Undismayed, Bengerd objects that Danish women have no business to wear silken gowns, and that a good horse is not for a peasant lad. The King replies patiently that what a woman can buy she may wear for him, and that he will not take the lad’s horse if he can feed it. Bengerd is not satisfied. “Let bar the land with iron chains” is her next proposal, that neither man nor woman enter it without paying tax. Her husband says scornfully that Danish kings have never had need of such measures, and never will. He is plainly getting bored, and when she keeps it up, and begrudges the husbandman more than “two oxen and a cow,” he loses his temper, and presumably there is a matrimonial tiff. Very likely most of this is fiction, bred of the popular prejudice. The King loved her, that is certain. She was a beautiful high-spirited woman, so beautiful that many hundreds of years after, when her grave was opened, the delicate oval of her skull excited admiration yet. But the people hated her. Twenty generations after her death it was their custom when passing her grave to spit on it with the exclamation “Out upon thee, Bengerd! God bless the King of Denmark”; for in good or evil days they never wavered in their love and admiration for the king who was a son of the first Valdemar, and the heir of his greatness and of that of the sainted Absalon. Tradition has it that Bengerd was killed in battle, having gone with her husband on one of his campaigns. “It was not heard in any place,” says the folk-song wickedly, “that any one grieved for her.” But the King mourned for his beautiful queen to the end of his days.
Bengerd bore Valdemar three sons upon whom he lavished all the affection of his lonely old age. Erik he chose as his successor, and to keep his brothers loyal to him he gave them great fiefs and thus, unknowing, brought on the very trouble he sought to avoid, and set his foot on the path that led to Denmark’s dismemberment after centuries of bloody wars. For to his second son Abel he gave Slesvig, and Abel, when his brother became king, sought alliance with the Holstein count Adolf,[10] the very one who had led the Germans at the fatal battle of Bornhöved. The result was a war between the brothers that raged seven years, and laid waste the land. Worse was to follow, for Abel was only “Abel in name, but Cain in deed.” But happily the old King’s eyes were closed then, and he was spared the sight of one brother murdering the other for the kingdom.
Some foreboding of this seems to have troubled him in his last years. It is related that once when he was mounting his horse to go hunting he fell into a deep reverie, and remained standing with his foot in the stirrup a long time, while his men wondered, not daring to disturb him. At last one of them went to remind him that the sun was low in the west. The King awoke from his dream, and bade him go at once to a wise old hermit who lived in a distant part of the country. “Ask him,” he said, “what King Valdemar was thinking of just now, and bring me his answer.” The knight went away on his strange errand, and found the hermit. And this was the message he brought back: “Your lord and master pondered as he stood by his horse, how his sons would fare when he was dead. Tell him that war and discord they shall have, but kings they will all be.” When the King heard the prophecy he was troubled in mind, and called his sons and all his great knights to a council at which he pleaded with them to keep the peace. But though they promised, he was barely in his grave when riot and bloodshed filled the land. The climax was reached when Abel inveigled his brother to his home with fair words and, once he had him in his power, seized him and gave him over to his men to do with “as they pleased.” They understood their master only too well, and took King Erik out on the fjord in an open boat, and killed him there, scarce giving him time to say his prayers. They weighted his body with his helmet, and sank it in the deep.
Abel made oath with four and twenty of his men that he was innocent of his brother’s blood, and took the crown after him. But the foul crime was soon avenged. Within a few years he was himself slain by a peasant in a rising of his own people. For a while his body lay unburied, the prey of beast and bird, and when it was interred in the Slesvig cathedral there was no rest for it. “Such turmoil arose in the church by night that the monks could not chant their vigils,” and in the end they took him out, and buried him in a swamp, with a stake driven through the heart to lay his ghost. But clear down to our time when people ceased to believe in ghosts, the fratricide was seen at night hunting through the woods, coal-black and on a white horse, with three fiery dogs trailing after; and blue flames burned over the sea where they vanished. That was how the superstition of the people judged the man whom the nobles and the priests made king, red-handed.
Christopher, the youngest of the three brothers, was king last. His end was no better than that of the rest. Indeed, it was worse. Hardly yet forty years old, he died—poisoned, it was said, by the Abbot Arnfast, in the sacrament as he knelt at the altar-rail in the Ribe cathedral. He was buried in the chancel where the penitents going to the altar walk over his grave. So, of all Valdemar’s four sons, not one died a peaceful, natural death. But kings they all were.
Valdemar was laid in Ringsted with his great father. He sleeps between his two queens. Dagmar’s grave was disturbed in the late middle ages by unknown vandals, and the remains of Denmark’s best-loved queen were scattered. Only a golden cross, which she had worn in life, somehow escaped, and found its way in course of time into the museum of antiquities at Copenhagen, where it now is, its chief and priceless treasure. There also is a braid of Queen Bengerd’s hair that was found when her grave was opened in 1855. The people’s hate had followed her even there, and would not let her rest. The slab that covered her tomb had been pried off, and a round stone dropped into the place made for her head. Otherwise her grave was undisturbed.
“Truly then fell the crown from the heads of Danish men,” says the old chronicle of King Valdemar’s death, and black clouds were gathering ominously even then over the land. But in storm and stress, as in days that were fair, the Danish people have clung loyally to the memory of their beloved King and of his sweet Dagmar.
Footnotes:
[7] Pronounced as Strangle, with the l left out.
[8] Pronounced Reebe, in two syllables.