H. C. Andersens House — Attraction in Odense Kommune

This was the most boring museum I have ever been to. The HC Andersens House Museum, meant to showcase the writings of a genius. Instead, the entire place is filled with GRAY AND WHITE muted surroundings. When you enter, you're forced to put your stuff in a locker, God know's why, because there is nothing you could steal, because there's literally nothing on display. The entire museum is made of circular walls with "movies" displayed on them (if you can call them that, because just as the rooms, the "movies" are also completely BLACK AND WHITE with minimal movement). The movies come with small tidbits of voiced info which are laced in unnecessary pandering, half of the info wasn't even relevant. You had to activate them by stepping on a circle while wearing a headphone, which feels like a brick on your head, and after wearing it for 1 hour it also heats up to the point where you're beginning to question whether or not your hair will burn and fall off. Did no one ever stop to think and ask a writer for their input on this horrible show?

I AM A WRITER BY PROFESSION. This is literally my job and I was SO excited to enter a museum based on a writer, only to find out that it has nothing, and I mean nothing, to do with writing at all. No one is ever even prompted to participate, let alone to see what it is like to write. What it is like to actually fantasize and dream.

All the rooms are bland, dull, devoid of emotion, there is not an inkling of fantasy present, except in the children's playroom, which was probably the highlight of our day there. The rest of the museum is so boring, not just the kids skip everything but the adults do too.

This place is not an ode to a magical writer, but an abysmal presumption of what it must be like to be a writer created by those who do not possess even a smidge of creativity. IT DOESN'T LOOK LIKE A DULL, GRAY TONE-DEAF MUTED HOSPITAL, which is what this museum was cosplaying as. Writing is vivid, full of colors, voices, faces, places, imagery plucked from the sky and into my brain and out, like picking flowers off an endlessly growing tree that we can fly through.

Never in my life have I been so offended by a museum, because they got it ALL WRONG. This is NOT how writers write, this is NOT what it's like to be a writer, this is NOT what writers see when they imagine the stories.

I KNOW. BECAUSE I AM ONE. And I can 100% tell this entire museum was created by people who have never written a single story in their entire life.

The ONLY plus side to visiting here is that you get a free pass to also visit his parent's house, which was more interesting than the entirety...

I am extremely disappointed with my visit to the new HC Andersen's House, which "soft" opened on June 30.

First, I think the website is outwright deceiving!!! The beautiful image of the museum you see when you go to its home page is fake (computer generated)!!! The actual site is still very mush a construction zone with barricades/construction equipments/workers everywhere.

Second, I don't think the museum understand what "soft" opening means!!! In my opinion, this museum is NOT ready and shouldn't be open to visitors. To me, soft opening (vs. grand opening) means the museum opens quietly without major advertisements and is served as a trial run for the operation before the grand opening, when large flows of visitors will be coming in. It does NOT mean you open it when more than half of the museum offerings are not completed and ready for the visitors!!! As I mentioned in the paragraph above, the site of the museum is an active construction zone, but that is not the worst part. In addition, there is supposed to be a beautiful cafe and of course it was no where to be found, and this is also not the worst part. Upon our arrival to the museum, we were informed the headset for English that allows us to enjoy all the interactive experiences, which in my opinion is really the highlight of this museum, is NOT ready!!! But we looked around, no one had any headset on (Danish spoken or not), so I think the headsets were not available to anyone, at least on the date we visited. As the result, one had no idea what's going on with all the interactive experiences. There were buttons and interactive screens where you saw everyone try to push and touch, but without the headset and the narrative, none of the experiences meant anything to anyone. We were in and out of the museum in 30 minutes, and that's including me looking a bit in the gift shop area.

I am sure when the museum is finally completed, it will be amazing, but for now, I don't think it's ready for visitors to appreciate what this place has to offer. And yes, the museum only charged half of the regular price during the "soft" opening. But again, this is not soft opening (in my opinion), it's a HALF COMPLETED museum with key parts missing, and to me, I wouldn't pay...

There is something profoundly unsettling, almost metaphysical, about entering the H.C. Andersen House Museum in Odense. This is not a museum in the ordinary sense, but a kind of sanctuary for a soul that wandered through life as an exile, even in the midst of admiration and applause. Here, one is not simply walking through curated rooms but descending into the deep caverns of a man’s yearning: his hunger for love, for beauty, for meaning in a world that so often offered him none.

Hans Christian Andersen’s life was one of quiet tragedy. Born into poverty, plagued by physical awkwardness, and possessed of an almost painful sensitivity, he moved through the world with the wide, searching eyes of a child who never stopped longing. And yet, this child grew into a man whose most intimate desires were never fulfilled. It is likely — though veiled in the gentility of the time — that he was homosexual, or at least deeply drawn to men in a way that society punished with silence. The letters he left behind read like confessions: full of yearning, obsession, loneliness. There is no record of requited love. None.

And so, he wrote. But not for children — not truly. Andersen’s tales are often mistaken for sweet bedtime stories, when in truth they are parables of suffering, of moral endurance, of love crushed beneath the weight of indifference and fate. The Little Match Girl dies in the cold, her final visions a last rebellion against a brutal world. The Snow Queen is not a villain, but a symbol of ice that forms in the human heart when warmth is denied. And The Steadfast Tin Soldier — mute, deformed, and noble — burns silently in the fire, still standing, still in love, and no one sees.

This museum dares to embrace that darkness. It doesn’t flinch. In its quiet corners and haunting visuals, one finds not the fairytale castles of childhood but the long corridors of the soul. It is a Dostoyevsky-style place where suffering reveals truth, and beauty is inseparable from pain.

Odense itself is charming, as though frozen in the innocence that Andersen longed for but never found. But here, in this museum, we confront not the child Andersen, but the man: the weeping dreamer in a cold room, writing his way...