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© 2025. All rights reserved.
Site created with
Hakyll.
Modified theme
lanyon-hakyll
based on
Lanyon.
We are fortunate to read Kierkegaard where he lived and worked: on the streets he walked obsessively every evening, near the churches where he worshipped and raged, in a city whose culture of Gemütlichkeit he diagnosed and resisted. This syllabus treats Copenhagen not as backdrop but as a second text. Each afternoon visit has a specific connection to the week’s readings — a few of them almost embarrassingly direct.
The readings follow The Essential Kierkegaard (Princeton UP). Participants should read each day’s texts before the morning session. Three hours is enough time for close reading and genuine argument, but only if everyone arrives prepared.
A note on authorship: Kierkegaard published much of his work pseudonymously. We will track which voice is speaking each day — the seducer, the judge, the anxious psychologist, the Christian idealist — since the plurality of personae is itself a philosophical argument, not a quirk of biography.
There are no Danish public holidays between June 25 and July 25. The seminar meets every weekday, with two exceptions: a pilgrimage to Gilleleje (Friday, July 4) and a daytrip to Roskilde (Friday, July 18), each explained in its place. Both trips travel by mini-bus from Copenhagen.
The seminar opens the evening before the first session: Sankt Hans Aften (Midsummer Eve, June 23) is one of the great Danish popular festivals, marked throughout the country with bonfires on beaches and in parks, singing, and the burning of an effigy of a witch. Students are strongly encouraged to find a bonfire and experience it. The beaches north of the city — Hornbæk, Tisvildeleje — are particularly atmospheric; the harbour parks and Fælledparken in Copenhagen itself are easier to reach. There is nothing like it elsewhere in the calendar, and it sits on the threshold of everything we are here to read.
Morning reading
We open with Kierkegaard’s private notebooks — passionate, searching, already in argument — and then his first published work, a review of Hans Christian Andersen. The central concept is the life-view (Livs-Anskuelse): not a system but an existential orientation, a certainty “won from all experience.” Andersen, Kierkegaard argues, lacks one entirely. The implicit question is whether we do too.
Afternoon — Copenhagen City Museum (Bymuseet)
The City Museum on Vesterbrogade holds the finest collection of Kierkegaard artifacts in existence: his writing desk, personal effects, portraits, and the famous silhouette — as well as a lock of his hair and the engagement ring he gave to Regine Olsen, the broken engagement that haunts so much of the authorship. The museum also traces how Copenhagen itself has developed over the past several hundred years, situating Kierkegaard in the physical city of the 1840s — the streets, the institutions, the social world he moved through. This is the right visit for the first day: before we go deep into the texts, we meet the man and the city together.
Morning reading
Kierkegaard’s dissertation, submitted to the University of Copenhagen in 1841. Irony here is not a rhetorical device but a total existential stance: a negativity that clears ground without yet building anything. Socrates is the exemplary ironist, and he will haunt everything that follows.
Free afternoon.
Morning reading
The voice of “A,” the aesthetic pseudonym: the Diapsalmata, “The Immediate Stages of the Erotic,” and the notorious “Diary of a Seducer.” What does it mean to live for the interesting, the momentary, the beautiful? The aesthete is not frivolous; he is systematic in his refusal of commitment. Take him seriously.
Afternoon/Evening — Group lunch at Schønnemanns
A proper Danish frokost at one of Copenhagen’s most venerable lunch restaurants, a short walk from the Latin Quarter. Open midday only. A fitting end to the first week: the aesthetic stage in the morning, and a long, unhurried lunch in the afternoon.
Morning reading
Judge William’s long letters to “A.” The ethical stage as continuity, choice, marriage, and the taking-on of a self through time. Does he refute the aesthete, or simply talk past him? Notice also that both voices reach us through a fictional editor — what does that framing do to us as readers?
Free afternoon.
Morning reading
A richer ensemble revisiting the three stages. The aesthetic voices at the banquet are more nuanced than “A” — Kierkegaard seems to give the position every advantage before testing it. We focus on the banquet and the transition toward the religious border.
Afternoon — Nationalmuseet
The National Museum’s permanent collection — Bronze Age artifacts, Viking treasures, medieval ecclesiastical objects, Danish folk culture — offers a long view of the civilization Kierkegaard inherited. The medieval Christian section is particularly useful as we prepare for Fear and Trembling tomorrow: here is the world in which Abraham’s faith was not a paradox but a given, in which the religious stage was simply the air people breathed. Going forward into the authorship with this behind us changes how the arguments land.
