Modern Works
Poul Anderson's fantasy novel Three Hearts and Three Lions (ISBN 0-671-72186-0) (1961) draws upon these legends and also alters them. Its protagonist Holger Carlsen (a Danish resistance fighter) is transported to a fantasy alternate history where the Matter of France is historical. He eventually learns that he is Ogier the Dane, sent to our universe to remove him from the conflict between humans and Faerie in that one. At the book's end he returns to our world in time to cover Niels Bohr's escape to Sweden and prevent the Gestapo from capturing him - thus facilitating Bohr's part in the Manhattan Project and effectively fulfilling the prophecy that Ogier would return at the time of France and Denmark's grave need.
In his recent (2010, Harvill Secker) novel I Curse the River of Time (translated into English by Charlotte Barslund, with the author), award-winning Norwegian novelist Per Petterson describes a small ferry sailing between Norway and Denmark with the name Holger Danske; one of the main characters - a dying Danish woman going home - feels accepted and understood by its crew. She has lost a son some years ago. The ferry's name may or may not be relevant to the story, which has many interwoven strands.
Read more about this topic: Ogier The Dane
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“The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished, bequeathing to posterity not shameful defects but triumphant successes.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
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