Udby Vicarage

Facts

Grundtvig's birthplace

By Berit Christensen, Cand.mag. i historie og forhistorisk arkæologi fra Københavns Universitet. (1 story)

Udby is slightly north of Vordingborg. The village vicarage is a four-winged half-timbered 17th century farm where Denmark's great theologian and hymn writer Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig was born on 8 September 1783. The vicarage with its park-like garden was the setting for the first nine years of his life. In 1811, Grundtvig reluctantly returned as a young theologian in the midst of a personal crisis to help out as curate for his old father. Yet while staying at his childhood home, he experienced a religious revival that significantly impacted the rest of his life. Grundtvig's Mindestuer is a museum housed in the curate's wing where Grundtvig lived in 1811-13.

Partly a public place

Selected entry

Grundtvig's playground

Story written by Berit Christensen

Time / Periode 1783 1813

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Growing up in Udby Vicarage had a profound effect on Grundtvig, and his memories of the garden and church were strong motifs in his poems. On returning to Udby in 1811, he wrote his celebrated poem Udby Have", which looks back on the garden of his childhood as a source of great inspiration: Garden! You that grow so wide/ around the old vicarage,/ you led me warmly home/ In the lovely childhood years./ This wilderness, these passageways/ soon became too constricted for me./ When I was a little boy,/ to my eye/ your fences seemed high,/ I lay in your green meadow,/ looked at the sky, wondering/ how God could walk/ up on the thin clouds. "