Tuesday 18 March 2014

Denmark

Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time (London, 1968).

I admit to almost complete ignorance of geography. A school teacher told me that I concentrated on what I was interested in but ignored everything else. My interest has always been philosophical abstraction, not practical information. I cannot visually imagine anything and literally do not remember what anything looks like, except in the most general terms, so that I have to study a map very carefully if I am to retain any idea of relative positions, distances or travel routes.

Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time has made me aware of what an extraordinary country Denmark is and I had to consult a map in order to make sense of his text. In an earlier post, I summarized his account of Copenhagen. Storm Darroway and Malcolm Lockridge travel by car:

out of the old city,
through a district of high apartment buildings;
through green countryside and red-roofed villages;
into Roskilde;
past its three-spired cathedral;
through Rinsted and Soro Slagelse (one place or two?);
to Korsor on the Belt;
by ferry to Nyborg;
across Fyen;
through Odense ("Odin's Lake");
across the bridge to the Jutish peninsula;
north past forested hills and dolmens;
through Holstebro;
from there to the time corridor under a dolmen on a small hill.

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