The Saga of Gosta Berling Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1 - THE LANDSCAPE

  CHAPTER 2 - CHRISTMAS NIGHT

  CHAPTER 3 - CHRISTMAS DINNER

  CHAPTER 4 - GÖSTA BERLING, THE POET

  CHAPTER 5 - LA CACHUCHA

  CHAPTER 6 - THE BALL AT EKEBY

  CHAPTER 7 - THE OLD CONVEYANCES

  CHAPTER 8 - THE GREAT BEAR IN GURLITA BLUFF

  CHAPTER 9 - THE AUCTION AT BJÖRNE

  CHAPTER 10 - THE YOUNG COUNTESS

  CHAPTER 11 - GHOST STORIES

  CHAPTER 12 - EBBA DOHNA’S STORY

  CHAPTER 13 - MAMSELL MARIE

  CHAPTER 14 - COUSIN KRISTOFFER

  CHAPTER 15 - THE PATHS OF LIFE

  CHAPTER 16 - PENANCE

  CHAPTER17 - IRON FROM EKEBY

  CHAPTER 18 - LILLIE CRONA’S HOME

  CHAPTER 19 - THE WITCH OF DOVRE

  CHAPTER 20 - MIDSUMMER

  CHAPTER 21 - LADY MUSICA

  CHAPTER 22 - THE MINISTER OF BROBY

  CHAPTER 23 - SQUIRE JULIUS

  CHAPTER 24 - THE CLAY SAINTS

  CHAPTER 25 - GOD’S PILGRIM

  CHAPTER 26 - THE CEMETERY

  CHAPTER 27 - OLD BALLADS

  CHAPTER 28 - DEATH THE LIBERATOR

  CHAPTER 29 - DROUGHT

  CHAPTER 30 - THE CHILD’S MOTHER

  CHAPTER 31 - AMOR VINCIT OMNIA

  CHAPTER 32 - THE GIRL FROM NYGÅRD

  CHAPTER 33 - KEVENHÜLLER

  CHAPTER 34 - BROBY MARKET

  CHAPTER 35 - THE FOREST CROFT

  CHAPTER 36 - MARGARETA CELSING

  THE STORY OF PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE SAGA OF GÖSTA BERLING

  SELMA LAGER LARGERLÖF (1858-1940) was born and raised in the Swedish province of Värmland. She was teaching at a girls school in Landskrona when she was awarded a literary prize for what would become five chapters of The Saga of Gösta Berling (1891). Becoming a full-time writer after 1895 allowed her to travel to Italy and the Near East, where she gathered material for novels such as Jerusalem (1901-2). Her best-known work internationally, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1907), was conceived as a geography textbook for Swedish schools. Lagerlöf’s success allowed her to buy back her childhood home, Mårbacka, sold at auction after the death of her father. In 1909 Lagerlöf became the first woman—and first Swedish author—to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Five years later she became the first woman elected to the Swedish Academy. Her later works include The Emperor of Portugallia (1914) and several memoirs, including the remarkable Diary of Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf (1932). Many of her books have been made into films, most notably perhaps The Saga of Gösta Berling in 1924. Lagerlöf was a widely known and respected public figure in Sweden and abroad, a position that often placed heavy demands on her time and energy. She died at Mårbacka on March 16, 1940.

  PAUL NORLEN is a past winner of the American Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize.

  GEORGE C. SCHOOLFIELD is professor emeritus of German and Scandinavian literature at Yale.

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  This translation first published in Penguin Books 2009

  Translation copyright © Paul Norlen, 2009

  Introduction copyright © George C. Schoolfield, 2009

  All rights reserved

  Gosta Berlings Saga was published in Sweden in 1891.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Lagerlöf, Selma, 1858-1940.

