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.
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