(Tale 5) KING VALDEMAR, AND THE STORY OF THE DANNEBROG 

To the court of King Ottocar of Bohemia there came in the year 1205 a brilliant embassy from far-off Denmark to ask the hand of his daughter Dragomir for King Valdemar, the young ruler of that country.  Sir Strange Ebbesön and Bishop Peder Sunesön were the spokesmen, and many knights, whose fame had travelled far in the long years of fighting to bring the Baltic pagans under the cross, rode with them.  The old king received them with delight.  Valdemar was not only a good son-in-law for a king to have, being himself a great and renowned ruler, but he was a splendid knight, tall and handsome, of most courteous bearing, ambitious, manly, and of ready wit.  So their suit prospered well.  The folk-song tells how they fared; how, according to the custom of those days, Sir Strange wedded the fair princess by proxy for his lord, and how King Ottocar, when he bade her good-by, took this promise of her: 

In piety, virtue, and fear of God,

Let all thy days be spent;

And ever thy subjects be thy thought,

Their hopes on thy care be bent.  

The daughter kept her vow.  Never was queen more beloved of her people than Dagmar.  That was the name they gave her in Denmark, for the Bohemian Dragomir was strange to them.  Dagmar meant daybreak in their ancient tongue, and it really seemed as if a new and beautiful day dawned upon the land in her coming.  The dry pages of history have little enough to tell of her beyond the simple fact of her marriage and untimely death, though they are filled with her famous husband's deeds; but not all of his glorious campaigns that earned for him the name of "The Victor" have sunk so deep into the people's memory, or have taken such hold of their hearts, as the lovely queen who 

Came without burden, she came with peace;

She came the good peasant to cheer.  

Through all the centuries the people have sung her praise, and they sing it yet.  Of the many folk-songs that have come down from the middle ages, those that tell of Queen Dagmar are the sweetest, as they are the most mournful, for her happiness was as brief as her life was beautiful.  

They sailed homeward over sunny seas, until they came to the shore where the royal lover awaited his bride, impatiently scanning the horizon for the gilded dragon's head of the ship that bore her.  The minstrel sings of the great wedding that was held in the old city of Ribe.  The gray old cathedral in which they knelt together still stands; but of Valdemar's strong castle only a grass-grown hill is left.  It was the privilege of a bride in those days to ask a gift of her husband on the morning after the wedding, and have it granted without question.  Two boons did Dagmar crave, 

"right early in the morning, long before it was day": 

one, that the plow-tax might be forgiven the peasant, and that those who for rising against it had been laid in irons be set free; the other, that the prison door of Bishop Valdemar be opened.  Bishop Valdemar was the arch-enemy of the King.  The first request he granted; but the other he refused for cause: 

An' he comes out, Bishop Valdemar,

Widow he makes you this year.  

And he did his worst; for in the end the King yielded to Dagmar's prayers, and much mischief came of it.  

Seven years the good queen lived.  Seven centuries have not dimmed the memory of them, or of her.  The King was away in a distant part of the country when they sent to him in haste with the message that the queen was dying.  The ballad tells of his fears as he sees Dagmar's page coming, and they proved only too true.  

The king his checker-board shut in haste,
The dice they rattled and rung.
Forbid it God, who dwells in heaven,
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.  

In the bitter feud between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines he found his opportunity.  One of the rival emperors marched an army north to help the perjured priest.  King Valdemar hastened to meet them, but on the eve of battle the Emperor was slain by one of his own men.  On Sunday, when the archbishop was saying mass in the Bremen cathedral, an unknown knight, the visor of whose helmet was closed so that no one saw his face, strode up to the altar, and laying a papal bull before him, cried out that he was accursed, and under the ban of the church.  The people fled, and forsaken by all, the wretched man turned once more to Rome in submission.  But though the Pope forgave him on condition that he meddle no more with politics, war, or episcopal office, another summer found him wielding sword and lance against the man he hated, this time under the banner of the Guelphs.  The Germans had made another onset on Denmark, but again King Valdemar defeated them.  The bishop intrenched himself in Hamburg, and made a desperate resistance, but the King carried the city by storm.  The beaten and hopeless man fled, and shut himself up in a cloister in Hanover, where daily and nightly he scourged himself for his sins.  If it is true that "hell was fashioned by the souls that hated," not all the penance of all the years must have availed to save him from the torments of the lost.  

