Well I never! Talk about The Ugly Duckling! This is duck's revenge. Four drakes are gang-banging a duck on the lawn right in front of the Hans Christian Andersen museum here in Odense, arguably by the very house where one of the world's most beloved and most translated authors was born.
I kid ye not. They're going at it hammer and tongs, or whatever drakes use for hammer and tongs. In The Ugly Duckling the little bird is sorely abused by his ducky sibling and other barnyard animals until it's revealed that he's not a duckling at all and he matures into a magnificent swan, a fable emblematic of transformation for the better. Lord alone knows what's gonna come out of the current argie-bargie.
The modernistic museum is attached to what most people believe to be the little yellow house where the great man was born on April 2, 1805, although there remains a smidgen of doubt because HCA himself got a little hoity toity in his later years and would not recognize that he entered the world in such a lowly hovel.
The museum not only narrates the various stages of HCA's life as the son of a poor cobbler, his education and his travels, along with panoramic illustrations from his tales, but also provides a fine account of 19th century living conditions.
Odense, Denmark's third largest city, is above all HCA's hometown, as numerous statues, both of him and his fairy tale characters, direction signs and marker boards announce with great fanfare.
The oddest statute of all is Trinity, a modernist oeuvre - or utter piece of crap, depending on your artistic sensitivities - by Bjørn Nørgaard. It depicts three larger-than-life nude representations of the great man grappling, as far as I can see, in homoerotic combat with himself around a phallus rampant in the form of a giant swirling ice cream cone.
According to old Bjørn, however, it represents The Shadow, The Improviser and The Travelling Companion, the first a tale about a shadow coming to life, the second HCA's fictionalised account of his own trip to Italy, and the third an early tale about a poor man who marries the king's daughter and himself becomes king, thanks to the help of a travelling companion.
Be that as it may, it's the first thing you see on arriving in Odense by train, right in front of the railway station.
The city fathers have thoughtfully put miles of embossed red footprints on the pavements to guide visitors round the sites. As usual I'm half way to Australia on what's meant to be a 10-minute trail from the museum to HCA's childhood home, where he lived with his parents from the age of two to 14.
I've missed twin prints pointing across Munkemøllestræde. Well, with a name like that what do you expect!
The tiny yellow cottage with three rooms was home to three families, one with eight children. HCA's home was the small room at the end with a single bed and a boiler stove, which also served as Dad's workshop.
HCA was not only a teller of fairy tales. He was multifaceted, writing plays, travelogues, novels, and poems. He even made paper cuttings to amuse his friends and children, copies of which are displayed in his childhood home.
One shows two men hanging from a gallows sprouting out of a heart. I'm not sure whom that amused. And no, there are no cutouts of four drakes gang-banging a duck.
Odense, like all Danish towns, is very picturesque with streets of traditional pastel painted house, which is not to say that modern monstrosities don't intrude, like the ugly block of the Magasin superstore a mere stone's throw from the childhood home.
HCA didn't die in Odense. Suffering from liver cancer, he breathed his last on August 4, 1875, in the house of friends near Copenhagen.
But as you wander round Odense, let your imagination run berserk. I haven't put on The Emperor's New Clothes yet, nor run into The Little Mermaid, but a very ugly duckling on a bike has just run into me right by the Den Grimme Ælling (The Ugly Duckling) pub.
[Upcoming blog next Sunday: Beyond Copenhagen - Denmark's Other Historic Cities]
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By the same author: Bussing The Amazon: On The Road With The Accidental Journalist, available with free excerpts on Kindle and in print version on Amazon.
Swimming With Fidel: The Toils Of An Accidental Journalist, available on Kindle, with free excerpts here, and in print version on Amazon in the U.S here.
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