Take a Viking road trip through Denmark

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Saturday 31, January 2015
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Scandinavia
Take a Viking road trip through Denmark
The new 2,000-mile
Marguerite Route
takes in the nation’s
top sights, including
an ancient bog man,
says Jeremy Taylor
I
am less than an hour into my tour of
Denmark but I’ve already discovered
a Viking monument connected to
Bluetooth. The Jelling Stones are an
axe’s throw from Billund Airport and
a highlight of the Marguerite Route
— a 2,000-mile tour of the country’s
best destinations, named after the present
Queen’s favourite daisy.
These are the first of several odd facts I’ll
learn about Denmark and the East Jutland
region, a former royal hunting ground in
the very heart of the country. Over the
next five days, as I explore a small part of
the daisy trail, I’ll also bump into Elvis and
walk through a psychedelic rainbow.
Jelling is a good place to start. It’s a holy
spot, where Danes first made the transition to Christianity from rampaging Norse
paganism. It was inspired by King Harald
Blatand (or Bluetooth), who had one of the
standing stones erected in memory of his
parents, King Gorm the Old and his wife,
Thyra Danebold. They really knew how to
name royalty in those days.
Reading the storyboard in the town’s
churchyard, I discover that Harald was
also famous for defeating a Norwegian
king, Erik Bloodaxe, and uniting two
nations. The Jelling Stones are now carefully preserved in protective cases but,
pressing my nose against the glass, I can
clearly make out the H and B of Harald’s
initials carved on the side in Norse lettering. Over a millennium later, inventor Jim
Kardach decided that Harald’s surname
would fit his new technology that allowed
bil h
d
lk
mobile phones and computers to talk to
each other — Bluetooth.
East Jutland folk have a knack for
unearthing archaeological artefacts, including some of the best-preserved peat
bodies. Once a corpse had sunk into the
lowland bog, a combination of acid soil
and a lack of oxygen prevented the skin
from deteriorating. During the 1950s,
there were several remarkable and gruesome discoveries.
Silkeborg Museum is home to one of
them. Peering at the shrivelled body of
Tollund Man, I notice that the features
have been so well preserved for 2,400
years that I can count the furrows in
his forehead. I’m close enough to see a tuft
of stubble on his chin and, surprising
given the circumstances, the trace of a
contented smile.
“He may not be the oldest but he is definitely the prettiest,” says the tour guide.
Tollund Man was probably hanged about
350BC. Historians say the fact his eyes
were closed and the body placed in the
foetal position indicate that he was a sacrifice to the gods.
Viking history is one of the main reasons
why travellers come to this quiet corner of
the country. Described as “the Venice of
Denmark” by the tourist board, Silkeborg
is a sleepy town surrounded by lakes and
waterways. It has more than its fair share
of art galleries and museums, as well as an
interesting old town area. Only the most
dedicated traveller would have the
determination to complete the entire
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circular Marguerite Route. East Jutland is
the best part for a short taste of what’s on
offer: it’s only two hours from Copenhagen
by car and both Aarhus and Billund airports offer direct flights to the UK.
The countryside is as pretty as the
Cotswolds, except it doesn’t teem with
tourists or traffic jams. Litter is also
conspicuously absent. The Danes I meet
are a laid-back bunch with little in their
make-up to suggest violent Viking
ancestry. “We like to enjoy nature and our
surroundings,” says Josephine Oestergaard, a waitress at Hvidsten Kro, near
Randers, one of Denmark’s oldest inns.
I’ve come here to sample traditional
Danish cooking, which includes rather a
lot of salted fish and red cabbage.
Hvidsten Kro is famous partly because it
was a base for the Resistance during the
Second World War. The Fiil family has
manned the bar for more than 100 years
but it’s the story of what happened here in
1944 that has put it on the tourist map. On
the morning of March 11, Gestapo officers
surrounded the building and arrested 11
members of the Resistance for smuggling
weapons. Eight were eventually executed,
including two from the Fiil family.
The nearby port of Randers is a smorgasbord of cobbled streets, timber-framed
houses and crooked alleyways. Locals and
tourists like to lunch alfresco, listen to live
jazz and watch cyclists as they wobble
down lanes more suited to cart wheel than
rubber tyre.
My plan is to explore the nearby coast,
but driving past a retail park I’m distracted
by a grand mansion with Corinthian columns and two lions guarding the entrance.
After a double take, I realise that I’ve stumbled across one of the town’s most celebrated attractions.
Sandwiched between a DIY store and a
set of traffic lights is Graceland Randers,
built by Denmark’s biggest Elvis Presley
fan, Henrik Knudsen. It turns out that only
the exterior is a replica of Elvis’s Tennessee
house: inside it’s an American diner and a
museum of random memorabilia.
As I pull into the car park, Elvis is singing
karaoke on the terrace. He stops for a cigarette and checks his smartphone. Throwing caution to the wind, I order the king’s
favourite sandwich: fried white bread with
peanut butter, jam and slices of grilled
bacon and banana. Later that evening I
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realise it should have been called the Devil
in Disguise.
Next stop is Aarhus, Denmark’s second
largest city, a university town thronging
with 45,000 students and with a pretty
centre. It’s also home to one of the largest
art galleries in Europe, ARoS. With ten
storeys and 17,000 sq ft to fill, the curators
had a blank canvas to trace the history of
Danish art.
It’s one of the best laid out museums I’ve
visited, with a psychedelic sting in the tail:
a circular skywalk built on the roof has
glass walls made of all the colours of the
rainbow. After a beer in the Art Restaurant
below, seeing a panorama of Aarhus
through all the colours of the spectrum is
a heady experience.
Equally jaw-dropping is the enormous
Moesgaard Museum, 20 minutes from the
city centre. The building looks like a giant
wedge of cheese cut into the side of a hill.
From the grass-covered roof I can see
spectacular views of Aarhus bay.
Inside is a circular auditorium, home to
Denmark’s best-preserved bog body,
Grauballe Man. Like Tollund Man he
dates to 350BC, although a gaping cut on
his neck indicates Grauballe was murdered and not a human sacrifice. This is
probably as close as I’ll get to Nordic noir
in Denmark, one case that’s now too old
even for Sarah Lund to solve.
Elvis is singing
karaoke. He
stops for a
cigarette and
checks his
smartphone
Need to
know
Jeremy Taylor was a guest of
Visit Denmark. The Marguerite Route:
visitdenmark.co.uk/en-gb/
margueriteroute. Ryanair has returns
to Aarhus from £40. Europcar.com
has cars from £200 a week. See
Smalldanish-hotels.dk for hotel ideas.
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Saturday 31, January 2015
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763 sq. cm
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JUTLAND
Randers
Aarhus
Silkeborg
Billund
Airport
DENMARK
Copenhagen
40 miles
b
d
i
ith C i thi
l
Top: Aarhus’s historic
centre; above, the
Tollund Man
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Saturday 31, January 2015
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763 sq. cm
ABC 390765 Daily
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020 7782 5000
ANDREA RAPISARDA / GETTY IMAGES; JOHN SOMMER
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