How to Sleep With a Dyne

THERE is a rumor in Copenhagen that it is possible to drive from one end of Denmark to the other — Copenhagen to the Skaw — in a single day. Since the Danes, despite their tendency to turn everything possible into a joke, are honest at heart and accurate with facts to an almost worrisome degree, this story must be true. But how the fact was discovered is a mystery, for Danish driving is a pavane of infinite stateliness and courtesy.

The young man who delivered my rented car, after the papers had been signed and the various gadgets on the dashboard had been identified, drew a long breath and braced himself for unpleasant but necessary business. “I must tell you,” he began, “that in Denmark we consider that in almost all circumstances, tire pedestrian has the right of way.” I assured him that I consider the pedestrian has the right of way in all circumstances, as do bicycles, motor scooters, horses, and wandering livestock of any description. He grinned happily. I think he would have patted me on the head if such a gesture had been feasible in that midget vehicle. “You will have no trouble,” he announced, and went off with his documents.

He was mistaken. I got lost at once, and if the overcast had not broken momentarily, would have wound up in South Zealand. With the sun peering dimly on my left, I stopped and gave the right of way to an old man whose wooden clogs turned up at the toe in a curve that provided the other end of an arc begun by his long, curved nose. There was a gas station handy. The youth in charge of the pumps loped out, smiling.

Do you speak English? The smile was obscured by that look of guilt which afflicts any young Dane who cannot decently answer yes to this question. Speaking English, one gathers, is practically a patriotic duty.

I pointed at what I hoped was the main road north and asked, Kronborg? Utter dismay. The boy dashed into the station and reappeared with a map. We were here (miles off course); that street there (carefully indicated both on the spot and on the map) would lead into this road here (pencil check), which would lead into the main route to Helsingor and Kronborg (large triumphant star). He might have been reciting low limericks for all I knew, but the pantomime was clear as Euclid.

A thousand thanks was about the extent of my Danish vocabulary, and for once it was suitable. The main north highway appeared exactly as described, and this time I succeeded in transferring from it to the coast road, which is much prettier.

This particular coast road rambles along the west shore of Øresund, with handsome houses and small forest patches on its inland side and alternating marshes and beaches toward the water. The beaches are flat, narrow, and white. In the swamps, tall grass and reeds, dried yellow by the winter, rose out of a mat of thin, new green. Behind this loose grass screen, swans bobbed on slate-blue water which grew paler toward the east, melting at last into a thin, silvery mist. Above the mist, the sunless sky showed a surprising variety of color, great sheets and streaks of watery blue, gray, violet, and purple drifting across each other in the wind.

A few miles south of HelsingØr is a new museum called Louisiana. It was established by a cheese manufacturer, reportedly to ease his conscience; his crime was selling the secret of Danish blue to somebody in Wisconsin. Since the philanthropist conceived his project rather suddenly, following the Heather Ale transaction, he had little to put in the museum but a few pieces of sculpture, some rather undistinguished paintings, and a display of modern Danish furniture, glass, and pottery, all fine items and easily collected. But this sort of thing doesn’t really make much of a museum. Louisiana, consequently, houses a wild variety of traveling art shows and a steady program of small concerts and recitals.

The museum building is something of a work of art in itself. The property of Louisiana (the place originally belonged to a man whose several wives were all named Louise) consisted of a sizable house wreathed with balconies, railings, pergolas, and trellises, all painted blinding white. This gigantic wedding cake stood at the base of a triangular point of land jutting into the sea. A steep, heavily wooded ravine with a round pond at the bottom bordered the property on the north side, and the grounds between the house and the sandy bluff overlooking the beach were dotted with ornamental trees and shrubs, some exotic and some merely old. The architects commissioned to enlarge this manor to respectable museum size were forbidden to tamper with the house or to chop a single tree. They managed by constructing a long, narrow, one-story wing composed of a series of blocks jogged along the lip of the ravine, where there was a gap between the tame trees belonging to the house and the wild ones in the gully. The effect of this contrivance, in which the side walls are largely of glass and the inner ones of unfinished wood and white-painted brick, is thoroughly charming. Views of the garden, where daffodils and narcissus glinted against dark spruce and fir, of the shadowy ravine reflecting green into the pond, and of the museum exhibits crisscross the eye as the building winds its way to the end of the point. There a small restaurant and terrace overlook the sea, for no cultural enterprise is undertaken in Denmark without the near presence of refreshments.