Denmark now had peace on its southern border.  Dagmar was dead, and Valdemar, whose restless soul yearned for new worlds to conquer, turned toward the east where the wild Esthland tribes were guilty of even worse outrages than the Wends before Absalon tamed them.  The dreadful cruelties practised by these pagans upon christian captives cried aloud to all civilized Europe, and Valdemar took the cross "for the honor of the Virgin Mary and the absolution of his sins," and gathered a mighty fleet, the greatest ever assembled in Danish waters.  With more than a thousand ships he sailed across the Baltic.  The Pope sped them with his apostolic blessing, and took king and people into his especial care, forbidding any one to attack the country while they were away converting the heathen.  Archbishop Anders led the crusade with the king.  As the fleet approached the shore they saw it covered with an innumerable host of the enemy.  So great was their multitude that the crusaders quailed before the peril of landing; but the archbishop put heart into them, and led the fleet in fervent prayer to the God of battle.  Then they landed without hindrance.  

There was an old stronghold there called Lyndanissa that had fallen into decay.  The crusaders busied themselves for two days with building another and better fort.  On the third day, being St.  Vitus' Day, they rested, fearing no harm.  The Esthlanders had not troubled them.  Some of their chiefs had even come in with an offer of surrender.  They were willing to be converted, they said, and the priests were baptizing them after vespers, while the camp was making ready for the night, when suddenly the air was filled with the yells of countless savages.  On every side they broke from the woods, where they had been gathering unsuspected, and overwhelmed the camp.  The guards were hewn down, the outposts taken, and the King's men were falling back in confusion, their standard lost, when Prince Vitislav of Rügen who had been camping with his men in a hollow between the sand-hills, out of the line of attack, threw himself between them and the Esthlanders, and gave the Danes time to form their lines.  

In the twilight of the June evening the battle raged with great fury.  With the King at their head, who had led them to victory on so many hard-fought fields, the Danes drove back their savage foes time after time, literally hewing their way through their ranks with sword and battle-axe.  But they were hopelessly outnumbered.  Their hearts misgave them as they saw ten heathen spring out of the ground for every one that was felled.  The struggle grew fiercer as night came on.  The Christians were fighting for life; defeat meant that they must perish to a man, by the sword or upon pagan altars; escape there was none.  Upon the cliff overlooking the battle-field the archbishop and his priests were praying for success to the King's arms.  Tradition that has been busy with this great battle all through the ages tells how, while the aged bishop's hands were raised toward heaven, victory leaned to the Danes; but when he grew tired, and let them fall, the heathen won forward, until the priests held up his hands and once more the tide of battle rolled back from the shore, and the Christian war-cry rose higher.  

Suddenly, in the clash of steel upon steel and the wild tumult of the conflict, there arose a great and wondering cry "the banner! the banner! a miracle!" and Christian and pagan paused to listen.  Out of the sky, as it seemed, over against the hill upon which the priests knelt, a blood-red banner with a great white cross was seen falling into the ranks of the Christian knights, and a voice resounded over the battle-field, "Bear this high, and victory shall be yours." With the exultant cry, "For God and the King," the crusaders seized it, and charged the foe.  Terror-stricken, the Esthlanders wavered, then turned, and fled.  The battle became a massacre.  Thousands were slain.  The chronicles say that the dead lay piled fathom-high on the field that ran red with blood.  Upon it, when the pursuit was over, Valdemar knelt with his men, and they bowed their heads in thanksgiving, while the venerable archbishop gave praise to God for the victory.  