Morning reading
Johannes de Silentio on Abraham and Isaac. The teleological suspension of the ethical. The three Problemata. The knight of faith versus the tragic hero, and why the knight looks indistinguishable from a tax collector. One of the most argued-over texts in modern philosophy — we will argue over it.
Free afternoon.
Morning reading
Constantin Constantius’s experiment: can one return? Is repetition possible? The book plays philosophy as comedy, then abandons the comedy for something more urgent. The young man and Job haunt the second half. Pay attention to what the text does as well as what it says.
Afternoon — Christianshavn Walking Tour
A self-guided walk through the canal district: the Dutch-influenced architecture, Vor Frelsers Kirke with its external spiral staircase (the view from the top is worth the climb), the narrow streets and waterways. Christianshavn is one of the older parts of the city, slightly apart from the centre, dense and maritime in feeling — a fitting mood for Repetition, a text that keeps asking whether you can ever truly go back to a place or a self. Wander and decide for yourself.
No formal session. The seminar travels north by mini-bus.
The day begins at Esrum Monastery (Esrum Kloster), a twelfth-century Cistercian foundation in the beech forests of North Zealand — one of the oldest and best-preserved monastic sites in Scandinavia. We will have a guided tour of the buildings and grounds, followed by lunch at the monastery.
In the afternoon the mini-bus continues to Gilleleje on the northern coast. From the village we walk up to the Kierkegaard stone at Gilbjerg Hoved — the cliffside promontory where, in the summer of 1835, the twenty-two-year-old Kierkegaard wrote in his journal: “What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know… to find the idea for which I can live and die.” It is the motto of the whole authorship. Bring the journal entries from Week 1. There is no agenda beyond being in the place.
Morning reading
A lighter day, and intentionally so. Kierkegaard’s satirical pieces show his comic genius and his use of irony as a weapon against the Copenhagen literary establishment. These texts sharpen our sense of the world he was writing within and against.
Free afternoon.
Morning reading
Kierkegaard published his upbuilding discourses under his own name in parallel with the pseudonymous works — a deliberate counterpoint, not an afterthought. What can direct communication do that indirect communication cannot? These texts are addressed to “that single individual,” and they mean it.
Afternoon — Royal Library / Black Diamond (Det Kongelige Bibliotek)
The Black Diamond on the harbour holds Kierkegaard’s manuscripts, correspondence, and the original journals in its Special Collections. A full archive visit requires advance arrangement, but the reading rooms are open and the building is extraordinary. This afternoon is also simply an opportunity to keep reading: bring today’s texts and continue. There is something fitting about reading Kierkegaard’s argument for inwardness in the building that holds the outward record of his thought.
Morning reading
Johannes Climacus pits the Socratic model of learning (recollection from within) against the Christian model (a Teacher who brings the condition as well as the content). The argument is compact and merciless, and it deserves unusually slow reading. The unfinished novel about the young Climacus taking Descartes literally illuminates Fragments from the inside: what does it actually do to a person to begin from radical doubt, and what would it mean to receive the condition for truth from outside oneself?
Free afternoon.
Morning reading
Adolph Peter Adler was a Danish pastor who claimed to have received a divine revelation — and whose case obsessed Kierkegaard as a study in confused religious authority. Yesterday’s question was epistemological: what would it mean to receive truth from a Teacher who brings the condition? Today’s is existential and social: what does it mean to claim that one has received such a communication? The Genius/Apostle essay is the distilled theoretical core; the Book on Adler is the case study. Both are downstream of Fragments, and reading them here, before the Postscript, gives the authority question its proper weight.
Free afternoon.
Morning reading
Vigilius Haufniensis on anxiety (Angst) as the dizziness of freedom — not fear of a specific threat but the vertiginous awareness of possibility itself. The psychology of original sin, innocence as ignorance, dreaming spirit, and the demonic. The most phenomenologically rich text in the anthology.
Afternoon — Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK)
The national gallery holds Danish Golden Age painting (Eckersberg, Købke), Dutch and Flemish masters, and the European Romantics — the tradition of aesthetic cultivation that Kierkegaard both loved and suspected. Coming here after a morning with The Concept of Anxiety sharpens the question: the aesthetic world the pseudonymous “A” inhabits is also, for Haufniensis, the world of the demonic — closed-off, self-enclosed, refusing the transparency that freedom demands. Walk through slowly with that in mind.
