Qualla: Frederiksborg Castle

Frederiksborg Castle: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ferdinand Richardt, Public domain. The chimney was under repair. It was the middle of December, the third-floor room was cold, and Frederik VII wanted to sit up with his collection of antiquities, so he asked for a fire to be lit. Someone lit it. By half past three on the morning of 17 December 1859 the largest Renaissance building in Scandinavia was burning, the lake around it was frozen solid, and the only water anyone could reach came from the pantry and the kitchen.

Read more: Frederiksborg Castle on Qualla

Image: Ferdinand Richardt | Public domain

Frederiksborg Castle: Three Islets and an Ambition

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P.C. Skovgaard, Public domain. Before it was a palace it was Hillerødsholm — the islet of Hillerød — a half-timbered house on the northernmost of three small islands in a North Zealand lake. It belonged to the Gøye family; Mogens Gøye, Steward of the Realm and one of the architects of the Danish Reformation, l...

Read more: Frederiksborg Castle on Qualla

Image: P.C. Skovgaard | Public domain

Frederiksborg Castle: Ten Years, Three Wings, One Ego

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pieter Isaacsz, Public domain. Frederik's son Christian was born there and loved the place — which did not stop him from demolishing it. Reigning as Christian IV, he pulled down his father's castle in 1599 and hired the Flemish architect Hans van Steenwinckel the Elder to replace it in the Dutch Renaissance ma...

Read more: Frederiksborg Castle on Qualla

Image: Pieter Isaacsz | Public domain

Frederiksborg Castle: The Night the Roof Came Down

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Niels Elgaard Larsen - (WT-en) Elgaard at English Wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 4.0. For two centuries the castle mattered less as a residence than as a stage. Every Danish monarch from 1671 to 1840 except Christian VII was crowned and anointed in its chapel. In 1659, during the Second Northern War, Swedish troops took the castle and carried off most of its art a...

Read more: Frederiksborg Castle on Qualla

Image: Niels Elgaard Larsen - (WT-en) Elgaard at English Wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 4.0

Frederiksborg Castle: Beer Money

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Nico-dk assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. Denmark treated the loss as a national bereavement rather than a royal inconvenience. Money came from public subscriptions, from the crown, from parliamentary grants, and from an arts-and-crafts lottery set up in November 1861. Ferdinand Meldahl began the reconstruction in 1860, ...

Read more: Frederiksborg Castle on Qualla

Image: No machine-readable author provided. Nico-dk assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

Frederiksborg Castle: What the Fire Missed

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Casper Moller from London, United Kingdom, CC BY 2.0. The chapel, consecrated in 1617, is the best-preserved Renaissance interior in the complex: a long nave under a six-vaulted stucco ceiling, two storeys of galleries on pillars painted with grisaille biblical figures in the 1690s, an altarpiece and pulpit by the Hamburg silversmit...

Read more: Frederiksborg Castle on Qualla

Image: Casper Moller from London, United Kingdom | CC BY 2.0

Frederiksborg Castle: A Country in Faces

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Freepenguin, CC BY-SA 3.0. The paintings rescued on the night of the fire became the seed of a collection that now fills some seventy rooms and holds more portraits than anywhere else in Denmark. The Valdemar Room carries the story from the twelfth century to the seventeenth, with pictures commissioned spe...

Read more: Frederiksborg Castle on Qualla

Image: Freepenguin | CC BY-SA 3.0