Description
Selma Lagerlöf was a Swedish author, who, starting in 1891 with The Story of Gösta Berling, wrote a series of novels and short stories that soon garnered both national and international praise. This led to her winning the 1909 Nobel Prize for Literature “in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination, and spiritual perception that characterize her writings,” the first woman to do so. She happily wrote for both adults and children, but the same feeling of romantic infatuation with the spiritual mysteries of life runs through all of her work, often anchored to her childhood home of Värmland in middle Sweden.
The collection brings together the available public domain translations into English, in chronological order of their original publication. The subjects are many, and include Swedish folk-stories, Biblical legends, and tales of robbers, kings and queens, fishermen, and saints. They were translated by Pauline Bancroft Flach, Jessie Brochner, and Velma Swanston Howard.
Description
Set in the 1820s in central Sweden, The Story of Gösta Berling follows the saga of the titular character as he falls from the priesthood and is rescued by the owner of a local estate. Joining the other saved souls in the pensioners’ wing of the mansion, he embarks upon a series of larger-than-life stories that tell of adventure, revelry, romance and sadness.
Gösta Berling was the eventual Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf’s first published novel, and was written as an entry to a magazine competition. The richly detailed landscapes of Värmland were drawn from her own upbringing there, and the local folk tales inspired many of the individual stories in the book. The novel was published in Swedish in 1891; this edition is based on the 1898 English translation by Pauline Bancroft Flach. In 1924 the story was made into a silent film, launching the career of Greta Garbo.
Description
In The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Selma Lagerlöf tells the story of Nils Holgersson, a young boy who is transformed into an elf after a set of misdeeds. Escaping with his family’s farm goose he joins up with a flock of wild geese and travels with them across Sweden as they return to their annual nesting grounds in Lapland.
The story was originally written as a commission for the Swedish National Teachers’ Association to write a geography book for children and has become a firm favourite in the country. It’s been adapted for screen many times, translated into over 30 languages and, until recently, was the artwork on the 20 krona banknote.
Although originally published in English in two volumes—the second starting at “The Story of Karr and Grayskin”—here they are presented as a single combined story.