That is the story of the Dannebrog which has been the flag of the Danes seven hundred years.  Whether the archbishop had brought it with him intending to present it to King Valdemar, and threw it down among the fighting hordes in the moment of extreme peril, or whether, as some think, the Pope himself had sent it to the crusaders with a happy inspiration, the fact remains that it came to the Danes in this great battle, and on the very day which, fifty years before, had seen the fall of Arcona, and the end of idol-worship among the western Slavs.  Three hundred years the standard flew over the Danes fighting on land and sea.  Then it was lost in a campaign against the Holstein counts and, when recovered half a century later, was hung up in the cathedral at Slesvig, where gradually it fell to pieces.  In the first half of the Nineteenth Century, when national feeling and national pride were at their lowest ebb, it was taken down with other moth-eaten old banners, one day when they were cleaning up, and somebody made a bonfire of them in the street.  Such was the fate of "the flag that fell from heaven," the sacred standard of the Danes.  But it was not the end of it.  The Dannebrog flies yet over the Denmark of the Valdemars, no longer great as then, it is true, nor master of its ancient foes; but the world salutes it with respect, for there was never blot of tyranny or treason upon it, and its sons own it with pride wherever they go.  

King Valdemar knighted five and thirty of his brave men on the battle-field, and from that day the Order of the Dannebrog is said to date.  It bears upon a white crusader's cross the slogan of the great fight "For God and the King," and on its reverse the date when it was won, "June 15, 1219." The back of paganism was broken that day, and the conversion of all Esthland followed soon.  King Valdemar built the castle he had begun before he sailed home, and called it Reval, after one of the neighboring tribes.  The Russian city of that name grew up about it and about the church which Archbishop Anders reared.  The Dannebrog became its arms, and its people call it to this day "the city of the Danes." 

Denmark was now at the height of her glory.  Her flag flew over all the once hostile lands to the south and east, clear into Russia.  The Baltic was a Danish inland sea.  King Valdemar was named "Victor" with cause.  His enemies feared him; his people adored him.  In a single night foul treachery laid the whole splendid structure low.  The King and young Valdemar, Dagmar's son, with a small suite of retainers had spent the day hunting on the little island of Lyö.  Count Henrik of Schwerin,—the Black Count they called him,—who had just returned from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was his guest.  The count hated Valdemar bitterly for some real or fancied injury, but he hid his hatred under a friendly bearing and smooth speech.  He brought the King gifts from the Holy Sepulchre, hunted with him, and was his friend.  But by night, when the King and his son slept in their tent, unguarded, since no enemy was thought to be near, he fell upon them with his cutthroats, bound and gagged them despite their struggles, and gathering up all the valuables that lay around, to put the finishing touch upon his villainy, fled with his prisoners "in great haste and fear," while the King's men slept.  When they awoke, and tried to follow, they found their ships scuttled.  The count's boat had been lying under sail all day, hidden in a sheltered cove, awaiting his summons.  

Germany at last had the lion and its whelp in her grasp.  In chains and fetters they were dragged from one dungeon to another.  The traitors dared not trust them long in any city, however strong.  The German Emperor shook his fist at Count Henrik, but secretly he was glad.  He would have liked nothing better than to have the precious spoil in his own power.  The Pope thundered in Rome and hurled his ban at the thugs.  But the Black Count's conscience was as swarthy as his countenance; and besides, had he not just been to the Holy Land, and thereby washed himself clean of all his sins, past and present?   

Behind prison walls, comforted only by Dagmar's son, sat the King, growing old and gray with anger and grief.  Denmark lay prostrate under the sudden blow, while her enemies rose on every side.  Day by day word came of outbreaks in the conquered provinces.  The people did not know which way to turn; the strong hand that held the helm was gone, and the ship drifted, the prey of every ill wind.  It was as if all that had been won by sixty years of victories and sacrifice fell away in one brief season.  The forests filled with out-laws; neither peasant nor wayfarer, nor yet monk or nun in their quiet retreat, was safe from outrage; and pirates swarmed again in bay and sound, where for two generations there had been peace.  The twice-perjured Bishop Valdemar left his cloister cell once more and girt on the sword, to take the kingdom he coveted by storm.  

