# Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 11/Angeln

ANGELN.
It has been said that the Russian War revealed to the majority of Englishmen the existence of the Crimea. The Slesvig-Holstein question has been too long before the world, and has been used too much by the lightest of littérateurs as a synonym for something utterly incomprehensible, to allow me to say that the Dano-German war will be for my countrymen the epoch of the discovery of Slesvig. But its exploration will certainly date from the Austro-Prussian invasion. Thousands of tourists will trace this autumn the path of the German hosts, wander over the ground where the Dannevirke stood for well nigh a thousand years, maim their feet upon the execrable pavement of the long dull street of Slesvig town, look through the fine (as far as the interior is concerned) Dom Kirche, drive along the road to Flensburg, on which the outnumbered Danes made their retreat, stop at Oversee to note the spot where they made such a gallant stand, and dealt such slaughter amongst the impetuous Styrians, lounge along the quays of Flensburg, or sail upon its beautiful inlet, and, as the term of their journey, revisit, as it were, Sundewitt and Alsen, with which the vivid descriptions of special correspondents have already made them well acquainted.
I cannot tell how Slesvig may look this autumn, after the tornado of war has swept across it, but if the recuperative power of nature is strong enough to give it anything like the same smiling aspect it presented last year, the tourists cannot fail to find much to delight them. Very easy of access, Slesvig, which no one formerly visited, because it led nowhere and had no special attractions, could boast no mountains or waterfalls, no world-compelling ruins or galleries, will now draw the curious who delight to gaze upon the theatre of important events, and charm while it fills with wonder all those Englishmen who love the rural beauty of their native land. For, but that the people speak platt deutsch and dialects in which it is difficult to say, so philologists tell us, whether German or Danish more predominates, but that they dress a little differently, an Englishmen fancies himself at home in Slesvig. As long as he keeps out of doors it is hard for him—in the summer time—to believe that he is not in England. In winter the bitterness of the cold would remind him that he was in another clime, and the blank, dreary appearance of the snow-covered land would strike him with no similitude to the English landscape.
I am presuming that the tourist visits the right part of Slesvig; but it is extremely probable that unless he has some suggestion to do so he will pass by the most interesting district, and come away with an indifferent opinion of the duchy. I know Sundewitt, which he is sure to visit, would please him well enough if it were in its natural condition, but it has been the great theatre of war, the camping-ground of sixty or seventy thousand soldiers, and when the armies withdraw it must change from a scene of animation to one of desolation. The rest of the duchy that he is likely to see, if he follows the track of the war or of the railway, is one long unbroken stretch of heath and marsh, very good to fatten cattle for the London market, but very cheerless to look upon.
The interesting portion of Slesvig lies aside from the railway and from the war. The turn-pike road from Slesvig to Flensburg, of which I have spoken, may be said to form its boundary. The traveller who, instead of making his way from Slesvig to Flensburg by the rail, chooses, perhaps from a desire to follow in the steps of the armies, the road, will find himself after he gets a mile or two out of Slesvig on a heath, broken only two or three times on the whole of the rest of the distance—some twenty miles—by villages, cultivated land, and bits of wood. On his left hand the moor will stretch as far as his eye can reach, and if his vision were powerful enough, he would follow it to the North Sea. On his right hand, however, it is stopped in less than a mile by hillocks covered with wood. Sheltered by those hillocks, and stretching from them to the sea, forming a semicircle of which this road may be called the line, and the sea, the inlet of Flensburg, and the Slei the outside, lies Angeln, a country which possesses even a greater interest to Englishmen than the quiet beauty which it shows to all comers, inasmuch as it is the reputed home of the race which gave their land its back-bone and its name.