At the moment, Louisiana was showing two displays from the United States -Grandma Moses in the house and pop art in the wing. There was no doubt where the interest of the Danish public lay. Attractive primitive paintings are to be found in folk museums throughout the country, but a lifesize man in plaster of paris, seated on a mangy cafeteria bench and brooding over a cup and saucer on an authentically battered table, was a novelty. The only thing missing was the coffee, a lack which some Dane had striven to remedy by dropping a bit of small change into the cup. Action criticism seems a logical consequence of action painting. I regret my inability to interpret this early example of what may be a significant new form.

NORTH of Louisiana lie the town of HelsingØr and Kronborg Castle, where visiting English companies play Hamlet every summer. The castle looms up across a small inlet in a flourish of baroque towers and turrets, but is finally reached through the middle of HelsingØr’s dock district, amid a great clanging of hammers and squealing of whistles. Several cars and a sight-seeing bus were approaching Kronborg along with me, and we created much delay, everybody trying to give somebody else the honor of precedence. A little engine towing a large crane waited politely until we all got off its track. Kronborg rises straight out of the sea, with a moat looping around the inland side. Inland from the moat lies the parking lot, backed by a road, the tracks, and a collection of work sheds and docks where large ships were tied up. Ducks and swans patrol the reedy moat, indifferent to the industrial racket across the road.

An old bridge and an impressive gate lead into the main courtyard, large and stone-paved, where the play is staged before audiences who come, if they know the Danish climate, with plastic raincoats secreted in their evening clothes. Aside from the danger of being dampened, there is an appropriateness about this Hamlet-at-Kronborg arrangement that is almost eerie. A play can be staged anywhere, of course, but Kronborg, begun in brick and finished off in 1585 with more elegant sandstone, looks so precisely right as a setting for this particular play that one is tempted to believe Shakespeare had seen the place — or, worse folly, that the architects of King Frederik II foresaw the requirements of Shakespeare’s characters. Great formal rooms of state lead into dark passageways to which small, conspiratorial private chambers cling like secret vices. The thing can be taken, with little strain on the imagination, as a physical symbol of the play’s shifts between public decorum and private deviltry. (Common sense points out that private apartments were small simply because the royal family wanted to be comfortable. The great halls are obviously unheatable, and life in winter must have required heavy applications of furs and alcohol.) The ghost would have walked on the gun terrace, where the old cannon which enforced Denmark’s collection of tolls from ships using the strait still point northeast toward the Swedish coast.

Kronborg is a palace inside a fortification, and although the inside has been restored with fine taste and restraint and contains some exceptional furniture from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I preferred the gun terrace. Below the cannon snouts, the wall joined a slope running into the water. This area — could it be a glacis? — was not exactly paved, but, rather, surfaced with rounded yellowish stones. Four or five people had worked their way down the slope and were fishing, balanced precariously on rocks originally put there, with some art, to discourage the human foot. The wind complicated the business, and the whole situation was one to arouse sympathy. I watched hopefully, but nobody caught so much as a minnow.

The gun terrace trails off into gigantic mole runs — steep-sided artificial hills covered with short, rippling grass and honeycombed with passageways and portholes. Two little boys were playing war, stalking each other up and down the slopes. No more sensible, I peered into a barred porthole and confronted, at the other end of a drainpipe tunnel, one of the urchins peering back at me. We both withdrew in chagrin.

Back in the main courtyard, a party had assembled for a guided tour of the dungeons. Much of Kronborg can be viewed without any formality beyond the purchase of a ticket, but the dungeons are strictly a supervised excursion, for good reason. A stranger could blunder around down there for hours, and it would take a search party to extract him.

