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,[4] the very one who had led the Germans at the fatal battle of Bornhoeved.  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.

[Footnote 4:  That was the beginning of the Slesvig-Holstein question that troubled Europe to our day; for the fashion set by Abel other rulers of his dukedom followed, and by degrees Slesvig came to be reckoned with the German duchies, whereas up till then it had always been South-Jutland, a part of Denmark proper.]

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