  [Gösta Berling’s saga. English]

  The saga of Gösta Berling / Selma Lagerlöf ; translated [from the Swedish] by Paul Norlen ;

  introduction by George C. Schoolfield.

  p. cm.—(Penguin classics)

  eISBN : 978-1-101-14048-2

  I. Norlen, Paul R. II. Title.

  PT9767.G6E54 2009

  839.73’72—dc22 2009027532

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  Introduction

  Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf was born on November 20, 1858, at Mårbacka, her parents’ small estate in the Swedish province of Värmland. She was the third child of Erik Gustaf Lagerlöf, a sometime lieutenant in the Royal Värmland Regiment, and Louise Lagerlöf, née Wallroth, whose father was a well-to-do merchant and brukspatron or “foundry owner.” The paternal side of the family had many pastors over the generations, including the poet and churchman Esaias Tegnér, of whose verse epic, Frithiofs saga (1825), about a Viking with Byronic overtones, Erik Gustaf was inordinately fond. Erik Gustaf’s widowed mother lived with the family, and was the teller of the Värmland tales Selma heard in the nursery; the lieutenant’s spinster sister, Lovisa, occupied the spacious pantry of the main house. Selma’s older and younger sisters, Anna and Gerda, were both prettier than she, and would readily find husbands, as did Erik Gustaf’s sister Anna, who wed the dashing, improvident noncommissioned officer Carl von Wachenfeldt, and died after seventeen years of marital misery. Lagerlöf described von Wachenfeldt—he sounds not a little like Gösta Berling—in her first memoir volume (Mårbacka, 1922), where he is called, punningly, Vackerfeldt, “Pretty-field.” Graying and wrinkled, he became a hanger-on at the estate. Two brothers, Daniel, the eldest sibling, who became a physician, and Johan, who immigrated to America, completed the family roster.

  Selma was plain and slightly lame. The cross-country wanderings of the majoress and Elisabet in The Saga of Gösta Berling may be the author’s compensatory fantasies. As for dancing—a main entertainment of the Värmland gentry—she recalled, in Ett barns memoarer (Memories of My Childhood, 1930), how Erik Gustaf forced her to attend a ball at nearby Sunne, and no one invited her to the floor. Yet, for all one knows, she did not resent this apparently cruel (or encouraging) gesture on her father’s part; receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1909, the first woman and the first Swede to do so, she directed her acceptance speech to his memory: “I have never met anyone who cherished such love and respect for poetry and poets.”

  Like her sisters, Selma was homeschooled, and her sedentary childhood was happy. She began writing stories and verse, borrowing figures from her books, “the sultans of the Arabian Nights, the knights of Walter Scott, the saga-kings of Snorri Stur luson,” Iceland’s me
dieval historian and poet. Nonetheless, in Ett barns memoarer, she revealed that she was not always placid. She thought she caught Uncle Wachenfeldt cheating at cards, and fell into a fit of rage. Taken off to the children’s room by her mother, she believed she saw a large, dark cave, with a swampy bottom, where a dragon rested, like the monster battled by Saint Göran in Stockholm’s Great Church. “The cave was in myself.”

  At fifteen Selma was allowed to enroll in the Advanced Female Teachers’ Seminary in Stockholm; there, according to her stylized account in En saga om en saga (A Tale About a Tale, 1908), she had the illumination that would lead to The Saga of Gösta Berling . Trudging along a drab street with a pack of books after a lesson, she thought of two enormously popular masterpieces that she knew from home. The one was Fredmans epistlar (Fredman’s Epistles, 1790) by Carl Michael Bellman, songs to be sung, as it were, by the denizens of Stockholm’s taverns.1 (Lagerlöf devoted a chapter in Mårbacka to the Bellman songs performed in her home; “love for them stayed in the hearts of the Mårbacka children their whole life through.”) The other work she remembered was Fänrik Ståls sägner (The Tales of Ensign Stål, 1848, 1860) by the Swedish-speaking Finn Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1804-77); the Ensign is a veteran of the War of 1808-9, in which Sweden had lost Finland to Russia. The “Tales” are portraits, in verse, of the variously hardbitten or youthful officers and men of the defeated Swedish-Finnish Army. Selma told herself: “The world in which you have lived down there in Värmland is no less remarkable than Fredman’s or Ensign Stål’s. If you can only learn how to treat it, you’ll actually have material just as rewarding.” During a visit at home, Selma heard from her father about a friend from his youth, exceptionally gifted but given to drink, eking out an existence as a tutor and pastoral adjunct. “One fine day,” Selma went on, writing in the third person, “the hero even got a name, and was called Gösta Berling. Where she got the name from, she never knew.” Legions of Lagerlöf specialists have tried to ferret out the model or models for Gösta, just as they have for the majoress—the once beautiful Margareta Celsing, before her forced marriage to the loathsome bear-fancier Major Samzelius and her long affair with her true love, Altringer.

