She asks the King, so the ballad has it, to give her
Samsoe, a great and fertile island, and "a golden crown[3] for every
maid," but he tells her not to be quite so greedy:
There be full many an honest maid
with not dry bread to eat.
[Footnote 3: A coin, probably.]
Undismayed, Bengerd objects that Danish women have no business to
wear silken gowns, and that a good horse is not for a peasant lad.
The King replies patiently that what a woman can buy she may wear
for him, and that he will not take the lad's horse if he can feed
it. Bengerd is not satisfied. "Let bar the land with iron chains" is
her next proposal, that neither man nor woman enter it without
paying tax. Her husband says scornfully that Danish kings have never
had need of such measures, and never will. He is plainly getting
bored, and when she keeps it up, and begrudges the husbandman more
than "two oxen and a cow," he loses his temper, and presumably there
is a matrimonial tiff. Very likely most of this is fiction, bred of
the popular prejudice. The King loved her, that is certain. She was
a beautiful high-spirited woman, so beautiful that many hundreds of
years after, when her grave was opened, the delicate oval of her
skull excited admiration yet.
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