I am no ethnologist; I do not pretend to offer an opinion upon the merits of the arguments which have been brought forward in the controversy whether the Angles did come from Angeln, but I have acquired a conviction that they did, which no force of argument, I will even say no proof, however strong, can shake. I was at home there. As I wandered through the narrow roads, with their thick, luxurious fences, in which the blackberries invited me to feast, as I was wont to do when a schoolboy; as I turned aside to ramble without purpose or goal up the green lanes, with their even taller and more unkempt hedges; as I strolled in pleasant footpaths across fields of about five or six acres, in which the oats stood in shocks waiting to be carted, or the ploughman whistled after his horses; as I caught every now and ​then a glimpse of a lowly church peeping out of the trees, and close by it the substantial house of the gutsbesitzer, or squire; as I walked through the villages by the well-built cottages—the walls and porches covered with trailing flowers, the gardens neat and well kept up—I could hardly believe that I was not after all in East Anglia, somewhere on the coast of Norfolk. Almost everything I saw assisted to heighten the illusion. There was the blacksmith’s forge by the road side, with the gossips standing about it; there was the beer-house in the middle of the village, and the little general shop, where everything was to be bought; there were the guide-posts at every crossway, with unmistakeable English names upon them—at least half the villages in Angeln seemed to me to end in “by”—there were the boundary-stones marking the limits of the parishes, and chubby, flaxen-headed children,—non Angli sed Angeli—who bowed and curtseyed to the stranger just as if they had been trained by the parish schoolmistress. The only things that struck me at all strangely were the stone causeways, which commence at the first and finish at the last house of each village, the numbers on the houses—a police regulation— and the remarkable civility of the people. A stranger who strolls through an English village has to run the gauntlet of something more than curiosity; it is quite possible that he will be greeted with a stone or two, and if half-a-dozen fellows are lounging together in front of the beer-house or on the church-yard wall, a few coarse jeers are certain to be bestowed upon him. I met with nothing of the kind in Angeln, and choose to account for the difference by the mixture of races in England. The only impertinence I did experience was familiar enough. From almost every farmyard a couple of dogs rushed out and barked me beyond the bounds. The people looked strong and healthy, the young women were comely and ruddy as English peasant girls. The servant girls of Flensburg, drawn, I suppose, from Angeln, were among the prettiest I have seen out of or even in England. The country is pleasantly undulating and fairly wooded, and the larger part belongs to noble proprietors, as is also the case in Holstein, with the exception of the rich marsh district, Dithmarschen. In the rest of Slesvig the land belongs to peasant proprietors, but these peasant proprietors are really large yeomen, and own farms of three or four hundred acres. The language spoken by the inhabitants of Angeln was one of the most vexed disputes between the Germans and the Danish Government. As far as I could form a judgment, whilst the land-owners are Germans, and speak High-German, the population generally speak in about equal proportions Danish or Low-German.
I have no intention of describing Angeln in any detail, I desire only to state the impression it made upon me, for the benefit of those of my countrymen who, passing by Hamburg next autumn, may diverge from their route for a few days to visit the scene of what I hope may then be called the late war. But there is one spot of which I must make brief mention—Glucksburg, or Lyksborg, the favourite residence of the Late King of Denmark; and I do so the more especially that it is within an easy walk from Flensburg. A very pleasant walk I found it; the road, well kept, as becomes a road to a royal residence, runs through a country which presents the usual features of an Angeln landscape, the distance being about six or seven miles. The palace is built in a small lake of a circular shape, and rises out of the waters at a short distance from the shore. It is entirely surrounded by water; there is no embankment— not even a gallery; steps lead down to a landing place on the main front towards the park, and a bridge connects it on one side with the land, on which are the stables and other outbuildings. The house is a very large one, with no pretension to architectural beauty, but evidently very solidly built. Round the lake, except for the small distance along which the road runs, stretches a beautiful park, open to all, through which the visitor must perforce ramble. A beautiful bright afternoon had succeeded a wet morning, and a more delightful spot than Glucksburg I have seldom seen. All was so quiet and yet so bright. Here fine masses of trees came down into the lake, and there the waters forced their way into the forest, and formed little bays shut in by dense foliage; and the old house which looked into them all, with its three-gable roofs, held together as it were by the round towers which kept guard each at a corner, for all its ugliness had a charming look. It seemed just the place to live a lazy, lounging life, free from all care or trouble, one’s hardest work to float in a canoe across the lake, and there, under the shelter of some giant trees, and lulled by the rippling of the water, sleeping or waking, dream away. Behind the park and on towards the sea were woods in which a sportsman would find, no doubt, plenty of amusement. The village is a long one, and as a royal residence should be clean and well-to-do-looking, with some good houses of much higher pretensions than peasants’ cottages. On the other side of the road is another and smaller lake, connected with the larger one by a stream which turns a mill, and upon this lake stands another large house. ​The castle was formerly the seat of the Glucksburg dukes, and King Christian, who belongs to that house, resumes, therefore, an old family possession. Let us hope that he will soon be able to enjoy it. At present the Prussians are masters at Glucksburg, and they are "men in possession" of whom it is very difficult to get rid.
Burton S. Blyth.