The eponymous Sir Holger, a corrupt and greedy tax official, is discovered to have been pocketing money for himself.
In the Swedish variants, he warns her that unless she returns his ill-gotten gains to their rightful owners, she, too, may end up in hell.
The Danish text ends with Holger's ghost urging his wife to go to Norway in order to escape the king, which she does.
The song was not documented until the late 1800s, when it was collected from oral tradition in Denmark (by Evald Tang Kristensen, 1874[1]) and southern Sweden (by Axel Ramm, 1880s[2]).
Svend Grundtvig considered the song an "offshoot" of the ballad of Marsk Stig (DgF 145), otherwise known only from manuscripts.