[Footnote 2: The private wrongs committed by Eric the Seventh, surnamed Glipping, against his Marsk, Stig, a nobleman of high rank, had rendered him his deadly foe. Stig headed a band of conspirators on the 22d of November, 1286, disguised as Franciscan monks, and murdered him while asleep in a barn at the village of Finnerup, where he had taken refuge from their pursuit. The king's chamberlain, a kinsman of Marsk Stig, conducted the assassins to the place where the king lay concealed.--_Translator's Note_.] [Footnote 3: Waldemar the Victorious was Eric Menved's great-grandfather.] [Footnote 4: Drost, the prime minister of state in Denmark in the middle ages; all state ministers however, in that age, were required to serve in the field as well as in council. When the Drost was present, he superseded the Marsk in the command of the army.--_Translator's Note_.] [Footnote 5: Junker (pronounced Yunker) was the title of the sons of the kings of Denmark in the middle ages, corresponding to that of Infant in Spain.--_Translator's Note_.] [Footnote 6: Baron Holberg supposes that the word "carline" (kierlinge in Danish) had its origin in the easy victories obtained by the Northmen over the French, or Carlines, the subjects of Charles the Bald: the word carline or kierlinge now signifying in Danish an old woman, and applied in derision to the fainthearted of the other sex.--_Translator_.] [Footnote 7: Esrom Lake, situated about eight English miles from Elsinore, is a fair specimen of the placid lake scenery of Zealand. The monastery is still in part in a habitable state.] [Footnote 8: "Axel and Valborg," one of the gems of Scandinavian poetry. The interest of the poem turns on the separation of the hero and heroine (who had been betrothed from childhood) by an interdict of the church, on the plea of the parties standing within a forbidden degree of affinity to each other. This affinity, however, consisted merely in having one common godmother. Circumstances like these, however trivial, were frequently made available by the church for the extension of its power, and the furtherance of its secular interests.] [Footnote 9: Flynderborg, the castle at Elsinore, of which no vestiges now remain. Its site was not far from that of the present castle of Cronberg.] [Footnote 10: At this period the Hanseatic merchants were absolute masters of the whole trade of the Baltic. The Danish fleet was in a reduced state, and the Hanse were therefore under the necessity of guarding the seas themselves, for the security of their trade. This was peculiarly the case during the disturbed reign of Eric Glipping, when the northern pirate, Alf Erlingsen, infested the Danish seas. This is the subject of a ballad still preserved among the Danish peasantry,--