With a sound sense of drama, the restorers have kept electricity out of the place. The dungeons are seen by the light of small wall candles and the guide’s kerosene lantern, all of which smoke and stink in authentic antique fashion. Most of this subterranean area was admittedly never anything worse than emergency troops’ quarters, but there are one or two dank, airless, low-ceilinged rooms that chill the blood with real terror.

SOUTHWEST from HelsingØr, the road to Roskilde ran through flat, soft farm country where tractors rolled across the fields and fat silly-looking birds hustled after them, hunting in the newly turned ground. In flight, these lapwings suggest sea gulls gone slightly awry, but on the ground, mincing on inadequate feet and bobbing their small, wispily crested heads, they look like dowagers with pinching shoes.

The farmhouses in this district were set widely apart, often surrounded by orchards and high hedges, and frequently built on the same general plan as the castle of Kronborg: a square of buildings surrounding a courtyard entered by a large closable door. I could see these doors in the houses north of the road. Those on the south presented solid, usually windowless walls. The pagan Scandinavian hell was a hall with a leaky roof and a door facing north. It had other, fanciful trimmings as well, but that north door was a feature based on practical experience.

Most of the farms were devoid of outbuildings, barns and so on being incorporated into the basic square and all of them painted white. The per capita consumption of white paint must be higher in Denmark than anywhere else on earth. The situation almost warrants a formula: D + W = WP. A number of the farms still had the old soft-angled thatch roofs, but thatching is on the way to becoming a lost art or an impractical trade or both, and various modern substitutes, like corrugated iron, were deplorably evident. The Danes I met who still own such roofs worry, not about leakage and fire as one might think (thatch is alleged to be impervious to the first and surprisingly resistant to the second), but about the inevitable day when old age will just wear the things out.

Roskilde, at the inland end of a fjord running up to the north coast, was once a seat of kings but is now a quiet, pleasant little city. Its great attraction is the cathedral, where Danish rulers have been buried for nearly a thousand years. I may as well admit that my interest in old churches, no matter how nobly Gothic, is negligible, while rows of sarcophagi adorned with bronze wreaths and armorial bearings remind me, soporifically, of Dracula. Roskilde Cathedral has some carved wood panels of great age which depict biblical stories with a vivacity bordering on comedy, but otherwise it was no place for me.

The tourist office suggested an alternative: ruins of the church of St. Lawrence, under the town square. With a large iron key loaned by the tourist office in my hand, I hunted about among parked cars and coffee stands and found a flight of steps protected by a casual iron railing. The door at the bottom gave on the oddest display of ruins I have ever seen. In a sort of cement cave, lit partly by feeble electricity and partly by daylight filtering greenishly through heavy glass tiles in the roof, lay the lower walls and part of the flooring of what had been the choir and apse of an eleventh-century church.

It was built of limestone, now badly eroded, with a floor of red and black squares. (The red squares, according to the brochure, were originally white. How anybody knows this is not explained; brochure writers always leave out the interesting details.) The remains of several brick coffins, much too small for any modern Dane, lay in the apse, and a passage ran around outside the whole structure, so that one could circle it, peering through gaps in the stonework at the blurred remains of ornamental carving. There was a faint, steady patter overhead, where people went about their affairs in the square.

St. Lawrence’s church had a sad fate: first overshadowed by the new cathedral nearby, it was then slowly engulfed by the rising level of Roskilde’s streets, which were simply repaved over the accumulated rubbish whenever they became intolerable. The church was refloored twice to keep up with the outside world, which explains the coffins, but with the coming of the Reformation, the whole building was judged dispensable and flattened. All that survives aboveground is one tower, usefully incorporated into the town hall. Excavation could retrieve only that part of the walls already buried before the church was razed, but the diggers turned up a fine collection of nonecclesiastical junk — bits, stirrups, knives, broken hardware, coins — all the trash thrown or dropped in the square by the medieval citizens of Roskilde, who were, judging by the display in the museum, a cheerfully careless lot.

