The Saga of Gosta Berling pdf Selma Lagerlof Free Download

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

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.

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