They saw him no more; but on his tomb the Swedish people, forgetting all else, have written that he was the “Father of his Country.”

ABSALON, WARRIOR BISHOP OF THE NORTH

A welcome change awaits the traveller who, having shaken off the chill of the German Dreadnaughts at Kiel, crosses the Baltic to the Danish Islands—­a change from the dread portents of war to smiling peace.  There can be nothing more pastoral and restful than the Seeland landscape as framed in a car window; yet he misses its chief charm whom its folk-lore escapes—­the countless legends that cling to field and forest from days long gone.  The guide-book gives scarce a hint of them; but turn from its page and they meet you at every step, hail you from every homestead, every copse.  Nor is their story always of peace.  Here was Knud Lavard slain by his envious kinsman for the crown, and a miraculous spring gushed forth where he fell.  Of the church they built for the pilgrims who sought it from afar they will show you the site, but the spring dried up with the simple old faith.  Yonder, under the roof of Ringsted church, lie Denmark’s greatest dead.  Not half an hour from the ferry landing at Korsoer, your train labors past a hill crowned by a venerable cross, Holy Anders’ Hill.  So saintly was that masterful priest that he was wont, when he prayed, to hang his hat and gloves on a sunbeam as on a hook.  And woe to the land if his cross be disturbed, for then, the peasant will tell you, the cattle die of plague and the crops fail.  A little further on, just beyond Soroe, a village church rears twin towers above the wheat-field where the skylark soars and sings to its nesting mate.  For seven hundred years the story of that church and its builder has been told at Danish firesides, and the time will never come when it is forgotten.

Fjenneslev is the name of the village, and Asker Ryg[1] ruled there in the Twelfth Century, when the king summoned his men to the war.  Bidding good-by to his wife, Sir Asker tells her to build a new church while he is away, for the old, “with wall of clay, straw-thatched and grim,” is in ruins.  And let it be worthy of the Master: 

     “The roof let make of tiling red;
     Of stone thou build the wall;”

and then he whispers in her ear: 

     “Hear thou, my Lady Inge,
       Of women thou art the flower;
     An’ thou bearest to me a son so bold,
       Set on the church a tower.”

[Footnote 1:  Pronounce Reeg.]

Should the child be a girl, he tells her to build only a spire, for “modesty beseemeth a woman.”  Well for Sir Asker that he did not live in our day of clamoring suffragists.  He would have “views” without doubt.  But no such things troubled him while he battled in foreign lands all summer.  It was autumn when he returned and saw from afar the swell behind which lay Fjenneslev and home.  Impatiently he spurred his horse to the brow of the hill, for no news had come of Lady Inge those many months.  The bard tells us what he saw there: