Hero Tales of the Far North Part 4

When they heard of Arcona's fall in the royal city of Karents, they hastened with offers of surrender, and Absalon went there with a single ship's crew to take possession. They were met by 6000 armed Wends, who guarded the narrow approach to the city. In single file they walked between the ranks of the enemy, who stood with inverted spears, watching them in sullen silence. His men feared a trap, but Absalon strode ahead unmoved. Coming to the temple of their local G.o.d, Rygievit, he attacked him with his axe and bade his guard fall to, which they did. Saxo has left us a unique description of this idol that stood behind purple hangings, fashioned of oak "in every evil and revolting shape. The swallows had made their nests in his mouths and throats" (there were seven in so many faces) "and filled him up with all manner of stinking uncleanness. Truly, for such G.o.d was such sacrifice fit." He had a sword for every one of his seven faces, buckled about his ample waist, but for all that he went the way of the others, and even had to put up with the indignity of the Christian priests standing upon him while he was being dragged out.

That seems to have helped cure his followers of their faith in him.

They delivered the temple treasure into the hands of the King--seven chests filled with money and valuables, among them a silver cup which the wretched King Svend had sent to Svantevit as a bribe to the Wends for joining him against his own country and kin. But those days were ended. It was the Danes' turn now, and Wendland was laid waste until "the swallows found no eaves of any house whereunder to build their nests and were forced to build them on the ships." A sad preliminary to bringing the country under the rule of the Prince of Peace; but in the scheme of those days the sword was equal partner with the cross in leading men to the true G.o.d.

The heathen temples were destroyed and churches built on their sites of the timber gathered for the siege of Arcona. The people, deserted by their own, accepted the Christians' G.o.d in good faith, and were baptized in hosts, thirteen hundred on one day and nine hundred on the next. Three days and nights Absalon saw no sleep. He did nothing half-way. No sooner was he back home than he sent over priests and teachers supplied with everything, even food for their keep, so that they "should not be a burden to the people whom they had come to show the way to salvation."

The Wends were conquered, but the end was not yet. They had savage neighbors, and many a crusade did Absalon lead against them in the following years, before the new t.i.tle of the Danish rulers, "King of the Slavs and Wends," was much more than an empty boast. He organized a regular sea patrol of one-fourth of the available ships, of which he himself took command, and said ma.s.s on board much oftener than in the Roskilde church. It is the sailor, the warrior, the leader of men one sees through all the troubled years of his royal friend's life. Now the Danish fleet is caught in the inland sea before Stettin, unable to make its way out, and already the heathen hosts are shouting their triumph on sh.o.r.e. It is Absalon, then, who finds the way and, as one would expect, he forces it. The captains wail over the trap and abuse him for getting them into it.

Absalon, disdaining to answer them, leads his ships in single file straight for the gap where the Wendish fleet lies waiting, and gets the King to attack with his hors.e.m.e.n on sh.o.r.e. Between them the enemy is routed, and the cowards are shamed. But when they come to make amends, he is as unmoved as ever and will have none of it.

Again, when he is leading his men to the attack on a walled town, a bridge upon which they crowd breaks, and it is the bishop who saves his comrades from drowning, swimming ash.o.r.e with them in full armor.

Resting in his castle at Haffn, the present Copenhagen, which he built as a defence against the sea-rovers, he hears, while in his bath, his men talking of strange ships that are sailing into the Sound, and, hastily throwing on his clothes, gives chase and kills their crews, for they were pirates whose business was murder, and they merely got their deserts. In the pursuit his archers "pinned the hands of the rowers to the oars with their arrows" and crippled them, so skilful had much practice made them. Turn the leaf of Saxo's chronicle, and we find him under Rugen with his fleet, protecting the now peaceful Wendish fishermen in their autumn herring-catch, on which their livelihood depended. Of such stuff was made the bishop who

"Used his trusty Danish sword As the Pope his staff in Rome."

Wherever danger threatens Valdemar and Absalon, Esbern is found, too, earning the name of the Fleet (Snare), which the people had fondly given to their favorite. Where the fighting was hardest, he was sure to be. The King's son had ventured too far and was caught in a tight place by an overwhelming force, when Esbern pushed his ship in between him and the enemy and bore the brunt of a fight that came near to making an end of him. He had at last only a single man left, but the two made a stand against a hundred. "When the heathen saw his face they fled in terror." At last they knocked him senseless with a stone and would have killed him, but in the nick of time the King's men came to the rescue.

Coming home from Norway he ran afoul of forty pirate ships under the coast of Seeland. He tried to steal past; forty against one were heavy odds. But it was moonlight and he was discovered. The pirates lay across his course and cut him off. Esbern made ready for a fight and steered straight into the middle of them. The steersman complained that he had no armor, and he gave him his own. He beat his pursuers off again and again, but the wind slackened and they were closing in once more, swearing by their heathen G.o.ds that they would have him dead or alive, for a Danish prisoner on one of their ships had told who he was. But Esbern had more than one string to his bow. He sent a man aloft with flint and steel to strike fire in the top, and the pirates, believing that he was signalling to a fleet he had in ambush, fled helter-skelter. Esbern got home safe.

