Following the footsteps of H.C. Andersen in Nyborg

On September 4, 1819, when he was only 15 years old, he left his childhood town of Odense to seek his fortune in Copenhagen, traveling, as today, via Nyborg.

But the journey, which today can be done by train and across the Great Belt Bridge in five quarters of an hour, lasted then a good day and a half. This was due not least to the fact that the crossing of the Great Belt took place either in so-called "smacks", smaller two- or three-masted sailing boats, or in the postal service's sailing boats, the "post yachts", which sailed between Nyborg and Korsør.

In the poet's earliest memories - "The Book of Life", which was written down in 1832, but was not published until 1926 - the young Andersen describes this his first journey and his first meeting with Nyborg:

"Now I rolled out into the world with 10 Rdlr, the post office had the three; I had never been a Mile on this side of Odense, the new change therefore soon made me happy. I came to Nyborg, saw the Sea; only when I sailed away, did I become tight at heart, it was as if I was now sailing out into the wide world;..."

The journey from Odense to Copenhagen was also to be a turning point for the boy who had said goodbye to his family and never since would establish his own. But the journey to Copenhagen and out into the wide world was not a farewell to Funen: In the 50 years from 1823-1873, the poet returned to his native island again and again to visit his mother or friends in Odense and around the island's manor houses and bourgeois homes - and each time Nyborg was the entrance door.

From 1828, the sailing trip between Nyborg and Korsør took place with a steamship, and from 1865 there was a train connection between Nyborg and Odense.

The Ship Bridge in Nyborg, also called Midtermolen, was established by King Christian III in 1548 in connection with an expansion of the harbor and a development of the royal town.

It was from here that H.C. Andersen sailed to Korsør, it was from the Ship Bridge that he was picked up by the estate's horse-drawn carriage when he was to continue to Glorup or Lykkesholm, and it was from here that he went to the post office to take the horse-drawn diligence when he was to travel further around Funen or out into the wide world, for example, via Assens and Kiel or Svendborg and Flensburg further out into Europe.

In the summer of 1848, he also had a very special experience at the Ship Bridge. The Three Years' War had begun this spring with battles at Bov and Schleswig, and the Swedish government had decided to send auxiliary troops - about 4,000 men - to Funen to protect the island from the Schleswig-Holstein troops. The Swedish soldiers were received with enthusiasm and cheers on Funen, where they arrived in transport ships to Kerteminde and Nyborg, and on June 9, Andersen describes in his diary how the Swedes were eagerly awaited:

The man said that he saw smoke from Svindinge Tower from steamships, but it was not so! drove to Nyborg; The gate decorated with flowers, the Swedish and Danish coat of arms a tribune for the singers on the Ship Bridge. ... Thunder and rain; waiting in vain; drove home again at half past 7 ... saw from Svindinge Banke the Swedish vessels enter Nyborg Fjord. News that the Prussians were going north again People fleeing from Kolding.

In Nyborg, Johan Nicolai Gomard (1815-1900) ran a bookstore from 1839, and at the end of September 1848, he was able to report to Andersen that the Swedish troops had bought all of the bookstore's copies of the author's books.

Gomard's shop was located at Adelgade 4, to the left of the post office. H.C. Andersen had a special relationship with the bookseller: Johan Nicolai was namely the son of the porter at Odense Hospital who had stood as godfather to the poet.

When he writes to Gomard from the manor Glorup in 1842 to requisition some books, it sounds like this:

"I am pleased that I have met you by chance, I remember you as a little boy, and do you know, your father stood as godfather to me.”

In My Life's Fairy Tale (1855), H.C. Andersen recounts the early and beautiful prophecy that Johan Nicolai's father, Jean Gomard (1746-1821), made at the baptism:

"My father is said to have sat by my mother's bed for the first few days and read aloud to her from Holberg, while I screamed at the top of my lungs. 'Do you want to sleep, or listen quietly!' I have been told that he jokingly said, but I continued to be a screamer, and as such I must have shown myself especially in the church when I was baptized, whereupon the priest, who was later described by my mother as a very annoyed man, said: 'The young one is screaming like a cat!' which words she could never forget him; a poor French emigrant Gomard, who stood as godfather to me, however, comforted her with the fact that the louder I screamed as a child, the more beautifully I would sing when I grew older."

Also in H.C. Andersen's novels, the market town of Nyborg plays a central role. The town is mentioned in Only a Fiddler (1837), The Two Baronesses (1848), To Be or Not To Be (1857) and Lucky Peer (1870), but the finest description of the meeting with Nyborg and Funen is probably this one from the novel O.T. (1836):

Nyborg itself seems a living capital compared to the quiet, mournful Korsør. Now you see people on the large Ship Bridge, strolling on the ramparts and wide streets with tall houses, here are soldiers, you hear music, and, what is most uplifting on a journey, you come to an excellent inn. The drive through the arched gate is surprising, it is longer and larger than any of Copenhagen's. Villages and farmhouses have a more prosperous appearance than in Zealand, where you often believe by the road that it is a pile of manure lifted up on four poles, and then it is a family home. From the country road in Funen you only see clean houses; the window frames painted, in front of the door a flower patch, and where flowers are cultivated, there is always, as Bulwer aptly remarks, a greater culture with the farmer, he also thinks of the beautiful. On the ditches along the road we see lilacs, white and purple; nature itself has adorned here with a multitude of wild poppies, which in color splendor can measure up to the most beautiful ones that are cultivated in any botanical garden. Near Nyborg in particular, they grow in excessive abundance.