IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

A new trail is turning a fresh page in the life of Denmark's great storyteller, guiding travellers around the places that tell his own rags-to-riches fairy tale

- Sarah Baxter

The medieval merchant's house at Nedergade 24 was showing its age. Kramboden, as it's called, appeared to have been drawn freehand, its whitewashed plaster, timber frames and leaded windows all a little bowed or askew. Stepping inside, I found an Aladdin's Cave of domestic items: chambersticks, oil lamps and dish scourers all dangled from the low, beamed ceiling; shelves jostled with whisks, scissors, balls of twine, wooden pegs, doorknobs and cakes of soap. Marvelling at this exceptional trove of unexceptional treasures, a line came to mind: 'Everything you look at can become a fairy tale and you can get a story from everything you touch.' When Danish author Hans Christian Andersen wrote those words, this old store in Odense may have looked much the same. I like to think of a young Hans - who was born in 1805, only a few streets away - pressing his nose to the glass, conjuring backstories for the screws and teapots. I'd come to Denmark to see what else might have inspired that imaginative boy, whose eventual canon would go on to include 800 poems, 158 fairy tales, seven novels, five travelogues and three autobiographies.

EVERY STORY HAS A BEGINNING

Located on the central island of Fyn (also known as Funen), Odense is Denmark's third-largest city, and it has a curious relationship with its most famous son. Naturally, Andersen is used to tempt plenty of tourists indeed, I had arrived to follow a marked trail linking up relevant sites from the author's life: the church where he was baptised, the charity school he attended, the riverbank where his washerwoman mother once toiled. But, until recently, locals were a bit fed up with him.