Lagerlöf, Selma Ottiliana Lovisa

The Swedish author Selma Ottiliana Lovisa Lagerlöf (1858-1940) is noted for her ability to recreate a world of legend in an apparently simple, naive style. She was the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize for literature.

Selma Lagerlöf was born on November 20, 1858, on the estate Ma°rbacka in Värmland. In 1884 her father's illness forced the sale of the home, an event which would continue to affect her. She worked as a country schoolteacher for nearly 10 years, struggling at the same time to find a form in which to retell the legends she had heard as a child. She finally wrote them in her own way, ignoring the time's demand for realism, and published them as Gösta Berling's Saga in 1891. This work, set in a brilliantly evoked Värmland landscape, is a series of melodramatic, often fantastic stories organized around Gösta Berling, a despairing, defrocked minister. It is marked by vivid realism of description but also shows the influence of romanticism, the Bible, and Thomas Carlyle.

The Saga is an independent contribution to the "neoromantic" reaction of the 1890s against naturalism. It further departs from naturalism - as does most of her work - in its emphasis upon personal responsibility and its undogmatic, earthy Christianity. The book was not a critical success until it was warmly reviewed by Georg Brandes, the man most responsible for the literary fashions Lagerlöf defied. Gradually it has become a world classic.

Lagerlöf's second masterpiece is the two-volume novel Jerusalem (1901-1902), based on the true story of a group of Swedish peasants who, seized by religious fervor, sold their farms and went to the Holy Land to devote their lives to good works. The first volume is the more successful, evoking the shattering experience of a people who abandon their homes and traditions for the unknown. Her third masterpiece is The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1906-1907), written as a Swedish geography for children, one of the world's most popular children's books.

From the turn of the century on, Lagerlöf's literary output was impressive, both in quantity and quality, and her fame grew steadily until she became Sweden's most famous writer. Of her other books available in translation, the following deserve mention. In The Miracles of Antichrist (1897) and Christ Legends and Legends (both 1904), folk material she collected is used to build her own stories, blending the real and the fantastic. Gripping psychological novels are The Tale of a Manor (1899) and The Emperor of Portugallia (1914). Also available are her three books of memoirs, autobiographical classics: Ma°rbacka (1922), Memories of My Childhood (1930), and The Diary of Selma Lagerlöf (1932).

Lagerlöf won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1909 and used the money to buy back her beloved childhood home, Ma°rbacka, where she lived, wrote, and farmed from 1910 until her death on March 16, 1940.

Further Reading

Studies in English of Selma Lagerlöf's life and work are Walter Berendsohn, Selma Lagerlöf (1927; trans. 1931); Hanna A. Larsen, Selma Lagerlöf (1936); Alrik Gustafson, Six Scandinavian Novelists (1940; 2d ed. 1966); and Folkerdina deVrieze, Fact and Fiction in the Autobiographical Works of Selma Lagerlöf (1958).

Additional Sources

Lagerlöf, Selma, Marbacka, Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprint Co., 1975, 1924.

Lagerlöf, Selma, Memories of my childhood: further years at Marbacka, Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprint Co., 1975, 1934.

For more information on Selma Ottiliana Lovisa Lagerlöf, visit Britannica.com.

Lagerlöf, Selma (1858–1940), Swedish novelist, Nobel Prize winner (1909), the first woman admitted into the Swedish Academy of Letters. She was born and lived most of her life in the Swedish province of Värmland, famous for its storytelling traditions. In all her novels and short stories Lagerlöf makes use of folktales and legends, weaving them into everyday surroundings. Her most internationally well‐known book, Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (1906–7; The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, 1907, The Further Adventures of Nils, 1911), originally a geography schoolbook, has several layers of fairy‐tale matter. The frame of the book is a traditional fairy‐tale plot in which a lazy boy is punished by being transformed into a midget and must improve in order to become human again. His journey with the wild geese borrows many traits from the animal tale, notably Reynard the Fox, and from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. Like a folk‐tale hero, Nils is able to understand animal language when he is enchanted, and he acquires both friends and enemies in the animal realm. He is significantly nicknamed Little Tom Thumb, and in many of his adventures performs the function of the so‐called culture hero. He also has a typical fairy‐tale guide and mentor, the old wise goose Akka. Places which Nils visits are described in terms of etiological folk tales, explaining the origin of geographical features of the landscape, and of uncanny local legends. Finally, some well‐known plots are involved, such as ‘Pied Piper of Hamelin’ and the sinking of Atlantis, here both connected with concrete settings in Sweden.

Lagerlöf has served as a model and a source of inspiration for Michel Tournier.

Bibliography

• Edström, Vivi, Selma Lagerlöf (1984).
• Rahn, Suzanne, “‘The Boy and the Wild Geese’”, in Rediscoveries in Children's Literature (1995).
• Sale, Roger, Fairy Tales and After: From Snow White to E. B. White (1978).

— Maria Nikolajeva

Lagerlöf, Selma (sĕl'mä lä'gərlöv) , 1858–1940, Swedish novelist. Her native Värmland is the background for many of her excellent stories, which deal with peasant life. Novels include The Story of Gösta Berling (1891, tr. 1898), a romantic tale of a renegade priest, lyrical in style; Jerusalem (1901, tr. 1901–2); and a trilogy (1925–28) which was published in English as The Ring of the Lowenskolds (1931). Several of her works, often based on legends and sagas, served as the basis for early Swedish films. The short stories of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1906, tr. 1907) are classics of children's literature. She received the 1909 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first woman to be thus honored.

Bibliography

See biographies by H. A. Larsen (1936) and W. A. Berendsohn (1968); studies by V. Edström (1984) and B. Holm (1984).