No formal session. Participation is optional; the instructor will be present.
Helsingør is forty-five minutes from Copenhagen by regional train. The destination is Kronborg Slot — the Renaissance fortress on the Øresund strait, built to command the sound between Denmark and Sweden and for centuries one of the most strategically important sites in northern Europe. Whatever one makes of the Hamlet association, Kronborg repays a visit simply as a place where Danish history feels large and unavoidable: the cannon-lined terraces, the great hall, the casemates below. Come for the building and the view across to Sweden.
Those with time and energy may continue a few kilometers south to the ruins of Gurre Slot. Kierkegaard knew and loved this landscape; he mentions Gurre in his journals as a place of particular resonance, and the ruined medieval castle set among beech forests and the lake had for him, as for his Romantic contemporaries, the quality of a place where history and nature have quietly merged. It is a short bus or bicycle ride from Helsingør, and the walk around the lake to the ruins is not strenuous.
On the return to Copenhagen, those who wish may stop at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk (the train stops there). Louisiana is one of the finest museums of its kind in Europe — the permanent collection, the temporary exhibitions, and above all the building’s relationship to the sea and the sculpture garden make it worth an afternoon in its own right. Entirely optional, but hard to regret.
Morning reading
The great central work of the pseudonymous authorship. Climacus attacks objective speculation and defends subjective inwardness. The famous formula: truth is subjectivity. Read carefully enough to understand exactly what this does and does not mean. Note the opening scene — the gardens you will visit this afternoon.
Afternoon — Frederiksberg Have
The Concluding Unscientific Postscript — which we begin reading this morning — opens with Climacus sitting in Frederiksberg Gardens on a Sunday afternoon, smoking a cigar, watching the bourgeois crowd enjoy themselves, and wondering what his task in the world might be. We visit the gardens today so that passage will land differently when you return to the text. It is a large, freely accessible park — the old royal gardens, open since 1852 — and the atmosphere on a July afternoon is close to what Climacus describes. Find a bench. Bring a notebook.
Morning reading
The existential-pathos chapters: resignation, suffering, guilt, and humor as the border of the religious. Then Climacus’s startling revocation at the end. What exactly is being revoked, and why?
Free afternoon.
Morning reading
A literary review that becomes a diagnosis of modernity: leveling, the public, the reign of reflection without passion or commitment. Kierkegaard’s target is not individualism but the dissolution of individuality into anonymous opinion. Reading this now requires little updating.
Afternoon — Assistens Kirkegård
Kierkegaard’s grave is in this large, leafy cemetery in Nørrebro — the same cemetery where Hans Christian Andersen is buried, which has its own small irony given the review that opened the seminar. The grave is simple. The cemetery is used as a neighbourhood park: people bring picnics, children run around, and the graves of the famous and obscure lie side by side. It is not a solemn place, which feels right. We are at the midpoint of the seminar; this is the moment to sit with the question of what the authorship was for — and what, so far, you think of the answer.
Morning reading
“Purity of heart is to will one thing.” This long, searching discourse on self-examination is one of Kierkegaard’s most accessible and most demanding pieces of edification. Structured as a confession addressed directly to the reader, it expects you to sit still in front of it. We will read parts of it aloud together. The Christian Discourses, published under Kierkegaard’s own name in 1848, extend the same direct voice into meditations on anxiety, suffering, and joy — the hardships of the Christian life as Kierkegaard understood them. Both texts belong to the direct communication strand of the authorship that runs in parallel with the pseudonyms.
Free afternoon.
No formal session. The seminar travels west by mini-bus.
The day begins at Lejre — the open-air experimental archaeological centre (Sagnlandet Lejre) where reconstructed Iron Age and Bronze Age settlements give a vivid sense of the deep Danish past that lies behind the Christendom Kierkegaard will attack in Week 5. Lunch follows, tentatively at Restaurant Herthadalen, before the mini-bus continues into Roskilde.
The afternoon destination is Roskilde Cathedral (Roskilde Domkirke), UNESCO-listed and the burial place of Danish monarchs since the fifteenth century. Walking through the royal chapels and tombs, we can hold Kierkegaard’s question in mind: what does Christianity look like when it has entirely won, when it is no longer a risk but a pedigree, a dynasty? The cathedral embodies the answer more eloquently than any argument.
