Rosenborg Castle: Decaying Grandeur and Inspiration

When I finally made it to Copenhagen a couple of weekends ago, there was one place I had to visit: Rosenborg Castle. I can’t explain why exactly I needed to go, more a feeling than anything concrete, but I knew I had to see it.

After a day of roller coasters and free-falls at Tivoli Gardens, I dragged the family (only slightly against their will) to Christian IV’s summer palace.

By Elgaard - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=204754

I expected the Danish King's home to be especially grand--something along the ostentatious Swedish castle in Stockholm--but I was pleasantly surprised. The castle rooms are small and sparsely decorated. The rooms are drafty. The floor creaks. There is a toilet that drains right into the moat. And, best of all, there is a prank chair that trappers the sitter in place, makes a fart sound, and wets their pants. Even the people of the 16th century enjoyed a good laugh at someone else's expense.

The Winter Room caught me most. It’s the first large chamber to the right as you enter, where nobles once smoked pipes and warmed themselves while the rest of Copenhagen froze outside. When I visited, it was under restoration, making it less gaudy than how the room actually was, but the image of royalty lounging in its smoky comfort stuck with me.

The castle, I knew, would be a great set piece for A Wellspring of Lies. With its small-scale and decaying sense of old royalty, I decided to have it be the ancestral home for the Draghici family and renamed it Rosengarde Hall. The Winter Room is most certainly the centerpiece of the hall, a place for Valentina to exercise her diminishing power.

Rosengarde Hall description from my Scrivener project

Keep traveling and looking into dark corners. The next castle toilet might just inspire something.