ANDERS. [Angrily] Well!
OLAVUS. King Christian has been captured and made a prisoner at Sonderborg Castle, in the island of Als.
MONS and ANDERS show how deeply the news hits them; neither one has a word to say.
OLAVUS. You understand, don't you?—Stinderborg Castle, in the island of Als?
Curtain.
[1] Peder Jacobsson Sunnanväder, bishop at Vesterås, and his archdeacon, Master Knut, both members of the old Catholic clergy, tried to raise the Dalecarlians against the King in 1524-5, when his hold on the new throne was still very precarious. The False Sture was a young Dalecarlian named John Hansson, who had acquired gentle manners as a servant in noble houses and who posed as the natural son of Sten Sture the Younger, "National Director" of Sweden until 1520. This pretender, who headed another Dalecarlian uprising in 1527, figures also in Ibsen's early historical drama, "Lady Inger." The taking of the church-bells mentioned by Mons Nilsson's wife took place in 1531 and resulted in the killing of several of the King's representatives by the Dalecarlians.
[2] In 1520 Christian II of Denmark made a temporarily successful effort to bring Sweden back into the union with the other two Scandinavian kingdoms. Having defeated the Swedish "National Director," Sten Sture the Younger, and been admitted to the city of Stockholm, he caused about eighty of the most influential members of the Swedish nobility to be beheaded in a single day. That was the "Blood-bath of Stockholm," by which King Gustavus lost his father and brother-in-law. On the same occasion his mother and sister were imprisoned, and both died before they could be set free.
[3] Långheden is a wooded upland plain on the southern border of Dalecarlia. Brunbeck Ferry or Ford was for centuries the main crossing point of the Dal River for all who entered the province of Dalecarlia from the south. Rendered arrogant by the part they had played in the wars of liberation between 1434 and 1524, the Dalecarlians had established a claim that not even the King himself had the right to pass those two border points at the head of an armed force without first having obtained their permission.