Stories of Selma Lagerlöf's translated in irregular instalments.
I have been meaning for ages to resume these translations. Thanks to the wonderful Runeberg project I have found most of the rest of the book online (I still can't find the story about the house elf who forces his master to suicide in order to keep the house in the family). But this one is also fine. The most obvious difficulty for a translator is the names of the supernatural beings. Everything in English sounds too cute. "Kelpy" is, I think, the exact equivalent of näck. But tomte is harder. I have used "elf", but I don't like it, since it means cute, or, worse, Tolkein to me. Rå is just impossible, unless I can find a dialect word. Enough whinging. Here's the first installment.
A couple of hundred years ago there was an uncommonly strict and powerful priest in J�sseh�rad in Värmland, who exerted all his strength to make the people of J�sseh�rad observant and pious. It was not enough that he tried to cure them of drunkenness and fighting, of smuggling from Norway and other wickedness -- many priests had tried that before him -- but he forbad them also to fear and worship the powers that are in the farms and the forests and the waters, and this was something that the other priests had been careful never to meddle with.
The priests before him must have thought that since it unarguably the case that there are trolls in the forest and kelpies in the river and elves in the farms, they could not forbid their flock to protect themselves from the malice of these creatures, whether by sacrificing to them or by drawing up agreements with them -- but the new priest would hear nothing of such sophistry. God, and God's word alone were all that a man should hold fast to; if he only did this, there was no need to believe that anything else existed which might bring him harm or destruction.
Although the new priest was a mighty preacher it was obvious from the beginning that all his speeches against the powers under earth would be quite wasted. Most of his audience grew frightened that he would rouse the spirits of the land against them and such an emnity grew up against him that he had no success either will all the other things he struggled for. In the end it came about that everything he tried to work against was praised and admired, while God's cause suffered for every day he stayed in the parish.
Just at the time when he was most ground down by all his setbacks, he went out one afternoon to refresh himself with a walk. His house lay on the shore of a lake, and he followed his usual route, along the county road as far as the church and then back again. He looked often across the lake, which lay frozen and covered with snow, and thought of the trouble it cost the spring sun to dissolve the ice. It had not got far yet. He could even see that a couple of sledges were running out along the smooth worn way that ran out from the vicarage grounds and across the lake to the neighbouring parish.
But what did it matter to the sun that it took such a long time to melt the ice? She was, whatever happened, certain to manage the task. If only he could be as certain for his own part that his work would be crowned with success, he wouldn't worry about resistance, or suffering of any sort.
Right there, in the middle of the road, he clasped his hands together and turned his eyes to heaven. "Oh God, he said, if you see that my work will never bear fruit, give me a sign, and I will stop being a priest. I swear to you, that I am ready to be a day labourer, and earn my bread through the sweat of my brow, whenever you show me that I can't do this job, if that is your will."
Something strange happened then. No sooner had he spoken than he realised it had grown wonderfully silent around him. Or, more exactly, he felt that his ears had been shut to everything they normally heard, and that he had instead acquired a new sort of hearing. He could no longer hear his own footsteps, nor the squeaking of the sledge runnners, nor the hammer blows falling on the porch of the neighbouring farmstead. Instead of all that, he could hear the sounds and the voices which otherwise cannot reach human ears, and with his new powers he realised there was a voice calling from the under the lake. Three times it cried:
"The hour is come. Why tarries the man?
The hour is come. Why tarries the man?
The hour is come. Why tarries the man?"
The muffled voice tolled not from the ice that covered the lake, but from the abyss beneath. It was like the ghastly howling of starved wolves and came rolling wild and terrible under the ice as if a great bloodthirsty beast stood down there and howled for its prey.
As soon as the third cry had died away the listener felt as if a door had closed in his head, and he heard nothing more than the normal, daily sounds around him. The wind whistled gently in the alder bushes along the shore, the snow crunched underfoot, and a quiet bell came from a wagon just passing.