Morning reading
What is Christian love (Kjerlighed) as against preferential or erotic love? The command “You shall love your neighbor” sounds harsh; Kierkegaard argues it is liberating. Love grounded in duty is more reliable and more universal than love grounded in feeling or inclination.
Afternoon — Dyrehaven
The Deer Park north of the city, reached by S-tog to Klampenborg, is one of the great pleasures of Copenhagen summers: ancient beeches, wandering deer, the old royal hunting grounds. After a week of dense, inward texts — the Postscript, the diagnosis of the age, the discourse on purity of heart — the afternoon here is deliberately unstructured. Walk into the forest, away from Bakken and the crowds, and do as little as possible. Roskilde follows at the end of this week; then the final week begins.
Morning reading
Anti-Climacus’s masterpiece. The self is “a relation that relates itself to itself,” and despair is the failure to be a self before God. Kierkegaard’s most systematic psychological text, and one of the most penetrating analyses of self-deception in the tradition.
Free afternoon. Vor Frue Kirke — where Kierkegaard was baptized, confirmed, and buried from, and where Thorvaldsen’s colossal Christ stands with arms open — is a short walk away and well worth visiting before tomorrow’s session on Practice in Christianity.
Morning reading
Anti-Climacus forces the Christian ideal to its highest pitch: contemporaneity with Christ, the possibility of offense, the demand that cannot be softened. Then Kierkegaard, writing under his own name in the final year of his life, attacks the Danish church directly in his pamphlets. The contrast between the pseudonymous idealist and the polemicist is itself a lesson in his theory of communication.
Evening — Group dinner at Restaurant Høst
Dinner together after the session, at Høst on Nørre Farimagsgade.
Morning reading
The Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, brief and extraordinarily quiet, show Kierkegaard in a register we have not heard since the early upbuilding discourses: direct, devotional, without irony or pseudonym. He knows he is not an apostle — we established that distinction in Week 3 — and these discourses are what a non-apostle’s writing looks like at its most honest. The Point of View is his retrospective account of the whole authorship: partial, self-serving, and indispensable. Read it as a final attempt at indirect communication about the whole project of indirect communication.
Afternoon — The City Lakes Walk (Søerne)
Kierkegaard was known throughout Copenhagen for his evening constitutionals along the Søerne — the three connected lakes running along what was then the western edge of the city. He walked partly to think, partly to approach strangers (he was known for this), and partly, he admitted, because it was the only exercise he got. We walk the full loop (~6 km) as a peripatetic session on the penultimate afternoon. Bring a question from the week that you haven’t resolved. The walk takes about 90 minutes at a comfortable pace.
Morning reading
For Self-Examination gives us the image of the mirror one must stop before and not immediately walk away from. The Lily and the Bird teaches silence as an art that speech makes peculiarly difficult. The Changelessness of God is the last sermon Kierkegaard prepared before his death in November 1855. It is quiet, and hard, and — depending on where five weeks have brought you — either consoling or impossible.
The final hour is not for new material but for the question the seminar has been circling from the first morning: what does Kierkegaard ask of his reader, and has your sense of that changed over five weeks?
Free afternoon — or return, if you like, to Frederiksberg Have.
| Week | Day | Venue |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wed Jun 25 | Copenhagen City Museum (Bymuseet) |
| 1 | Fri Jun 27 | Group lunch at Schønnemanns |
| 2 | Tue Jul 1 | Nationalmuseet |
| 2 | Thu Jul 3 | Christianshavn walking tour |
| 2 | Fri Jul 4 | Daytrip: Gilleleje |
| 3 | Tue Jul 8 | Royal Library / Black Diamond |
| 3 | Fri Jul 11 | Statens Museum for Kunst |
| 3 | Sat Jul 12 | Optional daytrip: Helsingør (Kronborg), Gurre, Louisiana |
| 4 | Mon Jul 14 | Frederiksberg Have |
| 4 | Wed Jul 16 | Assistens Kirkegård (Kierkegaard’s grave) |
| 4 | Fri Jul 18 | Daytrip: Roskilde |
| 5 | Mon Jul 21 | Dyrehaven |
| 5 | Tue Jul 22 | (free — Vor Frue Kirke recommended nearby) |
| 5 | Thu Jul 24 | The City Lakes walk (Søerne) |
Not required, but rewarding for those who want more context or wish to go deeper.
