Elsinore

I've found different versions of the story in various sources, and the actual facts are clouded in periods of history from which records, while available, are far from complete, but here's the basic idea.  Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1150-1220) was a Danish historian who wrote the first full history of Denmark, including the lives of one hundred medieval, Viking, and legendary kings.  In one of these stories, Prince Amled's uncle murders Amled's father, the king, and marries Amled's mother, and after discovering what had happened Amled, fearing for his own life, pretends to be insane.  This story was translated into French in 1570 by François de Belleforest as part of a collection of stories called Histoires Tragiques.  At some point, an English playwright encountered the story, either in Saxo's original work (which was in Latin) or in Belleforest's Histoires, decided it would be good for the stage, and adapted it into a play.  This became perhaps the most famous play in the world.

The legendary Amled in Saxo's history is placed in the reign of Rørik Ringslinger, in the 600s CE.  It was in the 1420s that the Danish king Eric of Pomerania built a fortress at Helsingør, on the narrowest part of the Øresund Sound that joins the Baltic Sea to the Atlantic.  There a duty was imposed on all shipping through the straight.  Because the dues were so lucrative, in 1585 king Frederick II had the fortress rebuilt into a luxurious castle, which he named Kronborg and moved into himself.  Kronborg remained the seat of the Danish monarchy even after a fire in 1629 destroyed the interior of the castle.  Meanwhile, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark had been written right around the turn of the 17th century, and the splendid royal palace at Helsingør (Elsinore) was used as the setting.

In the years after the fire, the palace was rebuilt, although the interior was significantly different from its former glory.  Just two decades later, though, the castle was sacked by the Swedish army during one of the various Danish-Swedish wars, when the winter was so cold that the troops could march across the frozen Øresund to besiege the fortress by land.  It was later rebuilt again, so the building that stands there now incorporates a few elements of the original six-hundred-year-old structure, most of the external shape from the 1639 rebuilding after the fire, additional elements from the 1660s, and various other minor changes and restorations made since then, especially in recent years when the castle has become a tourist attraction.

That's where we went today.  This time, we managed to get there in time for the guided tour in English, which was an excellent idea.  One of the coolest anecdotes we heard was about the nature of that shipping tax that generated so much wealth for the Danish monarchy.  Apparently, a ship had to pay a percentage of the value of its cargo, so the Danes would board the ship and ask the captain how much the cargo was worth.  If he tried to cheat them by claiming a ridiculously low number, they would then insist on buying the entire contents of the ship for that amount, and there are records of some of the amazing amounts of goods from all over the world that came into the Danish treasury at ludicrously low prices.

The tour also included the castle casements, a system of vaults and tunnels underneath the fortifications.  The soldiers of the army were quartered there during war time, so as to be instantly ready for action.  It was hard to imagine living in those damp, dark, cramped, cold chambers.  The guide told us that one large low-ceilinged room was used for drill practice, and that the reason the soldiers constantly bumped their heads on the ceiling was that the floor had originally been a meter lower, but that rainwater would flood the room up to a man's knees, so they built a higher floor.  The other cool thing in the casements was a triangular room that was used as a dungeon, in which the bars could be moved back to reduce the size of the room depending on the seriousness of the crime.  At the farthest setting, the prisoner was not even able to sit down.

After the castle tour, we walked around the town for a couple of hours, enjoying the well-preserved medieval architecture with many colorfully-painted half-timber houses, the lovely Renaissance cloister, and the pretty harbor where we would have been able to see Sweden, had it not been somewhat foggy.  It was a good day-trip for the first day of our three-day weekend here.