Agnes Slott-Møller found inspiration for many of her motifs in the old Danish folk songs. She writes about the present painting, and how she got the inspiration for it from both nature and from the folk song about Hagbard and Signe, who love each other but can not get each other because their families are in feud - same basic story as in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet'. “Inside me lives a pictorial world of the Danish Middle Ages, I think it has been there as far back as I can remember. If I travel out in Danish nature, this” reminds “me of that world, and I immerse myself in my fantasy world, so it becomes alive and forms images through impressions I have received from nature. ”...." With another picture, that of the knight and the virgin under the linden tree, it happened like this. A bright summer evening I looked into a flowering linden tree, where all the thousands of golden-white, star-shaped flowers shone; it looked like sheer bliss, and I thought: it looks like a bridal chamber! When I once read the verse “And there they lay that night so long, - and no man knew it, - the linden she hides them so well - with her brave twigs”; - then the picture was there. " (Agnes Slott-Møller, “Tekst”, in “Tilskueren”, April 1910, p. 331).

Provenance: Winkel & Magnussen auction 343, 1948 no. 332.