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 Soeborg 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.