That Dagmar should die so young.
In the wild ride over field and moor, the King left his men far behind:
When the king rode out of Skanderborg
Him followed a hundred men.
But when he rode o’er Ribe bridge,
Then rode the king alone.
The tears of weeping women told him as he thundered over the drawbridge of the castle that he was too late. But Dagmar had only swooned. As he throws himself upon her bed she opens her eyes, and smiles upon her husband. Her last prayer, as her first, is for mercy and peace. Her sin, she says, is not great; she has done nothing worse than to lace her silken sleeves on a Sunday. Then she closes her eyes with a tired sigh:
The bells of heaven are chiming for me;
No more may I stay to speak.
Thus the folk-song. Long before Dagmar went to her rest, Bishop Valdemar had stirred up all Germany to wreak his vengeance upon the King. He was an ambitious, unscrupulous priest, who hated his royal master because he held himself entitled to the crown, being the natural son of King Knud, who was murdered at Roskilde, as told in the story of Absalon. While they were yet young men, when he saw that the people followed his rival, he set the German princes against Denmark, a task he never found hard. But young Valdemar made short work of them. He took the strong cities on the Elbe and laid the lands of his adversaries under the Danish crown. The bishop he seized, and threw him into the dungeon of Söborg Castle, where he had sat thirteen years when Dagmar’s prayers set him free. He could hardly walk when he came out, but he could hate, and all the world knew it. The Pope bound him with heavy oaths never to return to Denmark, and made him come to Italy so that he could keep an eye on him himself. But two years had not passed before he broke his oath, and fled to Bremen, where the people elected him to the vacant archbishopric and its great political power. Forthwith he began plotting against his native land.