  Having finished the teachers’ seminary, Selma found a job at the Elementary School for Girls in Landskrona, across the Öre sund from Copenhagen. She held the post for ten years (1885- 95), taking a leave in 1891 to finish Gösta. She was a well-liked teacher; her subjects were church history, Swedish history, a bit of natural science, and arithmetic. She did not detest foggy south Sweden—Skåne—as Strindberg would during his “exile” (1896- 97) in Lund.2 She thrived in Landskrona’s “Sewing Union” (a hotbed of incipient feminism) and burst into print with theater reviews for the local newspaper. Branching out, she published sonnets as well as play and opera reviews in Dagny, the new woman’s magazine in Stockholm. In 1890 she won first prize in a contest announced by Idun, a woman’s weekly, submitting five chapters that would shortly find their way into Gösta, among them “Ghost Stories.” The judges announced that her entry was “one of the most remarkable belletristic works to have seen the light of day in our country during the most recent decades.”

  Yet Selma Lagerlöf also had plenty of familial burdens to bear. Her father, long in failing health (he tried to cure himself with drink), died in the summer before she reported for duty in Landskrona. Mårbacka’s economy had gone from bad to worse in the course of his illness; it passed, catastrophically enough, to brother Johan before the father’s death, and then briefly to sister Gerda and her husband. By 1888 the home was put up for sale at public auction; Selma attended, wanting to see Mårbacka one last time “before strangers take possession of it.” In Landskrona she lived in the loft of her school. But she was not alone as she plugged away at her manuscript. Aunt Lovisa, who “could not realize that she was seventy” and gobbled bonbons, moved in with her, and her widowed mother came to stay from time to time.

  The Berling project went through stages. First it was a set of verse “romances,” in the fashion of her father’s favorite Frithiof and Runeberg’s Tales of Ensign Stål, next a drama (one act of which has survived). Finally Lagerlöf settled on short prose narratives, fitted into the frame of twelve months, from Christmas to Christmas, the year the cavaliers ruled the roost at Ekeby, the estate that is the center of action in the novel.

  Plenty of ingredients went into Gösta. For example, the uncanny “Wandering Willie’s Tale” in Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet rubbed off on “Ghost Stories.” Selma, of course, had known the tales of Hans Christian Andersen from her earliest years. The sobriquet “The Traveling Companion” that she gave Sophie Elkan—the beautiful, highstrung widow and novelist she met in 1894—was borrowed from Andersen’s story about the “strange fellow” who leads innocent Johannes to happiness through marvelous or frightening lands. Elkan accompanied Selma to Italy and Sicily, a journey that provided the background for Selma’s second novel, Antikrists mirakler (The Miracles of Antichrist, 1897), and to the Holy Land for Jerusalem I-II (1901-2). Zach ris Topelius, another teller of so-called fairytales from Finland, loomed so large for Lagerlöf that she devoted her only biography to him (1920); “his name was surrounded by an aura of beloved and pleasant memories.” Topelius was also famous, in Runeberg’s wake, for Fältskärns berättelser (The Stories of a Field Surgeon, 1857-64), novellas told by still another veteran of the War of 1808-9, about events in Sweden’s and Finland’s history from the death of Gustav II Adolf, the “Swedish Lion” in the Thirty Years’ War, to the start of the reign of Gustav III, Bellman’s art-loving patron. The field surgeon is particularly proud of the fact that he has been a “reader of many books,” altogether like Selma, and that he was born the same day as Napoleon: two striking characters in Gösta—vain, superficial Countess Märta Dohna and brave cousin Kristoffer—are leftovers from the Napoleonic Age.