The German emperors' fingers had always itched for the over-lordship of the Danish isles, and they have not ceased to do so to this day.

When Frederick Barbarossa drove Alexander III from Rome and set up a rival Pope in his place, Archbishop Eskild of Lund, who was the Primate of the North, championed the exiled Pope's case, and Valdemar, whose path the ambitious priest had crossed more than once, let it be known that he inclined to the Emperor's cause, in part probably from mere pique, perhaps also because he thought it good politics. The archbishop in a rage summoned Absalon and bade him join him in a rising against the King. Absalon's answer is worthy the man and friend:

"My oath to you I will keep, and in this wise, that I will not counsel you to your own undoing. Whatever your cause against the King, war against him you cannot, and succeed. And this know, that never will I join with you against my liege lord, to whom I have sworn fealty and friendship with heart and soul all the days of my life."

He could not persuade the archbishop, who went his own way and was beaten and exiled for a season, nor could he prevent the King from yielding to the blandishments of Frederick and getting mixed up in the papal troubles; but he went with him to Germany and saved him at the last moment from committing himself by making him leave the church council just as the anti-pope was about to p.r.o.nounce sentence of excommunication against Alexander. He commanded Absalon to remain, as a servant of the church, but Absalon replied calmly that he was not there in that capacity, but as an attendant on his King, and must follow where he went. It appeared speedily that the Emperor's real object was to get Valdemar to own him as his over-lord, and this he did, to Absalon's great grief, on the idle promise that Frederick would join him in his war upon all the Baltic pagans. However, it was to be a purely personal matter, in nowise affecting his descendants. That much was saved, and Absalon lived long enough to fling back, as the counsellor of Valdemar's son, from behind the stout wall he built at Denmark's southern gate, the Emperor's demand for homage, with the reply that "the King ruled in Denmark with the same right as the Emperor in Germany, and was no man's subject."

However grievously Absalon had offended the aged archbishop, when after forty years in his high office illness compelled him to lay it down, he could find no one so worthy to step into his shoes. He sent secretly to Rome and got the Pope's permission to name his own successor, before he called a meeting of the church. The account of what followed is the most singular of all Saxo's stories. Valdemar did not know what was coming and, fearing fresh trouble, got the archbishop to swear on the bones of the saints before them all that he was not moved to abdication by hate of the King, or by any coercion whatever. Then the venerable priest laid his staff, his mitre, and his ring on the altar and announced that he had done with it all forever. But he had made up his mind not to use the power given him by the Pontiff. They might choose his successor themselves. He would do nothing to influence their action.

The bishops and clergy went to the King and asked him if he had any choice. The King said he had, but if he made it known he would get no thanks for it and might estrange his best friend. If he did not, he would certainly be committing a sin. He did not know what to do.

"Name him," said they, and Valdemar told them it was the bishop of Roskilde.

At that the old archbishop got up and insisted on the election then and there; but Absalon would have none of it. The burden was too heavy for his shoulders, he said. However, the clergy seized him, "being," says Saxo, who without doubt was one of them, "the more emboldened to do so as the archbishop himself laid hands upon him first." Intoning the hymn sung at archiepiscopal consecrations, they tried to lead him to the altar. He resisted with all his might and knocked several of the brethren down. Vestments were torn and scattered, and a mighty ruction arose, to which the laity, not to be outdone, added by striking up a hymn of their own. Archbishop and King tried vainly to make peace; the clamor and battle only rose the higher. Despite his struggles, Absalon was dragged to the high seat, but as they were about to force him into it, he asked leave to say a single word, and instantly appealed his case to the Pope. So there was an end; but when the aged Eskild, on the plea of weakness, begged him to p.r.o.nounce the benediction, he refused warily, because so he would be exercising archiepiscopal functions and would be _de facto_ inc.u.mbent of the office.[4]

[Footnote 4: That all this in no way affected the personal relations of the two men Saxo a.s.sures us in one of the little human touches with which his chronicle abounds. When Eskild was going away to end his days as a monk in the monastery of Clairvaux, he rested awhile with Absalon at his castle Haffn, where he was received as a father.

The old man suffered greatly from cold feet, and Absalon made a box with many little holes in, and put a hot brick in it. With this at his feet, Eskild was able to sleep, and he was very grateful to Absalon, both because of the comfort it gave him and "because that he perceived that filial piety rather than skill in the healer's art" prompted the invention.]

Here, as always, Absalon thought less of himself than of his country, so the event showed. For when the Pope heard his plea, though he decided against him, he allowed him to hold the bishopric of Roskilde together with the higher office, and so he was left at Valdemar's side to help finish their work of building up Denmark within and without. At Roskilde he spent, as a matter of fact, most of his time while Valdemar lived. At Lund he would have been in a distant part of the country, parted from his friend and out of touch with the things that were the first concern of his life.

