Author: Rundetaarn

When the organ in the Trinity Church was restored in 1931, an old marble tablet was found under the large instrument. Five years later, the marble tablet was placed in the Round Tower’s spiral ramp, as marble tablets are not intended to be put away. Or said differently: it is not aimed at them when the old maxim states that to live well is to live concealed. The words, most famously coined by the Roman poet Ovid, apply much better to one of the lesser-known astronomical writers of the 18th century, Johan Samuel Augustin (1715-1785). At least he believed so...

There is an old joke about a Norwegian tourist standing in front of the Round Tower and taking a long look at it. A Dane comes along and remarks, “I’m sure you don’t have a tower like this in Norway?” and the Norwegian replies, “No, but if we had one, it would have been both taller and rounder”. One should not be too square when it comes to questions of roundness, but at least the part about the height is not quite right. Norway actually does have a Round Tower, which is, however, somewhat shorter than its namesake in Copenhagen....

If one can say that the Round Tower belongs to anyone, then it must belong to King Christian IV (1577-1648). It was he who, as early as February 1637, slightly less than half a year before the foundation of the tower was laid, had made an agreement with a citizen in the important Northern German Reformation city of Emden to deliver shiploads of brick for its construction. And it was he who, five years later, in July 1642, sat down at Rosenborg Castle and wrote in a letter that he had drawn a plan of the upper platform of “the...

A tower is like a story: it has a beginning, a middle and an end. When it comes to the Round Tower, the middle is the spiral ramp and the end is the platform with its observatory on top of the tower. These two parts of the tower have attracted most of the attention throughout the tower’s history. The Round Tower’s beginning, its entrance with the gateway to the tower, has received less notice. The gateway of the tower is, however, too interesting to simply be brushed aside as something one passes in order to reach something else. The gateway...

There is something about the Round Tower and lighthouses. If one starts in the periphery of things that connect them, one can mention that the Round Tower was thoroughly restored in 1870-71 by the architect N. S. Nebelong (1806-71) who covered the majority of its façade with grey cement plaster. A dozen of years prior to this, the same Nebelong had designed a lighthouse in Denmark’s northernmost area Skagen. The lighthouse reaches a height of 46 metres and was the tallest in Denmark until the lighthouse in Dueodde on the Danish island of Bornholm surpassed it with one metre a...