But the memory of the voice from the bottom of the lake was alive in him. He heard again and again the greedy animal cry, and all his childhood fears of the kelpie and the raw things of the forest swelled up in him again until he shook from head to foot. The fear so overpowered him that he even began to run towards the vicarage. But after a few steps he halted and wrestled with his terror. “You are a Christian and a servant of God”, he said. “The filthy spirits of the forests and fields and lake will not have the joy of seeing you are afraid of them.”
He forced himself to walk slowly, but he he could not help hunching his head and shoulders like a man who is expecting an attack from behind. But soon he straightened himself. His heartbeat was once more even, and a feeling of newly awakened hope coursed through him.
“You asked God for a sign”, he said. “You did ask God for a sign".
He reached the vicarage with his usual measured pace, and with his head held high.
Before he returned to his study, he stuck his head around the kitchen door and told the servants that if they were to see a traveler preparing to leave the road and cross the lake, they were to stop him, and say that the priest wanted a word.
A while later, a visitor was heard on the porch. The door to the priest’s study opened and a young man came in. He was wearing a padded jacket and leather trousers like all the other farm labourers of the district, but the priest thought he must be a man of some consequence from the certain neatness and style in these clothes.
The priest looked searchingly at the newcomer for a long time before he said anything. He felt drawn to him at once. This was a short, but well-knit, sturdy man, good looking, with grey eyes that glittered like water rippling in strong sunlight, and a smile that brightened him like a shaft of light.
“If I can rescue this man from crossing the ice and drowning”, thought the priest, “that will be a sign to me from God that I may continue to serve Him.”
The priest had talked to the stranger for two hours, and now they had both fallen silent and the room was quiet. Dark had long ago fallen outside, but a tallow candle burnt on the desk and illuminated the two men. The farmer sat on the extreme edge of a chair, still smiling and glittering, but the priest, who sat at his desk, was obviously in anguish. He leaned forwards with his head in his hands and his elbows propped on the table . From time to time he gave a sigh which shook his whole frame.
What had happened was that he'd failed with all his speeched to persuade the other to give him a definite promise that he would go home by land. He just came up with evasions: sometimes he said that he was expected at a particular time; then that he was to tired to take the long way round on the shore. The priest had offered to give him a list, but he had not wanted to accept. He didn't want to travel now, when the spring slush was so bad. He was afraid of everything except the walk home over the ice.
The priest sat and went over in his mind everything they had discussed, trying to find some way to get a firm hold of the man so he could save him. That was the extraordinary thing about him: that he always slipped away and would not be caught. It was like plunging a hand into running water and trying to seize hold of it.
The priest had started by saying that he had asked him in because he wanted to warn him against taking the route across the lake. He knew that the ice in Church Bay, beneath their windows, was unsafe. The stranger would only reply that the ice had been a good ell thick when he left home that morning. That could never have melted in a day, even if it had been in the full glare of the sun. -- No, there was no danger on the lake, the priest didn't think that either; but in the bay, where the river ran in -- At this, the young man looked as if he were having trouble keeping a straight face, He was a fisherman, and had lived by this lake all his life. The priest could be very certain that he had more sense than to pass by the weakened ice of an inflowing river.
But there was a special reason which meant that he should beware of traveling over the ice this particular evening. And so the priest had told him what he had heard from the shore road. It was astonishing how little this worried the young man, as if it were just everyday gossip. If you worried about that stuff, he said, you'd never dare walk on the lake at all.
The priest asked whether he believed him. Yes, of course he did. He himself had heard them bellow and howl in their depths but it was just bravado. They were just the little lake trolls, showing off. Like everyone else who lived in Jössehärad, they liked to have a little fun.
He stood there, smiling the whole time, and it was impossible to get him to take the warning seriously. The priest felt a growing fear that he would never be able to persuade him that there was danger out there. It shouldn't have been difficult, but there was something that kept obstructing his efforts. The priest had said to himself that he must discover what it was, if he was to gain power over this man.
The Fisherman was otherwise outgoing enough, and talked about all sorts of things. The priest had learnt that his name was Gille Folkesson, and that he lived on the other side of the lake. He was married, too, and had a young, pretty wife of whom he was very proud. She wasn't from peasant stock, as he was. She was the daughter of a farmer who owned his own land; but he looked after her well, even though he was only a fisherman. She couldn't have done better if she had married a farmer.
"She won't do that well if you go and drown yourself", the priest had said, but once gain Gille took this for a joke and would have laughed out loud if he'd dared.
He was a wholly contented man, and not without a boastful edge. He had built his boat himself, and it was so light it flew over the water at his lightest touch on the oars. Also, he had more success fishing than anyone else. That was what let him live so well, even though he owned no land. It wasn't at all unusual for him to get so many fish in a single haul of the net that there was no room for them all in the boat.
This talk caught the priest's attention. "You are pretty certain of your good luck, aren't you?" he asked suddenly. "Sure", came the answer; and, as he said this, the fisherman's eyes shone more brightly than ever. "And I've got reason to be."
He told the priest that a few months before he, Gille, had been born, his mother had been out walking one summer night. The path she found had taken her through a thick wood, where the branches had woven themselves over her so tightly that she was almost in darkness, even though it was soon after midsummer when the nights are otherwise light. Suddenly the forest thinned out, and the path ran suddenly downwards to a large semicircular bay, nearly as beautiful as Church Bay here beneath the vicarage. It was surrounded by green grassy meadows and on these, which were full of large flowers and glittering with a heavy dew, there was a white horse browsing. It was the most beautiful animal she had ever seen. The mane was so long it reached down to the hooves; the coat was dapple gray; the back broad and the legs as slender and taut as arrow shafts; the tail was thick as a sheaf of rye, and so long that it brushed the ground.
She had only a moment in which the enjoy the sight. She wanted to creep towards the horse between the high flowering plants on the shore but it saw her then and fled -- not to the fields, but straight out into the lake. He ran through the shallows whipping up foam around him, and as soon as he reached deep water dived down without trying to swim at all. Then Gille's mother understood that it must have been the Kelpie, who usually appears in the form of a horse when he goes up on land. She wasn't at all afraid for her own sake, but she was concerned for the child she bore, and wondered whether he would take harm of the encounter. Just to be on the safe side, she had gone to a wise woman, and asked. She had been answered that this would not harm the child. Were she to bear a son, she must make him a fisherman, for the Kelpie would make sure that he had great success as a fisherman. One thing only must she watch out for, if he became a fisherman: he maust never drink water from the lake where he caught his fish.
He had managed to avoid doing so, though it had not been easy. It was hard not to moisten himself with so much as a drop of water when he was out on the lake on hot summer days. When he went visiting, he hardly dared set a glass to his lips. There were people who laughed at everything like this, and they tried to fool him into drinking lake water, just for the fun of it. They couldn't really believe it meant anything to him. Even the lake trolls had sometimes tried to tempt him into breaking the ban. But so far he had been able to control himself, and everything had gone well for him, as prophesied. And many times -- innumerable times -- he had seen that the little mermaids, no larger than perch, who were lovely down to the waist, where their fish tails started, were swimming in whole schools round his boat where he lay at rest, bait fishing on warm summer evenings, and they would put one fish after another onto his hooks. And in the same way he had been helped by them in autumn, when gales has tangled his nets.
When the priest heard this story from Gille's own mouth it hadn't upset him as much as it did now, when he looked back on it. While Gille talked, he had clearly seen the lovely small V�rmland lakes with their bathing beaches and fishing grounds, where he himself had had his happiest hours as a boy. He thought that the water glittered and reflected all the way into the room in his own house: it rose gently and caressingly around him. He had felt as if Gille and his troll and the fishing and the easy life out on the lake all belonged together: he couldn't see anything shocking in it. He had almost been dowsy with the slapping of small waves. Nor had he really known whether Gille was serious or whether he would announce any moment that he had just been joking. Therefore the priest had said, in a matter of fact way, that it could be dangerous to accept help from creatures who don't belong to our world.
Gille had answered as before, that there was no danger for him so long as he didn't insult the water people by drinking water from the lake where he fished, for in that case he would pass into their hands. As things now were, he had had nothing but help and profit from them.
To illustrate this, he told the priest a story from his wedding.
On the day of his marriage, Gille had almost come late to the ceremony. He had arranged to borrow a horse from one of his neighbours, but the horse had fallen ill that very day, and Gille had stood there with no idea of what to do. Just then he had caught sight of a horse that was cropping the grass in the meadow on the shore. It was a fine beast, grey white and dappled, with a mane so long that it touched the ground as soon as the horse lowered its head, and a tail thick as a sheaf of rye. Gille had never seen the horse before, and didn't know who owned it, but desperate times call for desperate measures. He had to get hold of a horse; otherwise he would never get to his wedding on time. He tried to catch the strange horse, and that went easily enough. It condescended to be harnessed to the cart and pulled him all the way without fuss. Gill thought he noticed it had a curious gait and was badly trained, so that it didn't understand his signals and orders, but he sat in his bridegroom's thoughts and didn't take much notice of the horse: he was just happy if it kept walking forwards.
But when he had reached the wedding ground, people came running out of the house, and forgot both bride and bridegroom to look at the horse, and praise it and discuss it. No one could understand how Gille had got hold of such a creature. It must have grown up in a King's stable at the very least. Gille hurried to unharness it and placed it with the other horses. He laid out good hay for him,, thanked him for the lift, and fastened him with nothing more than an overhand knot. When the wedding was over, people had gone out for another look at the horse, but it had gone. Gille blamed himself because he hadn't tied him up securely, and said that the horse had probably run home. There in the wedding place he hadn't wanted to reveal that there was anything strange with the horse, but he himself had decided that is was none other than the Kelpie, which had done him the favour of being his horse on his wedding day.
He had told other stories as well, but it was that one more than any other which had persuaded him that he had friends under water, and did not need to fear them.
The priest liked the young man, and his stories had, as I said, reminded him of his own childhood in the forests and on the lakes; this was what had lulled him and stopped him from warning Gille to watch himself and not to speak about such things in his presence.
There were many who did not believe in the creatures which people claimed to have seen in the wild, but the priest was not among them. Still, it was one thing to believe that they existed and another to accept their help and assistance, as this fisherman had done. They were evil by nature, and any venture with them would certainly end badly. That was what the church knew; that was why it forbad all commerce with these spirits. The would bring tragedy to Gille Folkesson, too, if the priest were unable to free him from the shackles of superstition.
The priest had heard a thousand stories of these creatures' ways. They all ended the same way: whoever had once enjoyed their favour and kindnesses would see, when he had come to trust them, that they hurled themselves upon him and destroyed him. Trickery, cunning, and evil were all they knew. They belonged among the subterraneans, and their only goal was to drag humans down into their darkness.
Now the priest could see clearly that this was their aim with the fisherman. He was drowsy with security; he believed in their friendly expressions. No warning had the power to frighten him any longer, and soon he would fall into the net which had been spread for him from the day of his birth. This was inevitable, unless the priest rescued him.
The priest twisted turned the problem in his thoughts. There was one thing that Gille based all his confidence on; and this was that he had never drunk water from the lake where he laid out his lines and nets. But what kind of a refuge was that belief? It was a delusion, which would snare him that very night, for the priest had heard that they were waiting for Gille in the depths. It was a rotten plank, that could not carry him; and if he continued to trust in it, he would be undone.
The priest saw clearly that this plank must be pulled from under Gille Folkesson before it was too late. If only he no longer had that to believe in, he would no longer have faith in the sea trolls and the Kelpie, but in the living God instead. Without his false hopes, he could be saved, body and soul, and come happily home to his young wife.
There was no one in his whole congregation whom he had found as attractive as this Gille Folkesson. He could not condemn him, as he should, for his connection with the unclean spirits; but he felt a great longing to rescue the young man from their power. His heart seared inside him when he looked at the man who sat in front of him, young, beautiful and carefree, and doomed to die that very night.
The priest saw one way to save him. He'd seen it from the very beginning but he did not know whether it was a sin and a desecration. But could there be any greater sin than to leave a human being body and soul in the clutches of the evil power? Perhaps it was permitted in such a case to take this way out? It tempted him, and repelled him. It was truly repulsive. He was in a terrible anguish. He needed a sign from God.