Deceived by the long light of the northern spring, I reached the town of Ringsted in what I thought was midafternoon. Actually, it was past six o’clock, and everything was closed down except a coffee stall on the square.

The cobblestone square contains a row of large, flat boulders, survivors of the circle where the old legislature sat to debate in the open air. Ringsted is proud of these stones, which prove that it was an important center of government centuries before the Christian era. I sat on all the stones, one after the other, to the amazement of the coffee-stall proprietor, and decided that they must have been designed for men close to six feet tall. This brought back the question of the coffins at Roskildc. Is it conceivable that medieval people were as much smaller than their forebears as they were smaller than their descendants? Or did the old pagan lawmakers want to increase their height and visibility?

Absolved from viewing the inside of the church and the tombs of kings Valdemar the Great, Valdemar the Victorious, Knud VI, and their kin, I genuinely admired the outside. The building has space around it, grass plots, and an orchard of fruit trees in blossom. It was altogether a satisfactory thing to observe, for Ringsted is almost as old as Roskilde and less complicated by later additions.

The Danes began, after their conversion to Christianity under King Harald Bluetooth (nobody seems to know how he got this name), son of Gorm the Old (who may have been two or three other people), by building small Romanesque churches. By the end of the eleventh century, presumably convinced that the new religion would last, they were enlarging and rebuilding most of these structures in their own version of Gothic, which retained much of the sturdy, clean-cut simplicity of the Romanesque and depended for ornament on painted interior walls rather than elaborate stonework. Partly for this reason, partly, no doubt, because Lutheranism did away with minor saints, votive candles, and well-intentioned but ill-conceived dedicatory objects, Danish churches give an impression of austere practicality. They are unquestionably elegant but feel uninhabited.

A Dane assured me that they are uninhabited. “It’s a state religion, so nobody bothers to go to church,” he declared, and proved it with the story of a friend whose drunken, feather-wit brother turned up missing. He was discovered in a nearby mental hospital, to which he had been dispatched by the local parson. Somewhat annoyed (after all, the fellow was merely drunk), the sober brother asked why the minister had taken such excessively drastic action. “But you don’t understand,” cried the minister, much shaken. “He was in the church — praying. What else could I do?”

Having settled on a satisfactory style of architecture, the Danes sprinkled their low green countryside with high white churches and stopped for good. Almost any country church dates from the twelfth century or earlier. Any later church — barring those incorporated into various palaces — is pretty certain to be a twentieth-century creation in a previously unsettled district. The Reformation in Denmark was a discreet, peaceable, wellmanaged affair in which nobody thought it necessary to smash and burn perfectly good buildings. Painted walls were whitewashed, superfluous statuary was put into the attic, and business continued in a decent way. The supply of well-preserved medieval churches is therefore close to inexhaustible and definitely stupefying.

I HAD been warned in Copenhagen that hotel rooms are not to be counted on, at any season, in the larger cities. “They’re always having conventions of furniture makers out there,” to quote precisely. Slagelse, I concluded from a study of the guidebook, was a promisingly small city. Besides, a Viking camp fias been unearthed in the vicinity.

The Slagelse hotel was my first encounter with an old-fashioned Danish hostelry, and experience proved it to be typical of the breed.

The young boots spoke no English, but the deskman did. The food, which I ordered by pointing at random, was good; the wine list was better; the lighting was dim; the walls of the dining room were hung thick with the works of local painters. Until quite recently, a group of painters flourished as a matter of course in any Danish city, because it was unthinkable that a respectable citizen would put anything on his walls except an original work. The painter might be unknown forty miles away, and the buyer was under no illusion that he was collecting a potential old master. On this happy understanding, a great deal of pleasant painting was done, sold, and continues to ornament Danish houses in a highly agreeable, unpretentious way. It also ornaments Danish hotels, and so lavishly that I suspect arrangements about bar bills. My room, when I reached it, was huge, papered with something resembling Battenberg lace, and equipped with a doona.

