On our recent trip to Denmark, I told Erlinda I wanted to visit Kronborg Castle in Helsingor, or Elsinore as it’s called in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

The first words in Hamlet are “Elsinore. A platform before the castle,” and Kronborg touts itself as being that castle.

In his guidebook to Scandinavia, Rick Steves downplays Kronborg’s connection with Hamlet, saying the castle was built long after the historic Hamlet and that Shakespeare never saw it.

I didn’t care. I wanted to stand on the windswept battlement of a castle—any castle—in Helsingor and stare moodily across the Oresund toward Sweden.