Søborg Slot

"In the 12th century, Bishop Eskil erected the first fortification - a closed fort with a ring wall and moat. Søborg Castle has played a role in Danish history and was Denmark's strongest fortified castle and was used as a dungeon. Make sure you also visit the big, monumental Søborg Church from 1180. It was built as a market-town church in connection with Søborg Castle."

Søborg Castle also figures tangentially in the story of King Valdemar and the history of Dannebrog. It puts popery in a good light, so perhaps we can connect it in some way to Kierkegaard's take on marriage and politics! That's a bit of a reach, to say the least, but I'll lift a good sized chunk of it anyway.

To the court of King Ottocar of Bohemia there came in the year 1205
a brilliant embassy from far-off Denmark to ask the hand of his
daughter Dragomir for King Valdemar, the young ruler of that
country. Sir Strange Ebbesoen and Bishop Peder Sunesoen were the
spokesmen, and many knights, whose fame had travelled far in the
long years of fighting to bring the Baltic pagans under the cross,
rode with them. The old king received them with delight. Valdemar
was not only a good son-in-law for a king to have, being himself a
great and renowned ruler, but he was a splendid knight, tall and
handsome, of most courteous bearing, ambitious, manly, and of ready
wit. So their suit prospered well. The folk-song tells how they
fared; how, according to the custom of those days, Sir Strange
wedded the fair princess by proxy for his lord, and how King
Ottocar, when he bade her good-by, took this promise of her:

In piety, virtue, and fear of God,
Let all thy days be spent;
And ever thy subjects be thy thought,
Their hopes on thy care be bent.

The daughter kept her vow. Never was queen more beloved of her
people than Dagmar. That was the name they gave her in Denmark, for
the Bohemian Dragomir was strange to them. Dagmar meant daybreak in
their ancient tongue, and it really seemed as if a new and beautiful
day dawned upon the land in her coming. The dry pages of history
have little enough to tell of her beyond the simple fact of her
marriage and untimely death, though they are filled with her famous
husband's deeds; but not all of his glorious campaigns that earned
for him the name of "The Victor" have sunk so deep into the people's
memory, or have taken such hold of their hearts, as the lovely queen
who

Came without burden, she came with peace;
She came the good peasant to cheer.

Through all the centuries the people have sung her praise, and they
sing it yet. Of the many folk-songs that have come down from the
middle ages, those that tell of Queen Dagmar are the sweetest, as
they are the most mournful, for her happiness was as brief as her
life was beautiful.

They sailed homeward over sunny seas, until they came to the shore
where the royal lover awaited his bride, impatiently scanning the
horizon for the gilded dragon's head of the ship that bore her. The
minstrel sings of the great wedding that was held in the old city of
Ribe. The gray old cathedral in which they knelt together still
stands; but of Valdemar's strong castle only a grass-grown hill is
left. It was the privilege of a bride in those days to ask a gift of
her husband on the morning after the wedding, and have it granted
without question. Two boons did Dagmar crave,

"right early in the morning, long before it was day":

one, that the plow-tax might be forgiven the peasant, and that those
who for rising against it had been laid in irons be set free; the
other, that the prison door of Bishop Valdemar be opened. Bishop
Valdemar was the arch-enemy of the King. The first request he
granted; but the other he refused for cause:

An' he comes out, Bishop Valdemar,
Widow he makes you this year.

And he did his worst; for in the end the King yielded to Dagmar's
prayers, and much mischief came of it.

Seven years the good queen lived. Seven centuries have not dimmed
the memory of them, or of her. The King was away in a distant part
of the country when they sent to him in haste with the message that
the queen was dying. The ballad tells of his fears as he sees
Dagmar's page coming, and they proved only too true.

The king his checker-board shut in haste,
The dice they rattled and rung.
Forbid it God, who dwells in heaven,
That Dagmar should die so young.

In the wild ride over field and moor, the King left his men far
behind:

When the king rode out of Skanderborg
Him followed a hundred men.
But when he rode o'er Ribe bridge,
Then rode the king alone.

The tears of weeping women told him as he thundered over the
drawbridge of the castle that he was too late. But Dagmar had only
swooned. As he throws himself upon her bed she opens her eyes, and
smiles upon her husband. Her last prayer, as her first, is for mercy
and peace. Her sin, she says, is not great; she has done nothing
worse than to lace her silken sleeves on a Sunday. Then she closes
her eyes with a tired sigh:

The bells of heaven are chiming for me;
No more may I stay to speak.

Thus the folk-song. Long before Dagmar went to her rest, Bishop
Valdemar had stirred up all Germany to wreak his vengeance upon the
King. He was an ambitious, unscrupulous priest, who hated his royal
master because he held himself entitled to the crown, being the
natural son of King Knud, who was murdered at Roskilde, as told in
the story of Absalon. While they were yet young men, when he saw
that the people followed his rival, he set the German princes
against Denmark, a task he never found hard. But young Valdemar made
short work of them. He took the strong cities on the Elbe and laid
the lands of his adversaries under the Danish crown. The bishop he
seized, and threw him into the dungeon of Soeborg Castle, where he
had sat thirteen years when Dagmar's prayers set him free. He could
hardly walk when he came out, but he could hate, and all the world
knew it. The Pope bound him with heavy oaths never to return to
Denmark, and made him come to Italy so that he could keep an eye on
him himself. But two years had not passed before he broke his oath,
and fled to Bremen, where the people elected him to the vacant
archbishopric and its great political power. Forthwith he began
plotting against his native land.

In the bitter feud between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines he found
his opportunity. One of the rival emperors marched an army north to
help the perjured priest. King Valdemar hastened to meet them, but
on the eve of battle the Emperor was slain by one of his own men. On
Sunday, when the archbishop was saying mass in the Bremen cathedral,
an unknown knight, the visor of whose helmet was closed so that no
one saw his face, strode up to the altar, and laying a papal bull
before him, cried out that he was accursed, and under the ban of the
church. The people fled, and forsaken by all, the wretched man
turned once more to Rome in submission. But though the Pope forgave
him on condition that he meddle no more with politics, war, or
episcopal office, another summer found him wielding sword and lance
against the man he hated, this time under the banner of the Guelphs.
The Germans had made another onset on Denmark, but again King
Valdemar defeated them. The bishop intrenched himself in Hamburg,
and made a desperate resistance, but the King carried the city by
storm. The beaten and hopeless man fled, and shut himself up in a
cloister in Hanover, where daily and nightly he scourged himself for
his sins. If it is true that "hell was fashioned by the souls that
hated," not all the penance of all the years must have availed to
save him from the torments of the lost.

For the rest of the story (and much, much more), go to http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12481/12481.txt