Gurre Castle

Gurre stood west of the village of the same name, between Helsingør and Tikøb in North Zealand, on boggy ground at the edge of Gurre Sø that was wetter still before the lake was lowered. Excavation has shown that the royal castle was raised in two campaigns. The older one, dated to the twelfth century by some accounts and possibly to the reign of Erik Menved (1286–1319) by others, consisted of a central tower on a natural rise with an outer bailey on a second rise to the north.

The second campaign is attributed to Valdemar Atterdag and dated to the 1350s or the 1360s. The central tower was rebuilt as a donjon with no entrance at ground level, reached only from one of the upper storeys, so that those inside could hold out while fighting went on outside. A ringwall with four corner towers was thrown around it, and a second, much larger outer ringwall enclosed about 42,000 square metres, against roughly 50,000 for Hammershus. Inside the bailey buildings went up on artificial mounds raised in the marshy ground, the largest of them a three-aisled brick hall with a heated aisle, taken to have quartered the king's cavalry and to have given the men their quarters.

East of the enclosure stood the chapel of St Jakob, of which only the boulder foundation is left. In 1364 the chapel received relics from Pope Urban V, given to Valdemar Atterdag at the papal court at Avignon; this is also the first mention of Gurre in the court chronicles. No burials have been found in connection with the chapel. Valdemar Atterdag died at Gurre on 24 October 1375.

The captains who held the castle are known by name across a century and a half: Jakob Nielsen, captain of Søborg and Gurre together, from 1369 to 1371; Oluf Bjørnsen in 1376 and 1377; Folmer Jepsen Lunge in 1393; Niels Aagesen, called Jernskæg, in 1397; Godske Barsebek from 1458 to 1470; Torbern Arvidsen Baad from 1485 to 1497; then Laurids Knob in 1510, Johan Brockenhuus in 1511, and Oluf Daa in 1523.

Under Erik of Pomerania the castle even became a mint. The coin struck there in the 1430s, the Gurre gros, was worth nine penninge and carried a crown on one face and the letter E on the other; on the coins themselves the mint is named Castrum Gorge.

In 1525 Gurre was laid to the Crown. It was exchanged away to Bishop Joakim Rønnow in 1534 and came back to the Crown the following year, and from about that time the buildings were left to fall in. In Frederik II's day Gurre is said to have been pulled down, its stone apparently carried off for building elsewhere.

The documented history of Gurre is thin, and several of Denmark's most considerable poets have drawn their inspiration from it. Ballads and stories gathered around King Valdemar, his love for his mistress Tove Lille, who by tradition stayed a long while at Gurre, and the jealousy this roused in his queen, Helvig of Schleswig. The motif appears to have belonged first to Valdemar the Great and to have been transferred later to Valdemar Atterdag, and the place itself seems to have been partly confused with Lille Gurre near Køng.

Over the centuries that core saga drew in other legends and grew into a national myth. J. L. Heiberg, B. S. Ingemann, H. C. Andersen and Christian Winther all wrote on the Gurre theme, and the novelist and poet Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847–1885) put the myth into poetic form in his cycle Gurresange. A German translation of Jacobsen's poems supplies the text of the Gurre-Lieder by Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), which carried the name of the castle well beyond Denmark.

The ruin was partly cleared in 1817 on the initiative of Frederik Anthon Adam von der Maase, and again on a far larger scale in 1835, when ten thousand loads of earth were shifted and the surviving walls surveyed and mapped. Further work followed in the 1890s and in 1921. The restoration of 1936 to 1939 emptied a well inside the central tower and drove search trenches in every direction, which is how the outer ringwall north of the castle was found. In 2000 the laying of a district heating main between Helsingør and Tikøb turned up a paved surface under the road and set off fresh excavations on a large scale.

The site lies in Helsingør Municipality and is a protected ancient monument, listed on the Kulturstyrelsen register.