A doona — correctly spelled dyne — is a feather puff inside a cotton bag, and it serves as sheet and blankets in one. I had actually met these things on an earlier visit to Denmark, and remembered them as sly enemies, given to ambush in the middle of the night. I gave this one a shake and went out to look for the Viking camp, called Trelleborg.

The deskman was eager to help but incapacitated by his ignorance of Trelleborg’s location. Nobody, he lamented, had ever asked about it before. He consulted the boots — boots is the man to cultivate in a provincial hotel — who naturally knew where it was, how to get there, and also that it would be closed.

I drove off anyway in the last pale twilight. The expedition rapidly became a shot — several shots in the dark. A light fog came up, trailing delusive ribbons across the road and wavering raggedly but obstructively around signs. When a drizzle set - in, I gave up and retreated to the hotel, having tried every west road out of Slagelse except the right one.

I gave the dyne another shake, to remind it who was boss, and went to bed. As I had foreseen, the dyne jumped me at midnight, bent on suffocation. The defense against this maneuver is to grasp the top edge of the dyne and flap the whole thing briskly up and down until the feathers are fluffed up. Peace lasts until the feathers settle again, causing the dyne to cling to its owner like a rubber glove, and with the same liquefying effect. Weeks of dynes taught me that its place on a warm night is anywhere but the bed; on a moderate night, the dyne must be aired, or flaunted, about every two hours. On a really cold night, it is a treasure worth buckling to the soul with hoops of steel.

IN THE gray, rain-wet morning I found Trelleborg with no trouble at all. It lay down a well-marked side road which proceeded across country in a series of unaccountable right-angle turns. It was following the borders of old farms. I finally arrived at an avenue of trees, unmistakably a farmer’s driveway, but since the sign said Trelleborg, I went on in. A cherry orchard blossomed on one side of the drive, and on the other, six huge, overmuscled, smoke-colored bulls with black heads were tethered out by rings in their noses. The seventh animal was a cream-colored pasha with pink eyes who reclined in hideous state on a patch of buttercups.

The driveway swung past the farmhouse and into a small parking lot. Trelleborg was simply a section of pasture closed off by a tiny ticket booth and a locked gate. A strange humpbacked building of softly curved brown planks and posts stood beyond the gate, and on my side of the fence an old man in rubber boots was scything at wet weeds. He stopped work, said something, and slouched off with the scythe over his shoulder. I considered the best way to climb the fence, for it was too wet a morning to roll under it.

A woman appeared from the house, evidently recruited from some chore like chicken feeding, for she wore an apron over her starched dress, a sweater, and rubber boots. She took my inopportune arrival (the place didn’t open officially for two hours) with unperturbed good humor. I handed over one krone, the gate was opened, and Trelleborg was mine except for the diffident protests of some black-faced sheep.

The place is presumed to date from about the year 1000 and to have been built as one of a string of camps set up by Sven Forkbeard (son of Bluetooth) as bases for his assault on England. Islandhopping is an old invention. It was old in Sven’s day, but he made exceptionally clever use of it.

What remains of this camp is a circular earthwork about twenty feet high, with openings cut through it at north, east, south, and west. It has, naturally, been an obvious feature of the landscape for years, and excavation was not a matter of finding it but of rooting up the ground to make certain when it was built and how it was used. Denmark is thick with earthworks of one sort or another, from small barrows to large hills, simply waiting for the authorities to get around to them. There is no great hurry. A farmer traditionally plows around those on his place, and amateur digging is now strictly forbidden. If it were not, the country would be a paradise for disorganized antiquarians, for a map with every potential dig marked looks like a piece of cross-stitch embroidery.

