795 the literary historian Rasmus Nyerup wrote in the monthly Iris that it was to be found in nearly every second peasant's hut and was read aloud on holy evenings and at carding-bees. In 1837 B. S. Ingemann rebuilt the whole thing as a poem in five song-cycles, Holger Danske, which went to a second edition in 1845 and a third in 1847 and gave Danish song two standards, "I alle de Riger og Lande" and "Jeg saa kun tilbage". None of that is Kronborg. The sleeper under the fortress is a separate story, and the oldest printed version I have been able to read is Just Mathias Thiele's, in Danmarks Folkesagn, first volume, published by C. A. Reitzel in Copenhagen in 1843, pages 18 to 19, under the heading "Holger Danske under Kronborg". It is short and it is specific. For a long time the clash of weapons was heard now and then under Kronborg fortress, and nobody in the whole country dared go down the lowest passages. A slave who had forfeited his life was offered his freedom if he would descend as far as the passage led and report what he found there. He came at last to a great iron door that opened of itself when he knocked on it, and saw before him a deep vault. A nearly burnt-out lamp hung under the ceiling, and beneath it stood "et maegtig stort Steenbord", a mighty great stone table, with steel-clad champions sitting round it, bowed, their heads resting on crossed arms. The one at the head of the table rose, and it was Holger Danske; and as he lifted his head from his arm the stone table cracked right through, "thi hans Skaeg var ivoxet", for his beard had grown into it. He asked for the man's hand. The slave did not dare to give it, and held out an iron bar instead, which Holger squeezed until the marks showed in the metal, and let go with the words "Nu! det glaeder mig, at der dog endnu er Maend i Danmark", it gladdens me that there are still men in Denmark. Two years later Hans Christian Andersen printed his own tale, Holger Danske, and changed the furniture. In Andersen the table is marble, not stone, and an angel of God comes every Christmas Eve to tell the sleeper that Denmark is not yet in real danger. What the summaries lose is that the tale is a frame story about an old carver of ships' figureheads, and that its point runs the other way from a sleeping knight: the grandfather believes he served beside Holger at the Battle of Copenhagen, "den danske anden april", in Steen Bille's squadron, and the tale ends by naming who Holger really is in the carver's account, namely Holberg, Tycho Brahe and the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, to whom the family raises its glass in the last lines. The figure in the casemates is younger than any of this. Hotel Marienlyst in Helsingor commissioned a bronze Holger Danske from the sculptor Hans Peder Pedersen-Dan in 1907, and the bronze was unveiled at the hotel that July. To cast it, Pedersen-Dan first modelled a large plaster figure, and in October 1907 that plaster, not the bronze, was placed in Kronborg's casemates, where it became far better known than the finished statue. Damp destroyed it in the end, and in 1985 it was replaced by a copy in concrete cast by Eric Erlandsen. The concrete is what visitors photograph today. The bronze stayed at Marienlyst until 2013, when it was auctioned for 3.2 million kroner to buyers from western Jutland and re-erected in Skjern. And in the spring of 1943, in a flat at Overgaden neden Vandet 51B on Christianshavn in Copenhagen, a resistance group took the name Holger Danske. It counted some 350 members by 1945. Its best-known action was the destruction of the Forum exhibition hall in Copenhagen on 24 August 1943; Danish accounts credit the group with more than a hundred sabotage operations. Two of its members, Bent Faurschou-Hviid, called Flammen, and Jorgen Haagen Schmith, called Citronen, both died in October 1944, and 64 members of the group were killed or executed.

Kronborg stands on the point at 3000 Helsingor, at the narrowest part of the Oresund. The casemates, and the statue at the end of them, are inside the ordinary castle ticket. Checked on the castle's own site on 16 August 2026: adults 150 DKK at the door, 135 DKK bought online, children free, and the ticket is valid for a year from purchase. Opening hours change three times a year. From 28 March to 31 October the castle opens daily, 10:00 to 17:00. From 2 January to 28 March it opens Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 16:00, closed Mondays, with 7 to 22 February open daily. From 1 November to 30 December it opens Tuesday to Friday 10:00 to 16:00 and at weekends 10:00 to 17:00, and it is closed on 24, 25 and 31 December. Prices and hours are the first thing to go out of date on a page like this one; check them before travelling. Getting there without a car is easy. DSB's Kystbanen from Copenhagen Central runs roughly every twenty minutes and takes about 46 minutes to Helsingor; from the station it is a ten-minute walk along the harbour. Buses 801A and 802 serve the station. There is public parking at Nordhavnsvej, five minutes' walk north, which the castle warns fills early, advising arrival before 10:30 or after 14:00, and there is accessible parking inside the grounds by the red gate. The casemates themselves are the underground galleries built to shelter the garrison, up to 350 soldiers during a siege, with a forge and a stable down there. They are dark and damp. The castle tells visitors to bring a torch and to follow the oil lamps, and it asks that the bats which hibernate in the galleries in winter, a protected species, be left alone. The honest warning is about stairs. Kronborg states plainly on its own visitor pages that it has many stairs and no lift and that it is not easy to get around as a wheelchair user; the casemates are the least accessible part of the building. Guide and service dogs are welcome, and a Danish companion card admits one companion free. For context while you are there: the castle was built by Frederik II between 1574 and 1585, burnt in 1629 and rebuilt by Christian IV, plundered by the Swedes in 1658, and inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2000. The castle's own pages say that Shakespeare never set foot in it. And if it is the bronze Holger you want rather than the concrete one, he is not here: he is 250 kilometres west, in Skjern.