E-text prepared by Nicole Apostola
A Novel
From the Swedish of
Translated by VELMA SWANSTON HOWARD
With an Introduction by
Introduction
The Ingmarssons
At the Schoolmaster's
"And They Saw Heaven Open"
Karin, Daughter of Ingmar
In Zion
The Wild Hunt
Hellgum
The New Way
The Loss of "L'Univers"
Hellgum's Letter
The Big Log
The Ingmar Farm
Hök Matts Ericsson
The Auction
Gertrude
The Dean's Widow
The Departure of the Pilgrims
As yet the only woman winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, theprize awarded to Kipling, Maeterlinck, and Hauptmann, is theSwedish author of this book, "Jerusalem." The Swedish Academy, inrecognizing Miss Selma Lagerlöf, declared that they did so "forreason of the noble idealism, the wealth of imagination, thesoulful quality of style, which characterize her works." Five yearslater, in 1914, that august body elected Doctor Lagerlöf into theirfellowship, and she is thus the only woman among those eighteen"immortals."
What is the secret of the power that has made Miss Lagerlöf anauthor acknowledged not alone as a classic in the schools but alsoas the most popular and generally beloved writer in Scandinavia?She entered Swedish literature at a period when the cold gray starof realism was in the ascendant, when the trenchant pen ofStrindberg had swept away the cobwebs of unreality, and people wereaccustomed to plays and novels almost brutal in their frankness.Wrapped in the mantle of a latter-day romanticism, her soul filledwith idealism, on the one hand she transformed the crispactualities of human experience by throwing about them the glamourof the unknown, and on the other hand gave to the unreal—to folktale and fairy lore and local superstition—the effectiveness ofconvincing fact. "Selma Lagerlöf," says the Swedish composer,Hugo Alfvén, "is like sitting in the dusk of a Spanish cathedral …afterward one does not know whether what he has seen was dream orreality, but certainly he has been on holy ground." The averagemind, whether Swedish or Anglo-Saxon, soon wearies of heartlesspreciseness in literature and welcomes an idealism as wholesome asthat of Miss Lagerlöf. Furthermore, the Swedish authoress attractsher readers by a diction unique unto herself, as singular as theEnglish sentences of Charles Lamb. Her style may be described asprose rhapsody held in restraint, at times passionately breakingits bonds.
Miss Lagerlöf has not been without her share of life's perplexitiesand of contact with her fellowmen, it is by intuition that sheworks rather than by experience. Otherwise, she could not havedepicted in her books such a multitude of characters from all partsof Europe. She sees character with woman's warm and delicatesympathy and with the clear vision of childhood. "Selma Lagerlöf,"declared the Swedish critic, Oscar Levertin, "has the eyes of achild and the heart of a child." This naïveté is responsible forthe simplicity of her character types. Deep and sure they may be,but never too complex for the reader to comprehend. The more variedcharacters—as the critic Johan Mortensen has pointed out—likeHellgum, the mystic in "Jerusalem," are mere