Fjenneslev is the name of the village, and Asker Ryg[3] 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.” 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: “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.[4] 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.” 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.