A Game of Thrones

Rosenborg Castle is where the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg keep their family chair. Margrethe II, the current head of the House, also keeps her Crown Jewels there as well.

With a name that long, you would think she would need a huge vault to store her goodies. Not so. Rosenborg Castle is a nice, but smallish, Dutch Renaissance building in the middle of Copenhagen. It was built by Christian 4, whom I find very notable for the use of the Arabic '4' instead of the Roman 'IV' like all of his peers used. This is but one tidbit of interesting information I got from the guide we hired to walk us through the Castle and the surrounding neighborhoods.

As with any building constructed in the 1600's, there is not a lot of light in the rooms, which are small to start with. This makes the building a bit claustrophobic. The darkness, along with the usual ban on photography using a flash (light kills the historical artifacts) or a tripod (people trip over them), meant I wasn't able to get many photographs while inside.

One exception to the 'darkness' was the Long Hall on the third floor. It has many large windows, a white ceiling, and some white tiles as well. This helps brighten the room considerably. I can imagine that when the tapestries were new, this was a very, very colourful room.




The throne, made of silver and a royal red fabric, stands at one end of the room.




I really like the contrast in the silver and the red.






You cannot see it in the photo of the Long Hall, but one of the tiles is purposely mislaid. The workers were a bit superstitious and thought that only God could be perfect, so they would intentionally make a 'mistake' somewhere in their work. They did they same thing in the washroom on the main floor, where one single tile is turned sideways.




If there was an imperfection in these 'toy soliders', I couldn't see it. But then I also couldn't imagine getting close enough to look in that level of detail with toys that are worth a king's ransom.




Our last stop was to see the crowns themselves. Of course we didn't get to touch them; they were well secured behind glass. Yes, that is Angie in the background.



Here are links to all of my posts from this visit:
Faces of Copenhagen
Copenhagen Postcards
Copenhagen Walkabout - Oddities
Postcards from the Bryghus
Postcards from Louisiana MoMA
A Game of Thrones
Postcards from the Glyptotek