Selma Lagerlöf’s A Kaleidoscope of Stories (Norvik Press, July 2025)
‘Osceola’ by George Catlin (1838)
Selma Lagerlöf’s vivid recollection of discovering the heady delights of the adventure story Oseola (sometimes known as Osceola) as a child is taken from ‘Two Prophecies’, one of the autobiographical texts in this volume. It seems a fitting way to open this blogpost about the latest addition to our ‘Lagerlöf in English’ series, which turns the spotlight on the power of short stories. The volume contains a carefully chosen selection of Lagerlöf’s most important stories covering a range of themes, genres and periods of her career, translated by our prize-winning trio of Lagerlöf translators, Linda Schenck, Peter Graves and Sarah Death. After each story they also provide explanatory notes where appropriate.
Långserud, Värmland (Martin Edström/imagebank.sweden.se)
Midsummer folk dance, Öland (Bernt Fransson)
Lucca, Church of St. John and St. Reparata, 4th Century (Syrio)
Key autobiographical pieces, morality tales both dark and light, legends from several lands and folklore-inspired narratives combine to reveal the breadth and stylistic range of Lagerlöf’s storytelling skills. This is a collection of interest to general readers but also a useful teaching tool for Swedish and comparative literature courses around the world. The volume includes a comprehensive and accessible introduction by Lagerlöf specialist Bjarne Thorup
Thomsen (University of Edinburgh). The nine stories have been arranged into three thematic sections: Women, Work and Writing; Landscapes, Families and ‘Others’; Epochs, Societies and Values.
As our specialist scholar writes in his introduction, the collection has been designed to offer the reader a multifaceted mixture of stories. The selected narratives showcase different times, places, atmospheres, styles and genre modes. Some stories are obvious instances of prose fiction, while others are balanced somewhere between fictional and factual writing. With the nine narratives listed chronologically according to their dates of first publication, the content of the volume is as follows (annotations by Bjarne Thorup Thomsen):
‘Mamsell Fredrika’ / ‘Miss Fredrika’ – an imaginative and extravagantly expressed tribute to a female trailblazer in Swedish literature, centred, like many of Lagerlöf’s stories, around Christmas.
‘De fågelfrie’ / ‘The Outlaws’ – a narrative, steeped in nature mysticism and fin-de-siècle-feel, about clashes, but also fluid boundaries, between pagan and Christian mindsets in medieval times, fuelled by the descriptive energy that Lagerlöf attributed to her writing at the time.
‘Gudsfreden’ / ‘God’s Peace at Christmas’ – an enquiry into a close encounter, with elements of crime, between human and animal, and Lagerlöf’s first depiction of the Ingmarssons, the powerful family of peasants that would take centre stage in Jerusalem.
‘Spelmannen’ / ‘The Fiddler’ – a story, both playful and uncanny, about a self-assured musician and the shadows of abandoned family, set during a Nordic summer night in a landscape that is both attraction and trap.
‘Silvergruvan’ / ‘The Silver Mine’ – a nation-orientated narrative about the homeland’s real riches, anticipating some of the major themes in Nils Holgersson.
‘Två spådomar’ / ‘Two Prophecies’ – a biographical sketch in six life moments, infused with motifs of deciphering, reading and writing, about Lagerlöf’s route to becoming an author, published at a time when her national, and indeed international, fame was growing fast.
‘Bortbytingen’ / ‘The Changeling’ – a suspense-filled story about unexpected contact and strange parallels between a human and an ‘alien’ sphere, featuring an unconventional and resourceful heroine.
‘Den heliga bilden i Lucca’ / ‘The Sacred Image in Lucca’ – a miraculous legend and picaresque travel adventure played out in Italy, foregrounding poor but hopeful working-class characters and told in a lucid style and light-hearted tone.
‘Dimman’ / ‘The Mist’ – a modern parable with a punishing ending, published in the context of the First World War and critiquing attitudes, including artistic ones, to the reality of global conflict and suffering.
We enthusiastically echo Bjarne’s assessment that Lagerlöf’s rich corpus of short stories and related forms of short prose deserves renewed attention – and up-to-date translations. These are the first retranslations of the texts in our anthology for over a century. We are sure that all anglophone readers, from committed Selma followers to those discovering her work for the first time, will fall under the spell of her storytelling in this varied volume.