He was met by King Valdemar's kinsman and friend, Albert of Orlamunde, who hastened to the frontier with all the men he could gather.  They halted him with a treaty of peace that offered to set Valdemar free if he would take his kingdom as a fief of the German crown.  He, Albert, so it was written, was to keep all his lands and more, would he but sign it.  He did not stop to hear the rest, but slashed the parchment into ribbons with his sword, and ordered an instant advance.  The bishop he made short work of, and he was heard of no more.  But in the battle with the German princes Albert was defeated and taken prisoner.  The door of King Valdemar's dungeon was opened only to let his friend in.  

After two years and a half in chains, Valdemar was ransomed by his people with a great sum of gold.  The Danish women gave their rings and their jewels to bring back their king.  They flocked about him when he returned, and received him like the conqueror of old; but he rode among them gray and stern, and his thoughts were far away.  

They had made him swear on oath upon the sacrament, and all Denmark's bishops with him, before they set him free, that he would not seek revenge.  But once he was back in his own, he sent to Pope Gregory, asking him to loose him from an oath wrung from him while he was helpless in the power of bandits.  And the Pope responded that to keep faith with traitors was no man's duty.  Then back he rode over the River Eider into the enemy's land—for they had stripped Denmark of all her hard-won possessions south of the ancient border of the kingdom, except Esthland and Rügen—and with him went every man who could bear arms in all the nation.  He crushed the Black Count who tried to block his way, and at Bornhöved met the German allies who had gathered from far and near to give him battle.  Well they knew that if Valdemar won, the reckoning would be terrible.  All day they fought, and victory seemed to lean toward the Danes, when the base Holsteiners, the Danish rear-guard whom the enemy had bought to betray their king, turned their spears upon his army, and decided the day.  The battle ended in utter rout of Valdemar's forces.  Four thousand Danish men were slain.  The King himself fell wounded on the field, his eye pierced by an arrow, and would have fallen into the hands of the enemy once more but for an unknown German knight, who took him upon his horse and bore him in the night over unfrequented paths to Kiel, where he was safe.  

"But all men said that this great hurt befell the King because that he brake the oath he swore upon the sacred body of the Lord." 

The wars of Valdemar were over, but his sorrows were not.  Four years later the crushing blow fell when Dagmar's son, who was crowned king to succeed him, lost his life while hunting.  With him, says the folk-song, died the hope of Denmark.  The King had other sons, but to Dagmar's boy the people had given their love from the first, as they had to his gentle mother.  The old King and his people grieved together.  

But Valdemar rose above his sorrows.  Great as he had been in the days of victory, he was greater still in adversity.  The country was torn by the wars of three-score years, and in need of rest.  He gave his last days to healing the wounds the sword had struck.  Valdemar, the Victor, became Valdemar, the Law-giver.  The laws of the country had hitherto made themselves.  They were the outgrowths of the people's ancient customs, passed down by word of mouth through the generations, and confirmed on Thing from time to time.  King Valdemar gave Denmark her first written laws that judged between man and man, in at least one of her provinces clear down into our day.  "With law shall land be built" begins his code.  "The law," it says, "must be honest, just, reasonable, and according to the ways of the people.  It must meet their needs, and speak plainly so that all men may know and understand what the law is.  It is not to be made in any man's favor, but for the needs of all them who live in the land." That is its purpose, and "no man shall judge (condemn) the law which the King has given and the country chosen; neither shall he (the King) take it back without the will of the people." That tells the story of Valdemar's day, and of the people who are so near of kin with ourselves.  They were not sovereign and subjects; they were a chosen king and a free people, working together "with law land to build." 

King Valdemar was married twice.  The folk-song represents Dagmar as urging the King with her dying breath 

"that Bengerd, my lord, that base bad dame
  you never to wife will take." 

Bengerd, or Berengaria, was a Portuguese princess whom Valdemar married in spite of the warning, two years later.  As the people had loved the fair Dagmar, so they hated the proud Southern beauty, whether with reason or not.  The story of her "morning gift," as it has come down to us through the mists of time, is very different from the other.  She asks the King, so the ballad has it, to give her Samsö, a great and fertile island, and "a golden crown for every maid," but he tells her not to be quite so greedy: 

There be full many an honest maid
with not dry bread to eat.  

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, 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.