The ground enclosed by the central earthwork is something over four hundred feet across, and the sheep-cropped grass is now dotted with little cement blocks, showing where the excavators found, in the soil, traces of the walls and posts of the Viking barracks. The plan is perfectly regular. Roads ran between the gates, north to south and east to west. In each of the pie-piece quarters, four buildings stood in a square, forming an enclosed yard. There was one small extra building in the northeast quarter, and two very small structures, one at the north gate and one at the west, were presumably guard posts. The whole affair was reinforced with palisades inside and outside the earthwork, and the entrances had formidably solid gates.

The whale-backed building out by the ticket booth is a partly conjectural reconstruction of one of these barracks. I gathered from a study of the inevitable brochure that the conjecture has to do mostly with the height of things and the shape of the roof, for excavation seems to have established beyond question the placing of the doors and the fact that the side walls were made of vertical planks with a row of posts standing free outside them. The building is long, with curved walls tapering toward the ends, being in fact the shape of a large galley with the bow and stern bobbed off. A narrow gallery runs outside the walls under a sloped roof. If this feature is correctly reconstructed, the galleries met at the inner corners of the square, and a man could move around a whole quarter of the camp under protection from the weather. The doors at either end of the building are so low that I had to duck under the lintel. There are even lower doors in old houses in Norway. I’m afraid these low doors prove only that an enemy coming in doubled over and head down is more easily axed than one coming in upright. If that was really the case, they had two tries at any intruder, for there is a small room, with a door, partitioned off at either end of the building. In the long central section, raised earth shelves run along the side walls; they are wide enough to sleep on, head to the wall and feet warmed by the fire on a stone hearth in the open central space.

The thing looks altogether neat and shipshape, if a bit lacking in privacy and plumbing. I was reminded of Scott’s description of a medieval boudoir; comfort was not missed because it was not known.

It seems unlikely that Trelleborg draws many visitors before summer arrives. Enormous rainstrung spider webs hung between the gallery posts, and the grass grew long around the place. Wet to the ankles, I splashed back to the central earthwork. An iron tower has been put up in the middle, one of the very few misguided moves ever made by Danish restorers. The object, I suppose, was to give visitors a good view of the symmetry with which Trelleborg was laid out, but that can be appreciated perfectly well from the top of the rampart.

I climbed up a sheep track, clutching at clumps of grass which came up in my hand and then at a small leafless bush which did the same thing. Alarmed at the possibility of being charged with defacing a historic monument, I shoved the stump back in the ground and continued on all fours, reaching the top before it occurred to me that that bush had been dead as Sven Forkbeard before I ever laid hands on it.

Trelleborg is over two miles from the Great Belt, the strait separating Zealand from the island of Fyn, which seems a landlubberish location for a Viking base. The view from the top of the earthwork explains it. All the land to the north and west, now low-lying wet meadows drained by a couple of creeks, was formerly a lake, and either the lake or the ancestors of the creeks gave access to the strait. Trelleborg, built on a point extending into the lake, was protected on two sides by water. On the landward side, there is a wide, shallow moat, and beyond that a second earthwork encloses a row of barracks set side by side with one end pointing toward the rampart. A moat lies outside this second rampart, and both rampart and moat angle out on the east side to include a burial ground.

The information published about Trelleborg utterly destroys any romantic notion that Vikings were bloodthirsty pirates who rioted up and down the coasts of Europe as whimsy struck their alefogged minds. This place was laid out for a serious, well-organized campaign and built by engineers who followed a careful plan. The inner rampart, the outer rampart, and the two moats circle around a common center. A line extended through the long axis of the barracks at the outer rampart will infallibly arrive at that center. The inner barracks were identical in size and shape; the outer ones were smaller, but on their own scale, also identical. The unit of measure was the Roman foot, used for both buildings and earthworks. There was some ingenious fancywork at the gates to counteract the pressure of the piled earth.

The Danes now have a habit of making touristenticing posters which amusingly represent their ancestors as stout, bowlegged ruillans, witless wassailers submerged in whiskers, ironmongery, and beer. It is a terrible libel. They ought to be represented as gaunt scholars armed with rods, chains, theodolites, spirit levels, and blueprints.

Next month Miss Adams will write on the canals of Copenhagen.