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Updated: May 7, 2025
But all this is guess-work, and all we actually know is that Gorm, the son of a poor though nobly-born sea-rover, before his death gained control of all Denmark, then much larger than the Denmark of to-day, and changed the small state with which he began into a powerful kingdom, bringing all the small kings under his sway. The ambitious chief did not content himself with this.
I waited until they were all inside the hall, and then Gorm stepped aside, and Gerda stood forward. "Ha!" said Arnkel, smiling broadly, "a lady. Welcome to our hall, friends. It may be more to your liking than the sea, so late in the year." Gerda shook her long cloak from her, and stood before him at the length of the hall, plain to be known, even as he had last set eyes on her.
And now he proposes to reduce the whole land to slavery, or something like it, and all because of the foolish speech of a proud girl, who says she will not wed him until he shall first subdue to himself the whole of Norway, and rule over it as fully and freely as King Eric rules over Sweden, or King Gorm over Denmark.
On entering the hall he was struck by these signs of mourning and by the silence and dejection of the queen, and broke out in an exclamation of dismay: "My son, Knud, is dead!" "Thou hast said it, and not I, King Gorm," was the queen's reply. The news of the death had thus been conveyed to him without any one incurring the sworn penalty.
But those words of his came to Arnkel as a taunt, and his look at me was terrible. "Ho, men," he shouted, "will you own an outland lord?" "Aye, we will," said Gorm the Steward sturdily. "Sooner than listen to a coward and would-be murderer of women." That ended the matter.
Queen Thyra, while a worshipper of the northern gods, showed much favor to the Christians and caused some of her children to be signed with the cross. But King Gorm was a fierce pagan and treated his Christian subjects so cruelly that he gained the name of the "Church's worm," being regarded as one who was constantly gnawing at the supports of the Church.
He then instigated all the enemies of the empire simultaneously to attack the Franks and Saxons, at that crisis at war with each other, in 915, and while the Danes under Gorm the Old, and the Obotrites, destroyed Hamburg, immense hordes of Hungarians, Bohemians, and Sorbi laid the country waste as far as Bremen. The Emperor was, meanwhile, engaged with the Saxons.
Then old Gorm answered in a voice which shook with wrath: "And with him, bound in the funeral chamber, with burning peat piled round it, Arnkel set the Lady Gerda to burn at sea, even as you see her. But for chance she had never stood in Arnkel's way more. She is Thorwald's heiress." In the silence which followed Gerda spoke again.
The Dane saluted him with a surly nod, and he answered with such smooth words as the thrifty old Norse proverbs advise every man to practise. "Greeting, Gorm Arnorsson! Here is great industry, if already this Spring you have gone on a Viking voyage and gotten yourself so good a piece of property! How came you by him?"
In this quaint upland village stand the two great barrows, the reputed graves of King Gorm and Queen Thyra, his wife, the great-grandparents of Canute the Great, the Danish King who ruled over England for twenty years.
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