The home of Danish writer and storyteller Karen Blixen in Rungstedlund, Denmark.
Photo / Rungstedlundsamlingen
The home of Danish writer and storyteller Karen Blixen in Rungstedlund, Denmark.
Photo / Rungstedlundsamlingen
The memoir that went on to win seven Oscars is an inspiration for travellers. Visit the home museums of Karen Blixen, the author who penned Out of Africa, and connect the dots between Denmark and Kenya, writes Bob Wallace
“I had a farm in Africa … ” says the lightlyaccented voice of Meryl Streep in opening one of the most sentimental movies imaginable. Dripping with romanticism it might have been, but the film based on the memoir Out of Africa went on to win seven Oscars in 1986, including best picture, no doubt helped by the performances of dewy-eyed Ms Streep and handsome co-star Robert Redford.
Regardless, the love story is today still drawing pilgrims to the shrines of its famous author, Karen Blixen, scattered as wide as they are, in Denmark and Kenya.
A bedroom in the Karen Blixen house-museum in Kenya. Photo / Getty Images
After living in Africa for several years we watched the movie back in its day with some emotion as the film captured those vast and stunning panoramas, and the thorn trees and wildlife in Kenya. Extraordinarily, more than 35 years later as we flew from Dubai to Scandinavia it popped up on Emirates’ huge library of movies as one of a selection of classics – unbelievably timely, as we planned to go to Karen Blixen’s Danish museum-home, following a visit in 2009 to the other museum-home open to visitors, in Nairobi.
Karen Blixen Museum near Nairobi in Kenya. Photo / Getty Images
Apart from the fact that each museum is based around a substantial home and charming grounds, there could hardly be more difference between the two locations – one in the heart of the African continent, fringing on the equator; the other in the cooler northern climes of Europe on the edge of a sound.
Rungstedlund, north of Copenhagen city, is the birthplace of Karen Blixen, talented author and artist who was raised there and where she wrote most of her early works under the pen name Isak Dinesen. But at the age of 28, she left Denmark for Kenya with her Swedish husband, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, to establish a coffee plantation. They managed more than 2428ha of farmland, 242 of them in coffee, but ultimately their marriage failed (enter English hunter, safari guide and pilot Denys Finch-Hatton, portrayed by Robert Redford) and so too did the coffee enterprise.
Danish writer and storyteller Karen Blixen.
Photo / Rungstedlundsamlingen
Following the death of her lover in a plane crash, after 17 years in what is now the well-off Nairobi suburb of Karen, the writer returned to her Danish home; a large manor house and former inn dating back to about 1500, where she wrote Out of Africa, first in English and then in Danish. Another of her stories, Babette’s Feast, was also made into a film in 1987 and she was still writing until her death in 1962.
But you don’t have to be a Blixenophile to add a trip to this historic feature of Rungstedlund, backing onto an enchanting park and bird sanctuary, just 30 minutes by train north of Copenhagen. It is a genuinely attractive place to take in more of Copenhagen and its countryside by the Oresund sound.
The museum occupies the rooms where Karen Blixen lived, and it houses a gallery featuring her drawings and paintings; a documentary exhibit on her life and work, a library, a film screening room, a cafe, and a museum shop. A study with a view of the meandering gardens has on display the original Corona typewriter on which she typed her stories.
Visitors exploring the musuem-house of Danish writer and storyteller Karen Blixen in Rungstedlund, Denmark. Photo / Rungstedlundsamlingen
Wandering through the treed park beyond the flower gardens you will eventually come to her resting place, marked by a modest gravestone underneath a beech tree. Cancer claimed her life at 77 but the memories of this historical identity live on in both Denmark and Kenya.