  Living when and where she did, Lagerlöf of course knew her Ibsen. Peer Gynt’s sudden condemnation of his drunken and extremely inventive dreaming, “lies and damned poetry,” in the second act of that great verse play (1864), is quoted in Gösta in one of Lagerlöf’s numerous authorial interruptions, at the end of chapter 11: “Oh, latter-day children! I do not ask anyone to give credence to these old stories. They may be nothing more than lies and poetry.” Gregers Werle, whose persuasive tales cause the suicide of young Hedvig in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (1884), is called by Ibsen “the thirteenth man at table,” like Gösta’s Sintram, the would-be devil at the Christmas Eve feast, whose suborning of the cavaliers leads to the expulsion of the majoress, and the year of their misrule. Sintram roams the roads around the lake called Löven (Fryken in geographic fact), “seeking the ruin of souls,” like Satan in the prayer to Saint Michael at the end of the Tridentine Mass. His relations with the evil one are left murky in The Saga of Gösta Berling: Is he truly in league with the devil or rather a destructive and deranged meddler?

  Kierkegaard’s Enten-Eller (Either-Or, 1843) was among Lagerlöf’s many books in the Landskrona loft, even though abstruse texts were not customarily her cup of tea. She made her way as far as the chapter titled “The Direct Erotic Stages of the Musical Erotic,” Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, helping to form her image of Gösta Berling as a seducer. Also, it is tempting to conjecture that Lagerlöf, living in the cultural ambiance of Copenhagen, read the Danish classic Phantasterne (The Phantasts, 1857) of Hans Egede Schack. Its narrator, Con rad Malcolm, eventually is able to turn his daydreaming to positive ends; his friend Christian is destroyed by dreaming; a third comrade, stolid Thomas, is no dreamer at all. At the end of chapter 10, “The Young Countess,” Gösta salutes the dream in his great speech to the somnolent and grumpy cavaliers: “Of all the things that hands have built, what is there that has not fallen or will not fall? Oh, people, throw down the trowel and the clay form! Spread the mason’s apron over your head and lie down to build the bright palace of dreams!”

  However, Gösta’s longest dream of love
, his passion for the young countess, will lead to his quite unromantic marriage with her, in order to give a legal father to her as yet unborn child, by her doltish husband. (The poor infant expires straightaway.) He will settle down with her, working at his lathe, a friend to the poor, a humble peasant fiddler in the lonely forest croft. One wonders if this forced happy ending (viewed with considerable skepticism by Lagerlöf’s first Swedish biographer, Elin Wägner) draws on the plan of Goethe’s Faust (in part two) to drain swamps and serve mankind thereby. Otherwise, the echoes of Faust in Gösta are detectible enough, or, for that matter, all too obvious—for example, the pact with the devil (Sintram as a provincial Mephistopheles). In the final lines of Faust, “Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan” (The Eternal Womanly / draws us onward and upward); in Lagerlöf’s finale, Gösta is saved by Elisabet and by the majoress who expires to the sound of the foundry’s hammer. The cavaliers have at last undertaken honest work.

  Elisabet—who shares a name with Wagner’s redemptress in Tannhäuser—has delivered her lecture, “heroic gestures, heroic ostentation,” to Gösta, who is lying bound on the floor. As is Gösta’s wont, he offers an excuse: “We cavaliers are not free men. . . . We have promised one another to live for happiness and only for happiness.” Elisabet rejoins, “Woe to you . . . that you should be the most cowardly among the cavaliers and last in improvement of any of them!” Lagerlöf came to love the pattern of the man gone astray, redeemed by the savior woman; in En herrgårdssägen (From a Swedish Homestead, 1899), the mad peddler-and-peasant-fiddler, “Billy Goat,” is restored to his former handsome and cultured self, the estate owner and violinist Gunnar Hede, by the psychoanalytical skills of Ingrid, the frail girl whom Billy Goat, despite his madness, has saved from being buried alive. In Lagerlöf’s last completed novel, Anna Svärd (1928), the ex-pastor Karl-Artur Ekenstedt—formerly silly, self-righteous, destructive—returns to Värmland after seven years of rehabilitation as a missionary in Africa, and approaches the cottage of his long-neglected wife, the eponymous Anna Svärd. The reader never finds out what happens: does she continue her interrupted labor of his salvation?