Syllabus subject to revision. The seminar has no fixed conclusion — only, as Kierkegaard would say, an upbuilding task for each participant to carry home.
A loose collection of Copenhagen spots for lunches, free afternoons, and spontaneous excursions. Not scheduled — just recommended.
Beaches and islands — Several very good beach destinations are reachable from Copenhagen without a car, ranging from easy day trips to longer weekend excursions.
The nearest options are within the city or just north of it. Amager Strandpark is Copenhagen’s largest beach — a man-made sandy island a short metro ride from the centre (M2 to Amager Strand), with a sheltered lagoon on one side and open sea with dunes on the other; popular for swimming, kayaking, and kite surfing, with a promenade running the full length. Hellerup Strand, just north of the city and a short S-tog or bus ride away, is small and sandy with shallow water and a wooden pier — quiet by Copenhagen standards, and particularly good for an easy early-evening swim. Bellevue Strand at Klampenborg is the classic Copenhagen beach: 700 metres of sand with Arne Jacobsen’s blue-striped lifeguard towers and kiosks (1932) still in place, grassy lawns behind, and views across to Sweden. It is a short walk from Klampenborg S-train station, and conveniently combined with an afternoon at Dyrehaven next door — which the seminar visits in Week 5 anyway.
The simplest option for a longer excursion is the north Zealand coast, sometimes called the Danish Riviera. Hornbæk is the most popular: a large sandy beach backed by dunes, a pretty harbour, and a small town with cafés and ice cream shops. Get there by regional train to Helsingør (~55 min) then the local Kystbanen along the coast to Hornbæk (~25 min further). Tisvildeleje is more remote and more bohemian in character, with white sand, coloured bathing huts, and the atmospheric beech forest of Tisvilde Hegn (Troldeskoven) just behind the dunes. It has been a favourite summer retreat for Copenhagen artists and intellectuals for generations. Reach it via S-tog to Hillerød (~40 min) then the local train to Tisvildeleje (~40 min). Both destinations make easy day trips and are well worth the journey on a warm afternoon.
Samsø requires more planning but rewards it. The island sits in the Kattegat between Zealand and Jutland and is known for its long beaches, quiet roads ideal for cycling, and its distinction as the first carbon-neutral community in Denmark. The route without a car: train from Copenhagen to Kalundborg (~1.5 hrs), then Samsølinjen ferry from Kalundborg to Kolby Kås or Ballen (~1h 50 min), with only two daily departures — so check the schedule at samsoelinjen.dk and plan backwards from the last return ferry. The total journey of about 3.5 hours makes this a genuine weekend trip rather than a day excursion. For accommodation options including hotels, B&Bs, holiday apartments, and camping, see the official directory at visitsamsoe.dk/en/accommodation.
Bornholm is further still — a rocky Baltic island with a very different character from the rest of Denmark: round medieval churches, a great ruined fortress (Hammershus), herring smokeries, and stretches of granite coastline unlike anything on Zealand. The overnight ferry departs from Køge, south of Copenhagen, with a crossing time of about 5.5 hours to Rønne — reachable from Copenhagen by S-tog. The faster option is the train across the Øresund Bridge to Ystad in Sweden, where Bornholmslinjen’s high-speed ferries cover the crossing in 1 hour 20 minutes, with multiple daily departures in summer. Either way, Bornholm needs at least two nights. For students with a free weekend mid-seminar it is worth considering, but requires advance booking in summer.
Møns Klint — the dramatic white chalk cliffs on the island of Møn — is not primarily a swimming destination but belongs in this list for sheer natural spectacle. The cliffs rise over 100 metres above the Baltic and the beach at their base is one of the strangest and most beautiful in Denmark. Reachable by train to Vordingborg (~1 hr) then bus to Stege and onward (~1 hr further); the logistics are fiddlier than the north coast options but manageable for a long summer day.
Harbour swimming — Copenhagen’s harbour has been clean enough to swim in since 2001, and the city has built a series of free harbour baths along the waterfront. The closest to the seminar area are: Islands Brygge Havnebad (metro: Islands Brygge), the original and most popular, with five pools including two 50-metre lanes and a diving tower with 1, 3, and 5-metre platforms — open all year, lifeguarded in summer; Copencabana (metro: Havneholmen), on the Vesterbro side near Fisketorvet, a slightly smaller complex with three pools and springboards up to 3 metres; and Kalvebod Bølge (Kalvebod Wave), directly across the water from Islands Brygge on Kalvebod Brygge, a public waterfront structure with open decks and dipping areas. There is also a small bathing zone at Søndre Refshalebassin on Refshaleøen, a short walk from Reffen — convenient to combine with an afternoon at the street food market. Water quality is monitored daily; a red flag means the bath is temporarily closed. No charge at any of these facilities.
