In the summer of 1711, the bubonic plague swept through Copenhagen. The dead lay in the streets. By August, the army had been ordered to dig mass graves outside the city limits. Before it was over, roughly one in three of the city's inhabitants was dead.
Among those who fled was a young student named Ludvig Holberg. He made his way south to the island of Falster, where he found lodgings at a modest inn and ferry crossing called Borrehuset, by the Grønsund strait.
The woman who ran the place was nearly seventy years old, and her husband was in prison.
Her name was Marie Grubbe, and her life story was remarkable.
It is not a story of rags to riches.
Rather the other way round.
Marie and Ludvig
The name meant nothing to Holberg when he arrived, it meant a great deal by the time he left. Over the days and weeks they spent together — the young student from Bergen with nowhere better to be, the old innkeeper with time on her hands — she told him the whole story.
Ludvig learned that just a few weeks earlier, her husband Søren had been drinking with a skipper from Dragør. The night turned ugly, a loaded musket came down from a roof beam, and the skipper died on the spot. Søren was now in a cell in Nykøbing. Marie was alone with the inn, the ferry, and a plague-fleeing student asking questions.
Marie herself had fallen from the highest ranks of society. She had been born into the Danish nobility in 1643. At seventeen, she had married the most eligible man in the kingdom: Ulrik Frederik Gyldenløve, illegitimate son of King Frederick III and Governor-General (Stattholder) of Norway. The couple had lived at Akershus Fortress in Christiania — the building that still watches over Oslo harbour today.
It was not a happy arrangement. Gyldenløve was often away. Marie was not good at being left alone, or perhaps she simply refused to pretend she was.
Marie and her men
Marie Grubbe liked men, and she was not inclined to hide it. While married to Gyldenløve at Akershus, she pursued his secretary, a French cavalry officer stationed at the fortress, and quite possibly her own brother-in-law — simultaneously, or close to it.
After Gyldenløve, She married again. That marriage ended in divorce too, in 1691, when she fell for the man who drove her carriage. Her father asked the king to have her locked away for life. The king consulted her husband, who said he just wanted to be free of her. She married the coachman instead, in a quiet ceremony across the German border, since Danish law barred her from remarrying at home.
After her second marriage, she took up with the farmhand Søren Møller so openly that the servants testified in detail at the subsequent divorce trial: they had seen him in her bed, heard them through the walls, been sent to fetch him at night and dismissed from the room when he arrived. She embroidered gifts for him. She kissed him in front of the household staff. When he was arrested, she tried to sell what little she had to pay for his release.
This was not a secret affair conducted with discretion. It was a sustained, visible, unapologetic choice — made by a noblewoman, in the seventeenth century, in a society where adultery was technically a capital offence. She knew the price and paid it anyway, more than once.
Today we would call this sexual freedom. In 1691, it cost her everything she had left.
And now she was here, running a ferry crossing on Falster, her husband awaiting trial for manslaughter, and a young student taking notes.
Happier than ever
What Holberg heard in that kitchen — or across whatever rough table they shared — stayed with him. Years later, in his Epistles, he wrote it up, ensuring his readers that he had heard it from her own mouth.
Holberg's account contains one detail that has puzzled readers ever since. He writes that despite Søren treating her badly on a daily basis — his words — she insisted she was happier with him than she had ever been. Holberg clearly found this incomprehensible, and filed it as evidence of what he called perverse taste.
We should be careful with this. Holberg had an argument to make: that Marie's choices were irrational, that desire had overridden judgment. A man with that agenda might exaggerate the misery of her circumstances to sharpen the paradox.
What the historical record does confirm is that Søren drank heavily, that on the night of 18 May 1711 he shot a skipper dead in a drunken brawl at their own inn, and that Marie was the one who appeared at the subsequent hearings to defend him. Whatever the nature of their life together, she did not abandon him.
What astonished Holberg most was her contentment. Despite everything — the poverty, the beatings, the fallen circumstances — she told him she was happier with Søren than she had ever been with any nobleman.
Holberg, a man of the Enlightenment, filed this under perverse taste. He genuinely could not make sense of it.
Marie and H.C. Andersen
H.C. Andersen could. He wrote her into a fairy tale — Chicken Grethe's Family — where Marie appears as a headstrong noblewoman who follows her own desires against every social convention, and ends up as the defiant ancestor of a cheerful old henkeeper who remembers nothing of any of it. The contrast is the point.
Marie never had children. All three marriages were childless, which was unusual for a woman who lived to seventy-three. We don't know why. What we do know is that Andersen's invention of a granddaughter — the cheerful, utterly conventional Chicken Grethe — is pure fiction. Marie left no descendants.
One later novelist suggested that her childlessness may have been part of her freedom: while the women around her were worn down by pregnancies and infant deaths, Marie remained, in some sense, her own. That may be reading too much into the silence. But it is a silence worth noting.
Desires at the centre
Later J.P. Jacobsen spent four years on a novel about her — published in 1876, recommended by Rilke, admired by Ibsen — that placed her desires, rather than her disgrace, at the centre of the story.
The novel's argument, quietly made, was that Marie Grubbe had simply known what she wanted and paid the price for knowing it, which is not the same as a fall from grace at all.
After the book an opera followed. Then a TV series. Then another novel, set at Akershus in the winter of 1666.
What they all kept returning to was the same thing: a woman who looked at the life arranged for her — the fortress, the title, the absent husband — and chose, at considerable cost, something else.
She died in poverty at around seventy-three. She left no children. She left no portraits. What she left was the story itself, a story that still inspires women and men that recognise something in her that Holberg couldn't name.
That is inspiring.
Want to learn more about how Marie's life fits into the history of Christiania, Oslo and Norway? You can book me for one of these walks:
