Selma Lagerlöf - Dödskallen

Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf died 16 March 1940 and therefore I thought it fitting to read one of her short stories today. She wrote quite a few of those, but I chose the one Dödskallen (The skull) just because it fit well for someone's death day.

The short story was originally published under the title En underlig julgäst (A strange christmas guest) in the anthology Julstämning in 1914 and it was also part of the anthology Troll och människor II from 1921 in which Lagerlöf emanated from traditional Swedish folklore.

I love Selma! She is definitely up there among my favourites and I absolutely adore the cover Novellix has chosen for Dödskallen. It is amazing!

Dödskallen is about grave digger and church guard Anders Öster who walks around trying to invite people to his home for christmas dinner. No one accepts the invitation however and as he walks past the churchyard he jokes a bit to himself that he should invite the ghosts instead. He then finds a human skull which he suppose he has disturbed from its grave while he dug another one (Something that probably has been pretty common.) and he decides to invite it for christmas.

As he comes home to his wife Bolla, he is miserable and angry and takes it all out on his wife. He even go so far that he tries shooting her just because she refuses to let him eat in the big hall in the parish house where the parish counsel had its meetings. He justifies this with saying that now he had humbled her and she would know her place. He, however, feels somewhat lonely, so he walks out and brings home the skull he had found before to keep him company.

In the mean time Bolla flees to their neighbours who try comforting her and she sits down to have christmas dinner with them, thinking she can never go back to her husband and while he thinks he has just shown her who is the boss, she thinks that he must hate her. Suddenly Anders arrives looking all scared and Bolla decides to go back with him. It turns out the skull belonged to someone who has been shot making him realise what he has actually tried doing to his wife.

To be honest this sort of twist to the story was rather surprising. I felt sure it was going to turn out that he had really invited the dead to his christmas party and that he would end up scared because the skull came to life.  It was short and rather easy to read and gave you a feeling of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. This twist made it feel refreshing and the fact that Anders realises he is the one who have misbehaved towards his wife is making the ending much more hopeful.

Moa Martinson - Fjäderbrevet

When I was little there were this series of very small children's books called Pixiböcker (Pixi books) with short stories and lots of pictures. I have really fond memories of them and was therefore pleasantly surprised when I noticed the small short story books by more or less famous writers from Novellix at Pocketshop. They are kind of like Pixibooks for adults!

I have been sick with a cold these past few days, so it was nice to relax with a short story in the meantime. I chose Moa Martinson's Fjäderbrevet (The feather letter)* mostly because I liked the cover, but it turned out to be a quite interesting read.

My past experiences with Martinson's authorship has actually been quite mixed. When I was 15 and was "forced" to read her book Mor gifter sig (1936) in school I found it quite boring which might be because I was so young and I read it as a school assignment. Therefore I will not talk much about it. The second book I read by Martinson was a much more pleasant read: Kvinnor och äppelträd (1933). It is definitely up there among my favourite books of all time and I will give it its own entry in the future.

Moa Martinson

Fjäderbrevet is an autobiographical text which was first published in the antalogy Armén vid horisonten (1942). It is about her grandparents (the soldier and his wife) going to the priest to get their unmarried daughter's newborn daughter (i.e. Moa) baptist in november 1890. Her grandfather has already fought to keep them at the croft before his granddaughter was born. Then there is a jump in time to nine years later when the child's aunt and uncle come to visit her, her mother and her stepfather and they follow them back to the widowed grandmother in the croft. In an interesting story telling technique, which I have never encountered before, Martinson lets the mother tell much of the plot to her child.

När mor berättade om knekttorpet, där både hon och jag var födda, och då hon drog sig till minnes historier hennes mormor som var född på sjuttonhundratalet hade berättat, så fick jag det intrycket att det var knekthustrurna, knetsystrarna och knektmödrarna som var armén (When mother told about the soldier's croft, where both she and I were born, and when she remembered stories her grandmother who was born during the 18th century hade told, I got the feeling that it was the soldiers's wives, sisters and mothers who were the army.)

I really enjoy Moa Martinson's language. Her portrayal of her contemporary society and the people at its bottom (especially the women) is so raw and straight forward. It really gets you into the hardship of the society of that time (late 19th-early 20th century Sweden). Martinson belongs to the Swedish working class authors of the first half of the 20th century and I think it is very important for people today to read that type of literature in a way. It is raw and humanistic and paints a picture of a society that people today are rather unaware of existed only about a 100 years ago. Yes, Martinson's main focus is the poor, but that does not mean that she does not have feelings for the rich. Quite the contrary actually:

Man står inte ut med ens i fantasin att en människa, okunnig om sin ondska, sin girighet och hårdhet, inte ska få tillfälle till bättring. Livets egen happy end är ju döden för varenda varelse som föds. (You cannot stand even in your imagination that a human being without knowledge of his/her malignity, his/her greed and hardness will never have the opportunity to do right. The life's own happy end is death for every living being that is born.)

*Urgent post delivery was up until the 1870's in Finland and Sweden marked by feathers and therefore called Fjäderbrev