Rosenborg Slot — The Dutch Renaissance palace built by Christian IV in the early seventeenth century, set in the Kongens Have (King’s Garden) just north of the city centre and a short walk from Torvehallerne. The palace houses the Danish crown jewels and regalia in its basement treasury, and the upper rooms contain an exceptional collection of royal furnishings, portraits, and decorative arts from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries — including the throne room and the winter room. For this seminar the connection is minor but real: Kierkegaard walked frequently in the Kongens Have, one of the oldest public parks in Copenhagen, and references to these gardens appear in his journals. The park is free and open daily; admission to the palace is charged. See kongeligeslotte.dk for current hours.
Tivoli — The pleasure gardens in the heart of the city, open since 1843: Kierkegaard knew them well, and they appear in the background of several texts as a symbol of the aesthetic life at its most accessible and most shallow. We are tentatively planning a group evening here; details to follow.
Christiania — The freetown on a former military base in Christianshavn, founded in 1971 and still there: about 850 residents, hand-built houses, studios, music venues, and cafés governed by consensus. Worth a slow wander — the architecture is extraordinary and the community has produced genuine culture. The outdoor café Nemoland and the concert venue Loppen are both worth knowing about. Main entrance on Prinsessegade, a short walk from the metro or the Royal Library. The connection to the seminar is oblique but real: this is the most sustained experiment in living outside the structures of bourgeois society that Denmark has produced — exactly the possibility Kierkegaard both craved and doubted.
Reffen — The large open-air street food market on Refshaleøen, east of Christianshavn. A good destination for a free afternoon or a Saturday: dozens of stalls, a relaxed waterfront atmosphere, tables that fill up fast in good weather. The easiest way to get there is the harbour bus (route 992), which stops a 5-minute walk from Reffen and runs on the same ticket as the regular bus — 24 DKK. You can pick it up at Nyhavn, among other stops along the harbour.
CopenHill (Amager Bakke) — The waste-to-energy plant in Amager doubles as one of the more unlikely recreational destinations in northern Europe: the roof is a working ski slope in winter and a year-round hiking and running trail, with a via ferrata on the north face for those who want to use their hands. The reward for the climb is a panorama of the city — harbour, spires, Øresund, and Sweden on a clear day — that is hard to match from ground level. There is a rooftop bar at the summit. Take the metro to Christianshavn, then bus 37, which stops directly in front of the slope. See copenhill.dk for current hours and climbing sessions.
Broens Gadekøkken — A street food market on the Christianshavn side of Inderhavnsbroen — the Inner Harbour Bridge, nicknamed Kyssebroen (the Kissing Bridge) for the way its two spans slide apart and back together to let ships through. Good for lunch before an afternoon visit to Christianshavn or the Royal Library, with harbour views and a solid range of stalls. See broensstreetfood.dk for current opening times and stalls.
Folkehuset Absalon — A community house in Vesterbro with a large communal dinner served every evening — affordable, informal, and genuinely mixed in its crowd. A good option for students on any night of the week. See absaloncph.dk/en/food for the current menu and times.
Torvehallerne — The covered food market at Israels Plads, a short walk from the lakes. An easy lunch stop on any day, with high-quality provisions if you want to put together a picnic for Frederiksberg Have or Dyrehaven.
Lund, Sweden — Easily reached by train from Copenhagen via the Øresund Bridge (about 40 minutes, including a short metro connection to the main station). Lund is a small university city built around its Romanesque cathedral, one of the finest in Scandinavia — consecrated in 1145 and still the architectural and spiritual centre of the city. The university itself dates to 1666 and gives the place the particular atmosphere of a town that has been thinking for a very long time. For a seminar on Kierkegaard, who was acutely aware of the Danish church’s Scandinavian context and whose attack on Christendom resonates differently when you are standing inside a medieval cathedral that has never stopped being used, a few hours in Lund can be rewarding. The Historical Museum (Kulturen) is also worth a visit.
