“It was the good Sir Asker Ryg;
       Right merrily laughed he,
     When from that green and swelling hill
       Two towers did he see.”

Two sons lay at the Lady Inge’s breast, and all was well.

     “The first one of the brothers two
       They called him Esbern Snare.[2]
     He grew as strong as a savage bear
       And fleeter than any hare.

     “The second him called they Absalon,
       A bishop he at home. 
     He used his trusty Danish sword
       As the Pope his staff at Rome.”

[Footnote 2:  Pronounce Snare, with a as in are.  In the Danish hare rhymes with snare, so pronounced.]

Absalon and Esbern were not twins, as tradition has it.  They were better than that.  They became the great heroes of their day, and the years have not dimmed their renown.  And Absalon reached far beyond the boundaries of little Denmark to every people that speaks the English tongue.  For it was he who, as archbishop of the North, “strictly and earnestly” charged his friend and clerk Saxo to gather the Danish chronicles while yet it was time, because, says Saxo, in the preface of his monumental work, “he could no longer abide that his fatherland, which he always honored and magnified with especial zeal, should be without a record of the great deeds of the fathers.”  And from the record Saxo wrote we have our Hamlet.

It was when they had grown great and famous that Sir Asker and his wife built the church in thanksgiving for their boys, not when they were born, and the way that came to light was good and wholesome.  They were about to rebuild the church, on which there had been no towers at all since they crumbled in the middle ages, and had decided to put on only one; for the sour critics, who are never content in writing a people’s history unless they can divest it of all its flesh and make it sit in its bones, as it were, sneered at the tradition and called it an old woman’s tale.  But they did not shout quite so loud when, in peeling off the whitewash of the Reformation, the mason’s hammer brought forth mural paintings that grew and grew until there stood the whole story to read on the wall, with Sir Asker himself and the Lady Inge, clad in garments of the Twelfth Century, bringing to the Virgin the church with the twin towers.  So the folk-lore was not so far out after all, and the church was rebuilt with two towers, as it should be.

Under its eaves, whether of straw or tile, the two boys played their childish games, and before long there came to join in them another of their own age, young Valdemar, whose father, the very Knud Lavard mentioned above, had been foully murdered a while before.  It was a time, says Saxo, in which “he must be of stout heart and strong head who dared aspire to Denmark’s crown.  For in less than a hundred years more than sixteen of her kings and their kin were either slain without cause by their own subjects, or otherwise met a sudden death.”  Sir Asker and the murdered Knud had been foster brothers, and throughout the bloody years that followed, he and his brothers, sons of the powerful Skjalm Hvide,[3] espoused his cause in good and evil days, while they saw to it that no harm came to the young prince under their roof.