Odense
— — the city the storyteller drew his houses from.
Not only on a wall.
“Odense sits in the middle of the Danish island of Funen, a city of about 180,000 that traces its name to Odin and its founding charter to 988. Hans Christian Andersen was born in a narrow yellow house here in 1805, and the lanes of the old quarter still lean the way he drew them. St Canute's Cathedral holds the bones of King Canute IV, killed in 1086. The Odense River bends south toward the open-air Funen Village. The light is northern and slow. from the studio
Odense, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Odense is the third-largest city in Denmark and the principal city of the island of Funen, sitting in the Region of Southern Denmark. The 2024 estimate puts the urban population at about 180,000. The city's name derives from Odin's Vé, a sanctuary of the Norse god Odin, and Odense first appears in a royal charter from Emperor Otto III in 988. It lies roughly 165 kilometres west of Copenhagen, connected to Zealand by the Great Belt Bridge since 1998. The Odense River runs east to west through the old town toward Odense Fjord on the Kattegat.
St Canute's Cathedral, the Sankt Knuds Kirke, rises in red brick at the heart of the old town. The current building is a Brick Gothic structure largely completed in the late fourteenth century on the site of an earlier Romanesque church. Its crypt holds the remains of King Canute IV, killed in the previous church on this site by rebellious peasants on 10 July 1086 and canonised in 1101. The carved oak and gold altarpiece by Claus Berg, finished around 1525, is among the most important late-medieval altarpieces in Scandinavia. The cathedral is free to enter outside services.
Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense on 2 April 1805 in a small yellow corner house at what is now Hans Jensens Stræde 45. The H.C. Andersen Hus reopened in 2021 as a partly underground museum designed by Kengo Kuma, set among the old lanes of the writer's childhood quarter. The city's H.C. Andersen Festivals run in late August each year with street processions and outdoor performances. The river path leads south past Munke Mose to the Funen Village, an open-air museum of relocated nineteenth-century rural buildings.