They were preparing to aim a decisive blow against the Pomeranian pagans when Valdemar died, on the very day set for the sailing. The parting nearly killed Absalon. Saxo draws a touching picture of him weeping bitterly as he said the requiem ma.s.s over his friend, and observes: "Who can doubt that his tears, rising with the incense, gave forth a peculiar and agreeable savour in high heaven before G.o.d?" The plowmen left their fields and carried the bier, with sobs and lamentations, to the church in Ringsted, where the great King rests. His sorrow laid Absalon on a long and grievous sick-bed, from which he rose only when Valdemar's son needed and called him.

In the fifteen years that follow we see his old warlike spirit still unbroken. Thus his defiance of the German Emperor, whose anger was hot. Frederick, in revenge, persuaded the Pomeranian duke Bugislav to organize a raid on Denmark with a fleet of five hundred sail.

Scant warning reached Absalon of the danger. King Knud was away, and there was no time to send for him. Mustering such vessels as were near, he sailed across the Baltic and met the enemy under Rugen the day after Whitsuntide (1184). The bishop had gone ash.o.r.e to say ma.s.s on the beach, when word was brought that the great fleet was in sight. Hastily pulling off his robe and donning armor instead, he made for his ship with the words: "Now let our swords sing the praise of G.o.d." The Pomeranians were taken completely by surprise.

They did not know the Danes were there, and when they heard the archbishop's dreaded war-cry raised, they turned and fled in such terror and haste that eighteen of their ships were run down and sunk with all on board. On one, a rower hanged himself for fear of falling into the hands of the Danes. Absalon gave chase, and the rout became complete. Of the five hundred ships only thirty-five escaped; all the rest were either sunk or taken. Duke Bugislav soon after became a va.s.sal of Denmark, and of the Emperor's plots there was an end.

It was the last blow, and the story of it went far and wide.

Absalon's work was nearly done. Denmark was safe from her enemies.

The people were happy and prosperous. Valdemar's son ruled unchallenged, and though he was childless, by his side stood his brother, a manly youth who, not yet full grown, had already shown such qualities of courage and sagacious leadership that the old archbishop could hang up the sword with heart at ease. The promise was kept. The second Valdemar became Denmark's royal hero for all time. Absalon's last days were devoted to strengthening the Church, around which he had built such a stout wall. He built churches and cloisters, and guided them with a wise and firm hand. And he made Saxo, his clerk, set it all down as an eye-witness of these things, and as one who came to the task by right; for, says the chronicler, "have not my grandfather and his father before him served the King well on land and sea, hence why should not I serve him with my book-learning?" He bears witness that the bishop himself is his authority for much that he has written.

Archbishop Absalon closed his eyes on St. Benedict's Day, March 21, 1201, in the cloister at Soro which Sir Asker built and where he lived his last days in peace. Absalon's statue of bronze, on horseback, battle-axe in hand, stands in the market square in Copenhagen, the city he founded and of which he is the patron saint; but his body lies within the quiet sanctuary where, in the deep forest glades, one listens yet for the evensong of the monks, long silent now. When his grave was opened, in 1826, the lines of his tall form, clad in clerical robes, were yet clearly traceable. The strong hands, turned to dust, held a silver chalice in which lay his episcopal ring. They are there to be seen to-day, with remnants of his staff that had partly crumbled away. No Dane approaches his grave without emotion. "All Denmark grieved for him," says a German writer of that day, "and commended his soul to Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, for that in his lifetime he had led many who were enemies to peace and concord." In his old cathedral, in Roskilde town, lies Saxo, according to tradition under an unmarked stone.

When he went to rest his friend and master had slept five years.

Esbern outlived his brother three years. The hero of so many battles met his death at last by an accidental fall in his own house. The last we hear of him is at a meeting in the Christmas season, 1187, where emissaries of Pope Gregory VIII preached a general crusade.

Their hearers wept at the picture they drew of the sufferings Christians were made to endure in the Holy Land. Then arose Esbern and reminded them of the great deeds of the fathers at home and abroad. The faith and the fire of Absalon were in his words:

"These things they did," he said, "for the glory of their name and race, knowing nothing of our holy religion. Shall we, believing, do less? Let us lay aside our petty quarrels and take up this greater cause. Let us share the sufferings of the saints and earn their reward. Perhaps we shall win--G.o.d keeps the issue. Let him who cannot give himself, give of his means. So shall all we, sharing the promise, share also the reward."

The account we have says that many took the cross, such was the effect of his words, more likely of the man and what he was and had been in the sight of them all throughout his long life.

KING VALDEMAR, AND THE STORY OF THE DANNEBROG

To the court of King Ottocar of Bohemia there came in the year 1205 a brilliant emba.s.sy from far-off Denmark to ask the hand of his daughter Dragomir for King Valdemar, the young ruler of that country. Sir Strange[1] Ebbeson and Bishop Peder Suneson 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 G.o.d, Let all thy days be spent; And ever thy subjects be thy thought, Their hopes on thy care be bent.

[Footnote 1: p.r.o.nounce as Strangle, with the l left out.]

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 sh.o.r.e 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.[2] The gray old cathedral in which they knelt together still stands; but of Valdemar's strong castle only a gra.s.s-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.

[Footnote 2: p.r.o.nounced Reebe, in two syllables.]

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 G.o.d, 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: