Henrik Knudsen chairs the Official Elvis Presley Fan Club of Denmark. In 2006 he registered the name Graceland Randers, five years before there was anything standing to attach it to. What eventually went up on the site cost about 26 million Danish kroner, which for a privately driven museum project in a city of sixty-odd thousand people is a genuinely startling number. Fan projects usually end at a spare room full of vinyl and a display case of concert tickets. This one ended in a building permit, a construction contract, and a facade scaled up from photographs of a house on the other side of the Atlantic.

The museum opened its doors on 14 April 2011. The formal opening came the following day, and the guest list said a lot about how seriously the project was being taken: the mayor of Randers, the American ambassador James P. Cain, and the singer Suzi Quatro, who had rather more claim to the microphone than most ribbon-cutters. Attached to the mansion are an American-style restaurant and a fan shop, so the building has always been three things at once - collection, diner, and pilgrimage site. Whatever else it is, it is not a museum that expects visitors to whisper.

The collection runs to roughly 6,000 pieces, valued at something in the region of 1.5 million euros: Presley memorabilia gathered over decades of fan club work and assembled in one place. By 2015 the mansion was drawing about 130,000 visitors a year and had established itself among Denmark's fifty most-visited attractions - a figure that puts it in genuinely competitive company for a museum devoted to a single American singer, in a Danish provincial city, at a latitude where Memphis summers are unimaginable.

The trouble was never the building. It was the word on the sign. Graceland is a controlled name, and in 2015 a lawsuit was filed against Knudsen for using it. Before the case was decided he changed the name, and in December 2015 Graceland Randers became Memphis Mansion. The Maritime and Commercial Court - Denmark's Sø- og Handelsretten - ruled in September 2016 that the Presley heirs' claim was justified and imposed damages of 500,000 Danish kroner, around 75,000 dollars. One accusation did not stick: the claim that counterfeit Elvis merchandise had been sold was declared unfounded. The judgment was about a name, not about the honesty of the enterprise, and the enterprise carried on under a new one.

There is a temptation to file all of this under novelty - a fake Graceland in Denmark, funny, next slide. That reading undersells what actually happened here. Elvis Presley's popularity in Northern Europe outlived him by decades, and Randers now holds one of the largest collections of his material anywhere outside Tennessee, built and paid for not by an estate or a corporation but by fans, with their own money, in their own town. The mansion still operates as museum, restaurant, event venue, and shop. The name over the door is Memphis Mansion, chosen under legal pressure, and it has aged into something more honest than the one it replaced: this was never Graceland, and it never really needed to be.