Sorø and Hauchs Physiske Cabinet — Sorø is a quiet lakeside town in central Zealand, about an hour from Copenhagen by train, built around a Cistercian abbey and one of Denmark’s oldest boarding schools, Sorø Akademi. The town has a distinctly contemplative atmosphere that makes it a worthwhile half-day excursion. Within the Academy grounds is Hauchs Physiske Cabinet — a remarkable collection of physics and chemistry instruments assembled between 1790 and 1827 by Adam Wilhelm Hauch, purchased by King Frederik VI in 1815, and bestowed to the Academy in 1827. It is one of the finest surviving collections of early nineteenth-century scientific apparatus in Scandinavia, and an evocative glimpse into the natural philosophy of exactly the world Kierkegaard grew up in. Opening hours are limited — check en.awhauch.dk before visiting.
Medical Museum (Medicinsk Museion) — The medical history museum of the University of Copenhagen, housed in the former Academy of Surgery (Kirurgisk Akademi) at Bredgade 62. The collection spans five centuries of Danish medical history, from anatomical instruments and pharmacy equipment to surgical theatres and wax models. The address has a double resonance for this seminar. Kierkegaard spent his final forty days in the adjacent Frederiks Hospital at Bredgade 68 — admitted on 2 October 1855 as patient no. 2067, cause of death still disputed — and died there on 11 November 1855. The building at no. 62 was the childhood home of Niels, Harald, and Jenny Bohr: their father Christian Bohr moved in as senior lecturer in physiology in 1886 and was appointed professor in 1890, and Niels grew up here until he received his doctorate in 1911, doing his earliest laboratory work in the physiology institute behind the building. Since 1948 the house has been the Medical Museion. For a seminar focused on anxiety, the self, and the body’s relationship to spirit, a visit to this unsettling and beautifully preserved complex can be more philosophically resonant than it first sounds. See museion.ku.dk for opening hours and current exhibitions.
Jutland — A long journey from Copenhagen, but one that repays the effort for anyone who wants to understand the landscape at the root of the authorship. Kierkegaard’s father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard (1756–1838), was born in the village of Sædding, near Ringkøbing on the west Jutland coast, and spent his boyhood tending sheep on the surrounding heath — cold, flat, exposed, and immense. At some point during those years, alone on the moor and hungry, the boy cursed God. He carried that moment for the rest of his life, and it formed the dark undertow of the melancholy he passed on to his son. Søren knew the story, called it the “great earthquake,” and understood it as the key to everything. The philosophy of anxiety, guilt, and the self before God did not begin in Copenhagen drawing rooms. It began on the Jutland heath.
The nearest natural counterpart today is the West Coast (Vestkysten): the long, unbroken stretch of North Sea shore running south from Skagen. This is the most exposed and elemental landscape in Denmark — wide beaches backed by dunes, heavy surf, the wind uninterrupted all the way from England. Nothing in the gentler, more domesticated scenery of Zealand prepares you for it. Standing on a beach at Blåvand or Hvide Sande, in weather that is rarely quite calm, one gets a physical sense of what shaped the elder Kierkegaard: a world without shelter, where the sky is very large and human beings are very small, and where the question of what God owes us or we owe God has an urgency it does not have elsewhere. The seminar theme of existence as exposure, of the self as undefended before the infinite, takes on a different register here.
At the northern tip of Jutland, where the Kattegat meets the Skagerrak, lies Skagen — the furthest point of Denmark and for a century and a half the gathering place of Scandinavian painters drawn by its exceptional light. The artists’ colony that formed there in the 1870s and 1880s — P.S. Krøyer, Anna and Michael Ancher, Holger Drachmann and their circle — produced some of the most important work in the history of Danish art, and the Skagens Museum holds the finest collection of it. The landscape itself, the dune heaths and the two seas meeting at Grenen, has changed little. Getting to Skagen from Copenhagen takes a minimum of seven hours by train — south to Aarhus, north to Aalborg, then onward to Skagen — and is most naturally an overnight or multi-night trip, ideally combined with a night or two on the west coast. For anyone with a free weekend during the seminar it is strongly recommended.
Frederiksborg Slot, Hillerød — The great Dutch Renaissance palace on the lake at Hillerød, housing the Museum of National History. Reachable by S-tog in about forty minutes. Grander and more dynastic in feeling than Kronborg, with a remarkable portrait collection spanning five centuries of Danish history. A natural pairing if you have a free Saturday and didn’t make it to Roskilde.