If the man in front of him could be free of his faith in the broken plank, free in a way that would give him new strength, and new hope? If he could be liberated, blessed, assured, without feeling any danger, wouldn't this be the greatest kindness anyone could show him?
The priest was suddenly roused from his thoughts. The fisherman had tired of waiting and rose from his chair. At once the priest found his decision made. He could not let the fisherman walk to his doom. He must prevent it. He must do whatever he could to prevent him.
"I see you want to go, Gille", he said. He rose himself, and Gille moved quickly towards the door as if he was prepared for flight. "Gille, you mustn't think I'm planning to keep you here by force, even though I might want to. You're free to go wherever you want, and that will be across the lake so far as I can see."
"That's how it is, Vicar. I'll get home, in any case."
"But, Gille, you have to understand that when I let you go back across the lake, as you want to, for me that's like sending you to your death. I am just as certain, Gille, that you will never see tomorrow's morning if you go out on the ice tonight, as I would be if there were a gang of murderers in ambush for outside the door. So, Gille, please, I want to prepare you for death just as if you lay on your deathbed. I want to administer communion to you."
At this, Gille grabbed the door handle. He wanted to escape. But the priest called him back.
"You may not go, Gille!" he cried in a powerful voice breaking with emotion. "I have the care of your soul, and I must do my duty towards you, or else I cannot face Him who is Lord of both you and me."
The fisherman seemed to be dragged back against his will by this wave of emotion: he stood where he was, bound by reverence for the priest, who started his preparations as soon as he realised that Gille would obey him. He took out the cup and paten which he used when he was called out to a deathbed, robed himself, and lit another candle.
There was no wine in the bottle which he kept next to the chalice, but he did not send anyone to the cellar to have it filled. "May God have mercy on me!" he thought. "I will fill the chalice with the liquid which is precious enough for His second sacrament."
He had Gille kneel on one knee in front of a chair, forgave him his sins, read the words of consecration, gave him the bread, and touched the chalice to his lips.
The fisherman stumbled to his feet at once, pale with horror. "What have you given me in the chalice, priest?" he roared and gripped the arm that had held it. "I have given you the one thing you never dared taste in your pagan credulity", said the priest. "I have given you the water of Church Bay, but I have blessed it and consecrated it. Now it has crossed your lips, not as water, but as the blood of Christ. May it triumph over the natural power of water! May it free your soul from ...."
He came no further. Gille Folkesson could not hear him. "Water from Church Bay!" he shouted, as if his flesh had been gouged. "Water from Church Bay!"
In a moment he was out of the room, and rushing through the porch into the grounds. The priest hurried after but Gille ran like a lunatic and it was impossible to catch up with him. While he ran, he shouted with a voice as terrible as the one the priest had heard coming from the depths of the lake that afternoon . "The hour has come! Here is the man!".
The vicar had been out on the ice half the night with the farmers and their labourers, looking for Gille Folkesson, who had left the vicarage in anguish of mind. At last they had discovered that there was a hole in the weak ice where the river ran in; one man had very carefully crept towards is and found Gille's hat floating on the water. They needed to search no further; then they could walk back to land.
As they returned, still in the winter dark everyone talked about Gille, of course. They knew him well, and told each other stories of his deal with the water people. "Of course, those down there served him" said one man, stamping on the ice, "but now it's over the way these things always end. He fell into their clutches at last."
"He can't have been careful enough." someone said. "He must have drunk water from the lake."
Just as those words were spoken, another voice was heard, which started to tell a story. It was weak and shaky, the voice of an old, defeated man. At first they didn't realise whose it was: the men stopped still and wondered. No one old or weak had come out onto the ice with them.
Then they realised that it was the vicar speaking, and they clustered around him to hear his story. They couldn't clearly distinguish him in the dark, but they thought they saw a hunched and shivering man who could scarcely keep to his feet.
Never before had they seen a man so crushed. Most of them were young and carefree themselves, but they huddled around the broken man and wept like children as he told his story.
When he had finished the tale of what he had seen and heard that afternoon he walked up to the shore alone. The others followed him silently, at a distance, to be sure he managed to stagger home and did not collapse by the snowy roadside.
"He's finished", they whispered to each other. "He'll never climb into a pulpit again."