Selma Lagerlöf’s The Saga of Gösta Berling - some Swedish renunciation

Selma Lagerlöf’s first novel, The Saga of Gösta Berling (1891), turned out to be, to my surprise, a Don Juan story transplanted into western Sweden in the 1820s.  The title character’s horse is actually named Don Juan – that was a subtle clue – but more importantly Berling shares two characteristics with Don Juan, first, that he is a chaos seed, an impulsive prankster who delights in disorder and has trouble seeing the damage he does, and second, that he is irresistibly attractive to women.

Berling does not actually seduce any of the women, though, because Lagerlöf is writing under something like Victorian moral standards – so no sex outside of marriage – and also because both Berling and the various women practice the Goethean art of renunciation.  She loves Berling but must renounce him for some higher purpose, or perhaps Berling renounces the woman.   Lagerlöf’s novel is a mix of Don Juan and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.  Except there is more sex in Wilhelm Meister.

Scandinavians read German writers and Germans read Scandinavian writers.  I am not sure what else I have learned from my little project this year, but now I know that.  The Saga of Gösta Berling has more in common with German novellas (Theodor Storm, E. T. A. Hoffmann) or Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry than with anything going on in French or English literature at the time.

The story as such barely makes sense.  Gösta Berling is an alcoholic priest who finds himself leader of a group of “cavaliers,” washed up remnants of the recent wars who have been taken in as retainers by a woman who owns a large ironworks.  It is a bit like a Western about a tough female rancher and her bunkhouse of grizzled cowboys.   The book covers a year of their adventures.  Each of the eleven cavaliers gets his own chapter and adventure.  I think they each get a chapter.  I didn’t count them.

Chapter 8, for example, “The Great Bear in Gurlita Bluff,” is about “Anders Fuchs, the bear killer,” and his ongoing attempt to kill a magical bear.  “A bullet of silver and bell metal, cast on a Thursday evening at the new moon in the church tower, without the minister or organist or any person knowing of it, would quite certainly kill him, but such a bullet is perhaps not so easy to secure.”  Much of the chapter is about Fuchs acquiring the bullet.  By the end of the story, he does a good deed by letting someone else kill the bear.  More renunciation, for which he is duly rewarded (“’Lord God, how good you are!’ he says, clasping his hands together”).  It’s a good story, and though some bits of it are brought in later in the novel, it could easily have been omitted or published separately.

The rest of the chapters belong to Berling or one of the women with whom he becomes entangled.  Often, Berling’s pranks cause trouble far beyond his control, yet with an ultimate result that is good.  A man is accidentally driven from his wife (bad prank, Berling) but in the process becomes a saint.  That sort of thing.

Why do I keep writing these posts with no quotations?  Tomorrow, some quotations.  And the devil, the wood nymph – I already covered the werebear.  Some strange stuff in this novel.

I read the terrific 2009 Paul Norlen translation, the Penguin Classic.