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 Samsoe, a great and fertile island, and “a golden crown[3] 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.

[Footnote 3:  A coin, probably.]

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