The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Book

This children's classic, published in 1906 by future Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf, is so famous in Scandinavia that everyone knows the plot; but until now I'd never read it. Nils Holgersson, a good-for-nothing kid in late nineteenth century Skåne, angers the local tomte (a kind of Swedish leprechaun), who magically transforms him into another tomte. Nils, who's now the size of a thumb, is fortunately adopted by a flock of geese who take him to their summer nesting grounds in Lapland and back again. En route, they conveniently traverse all of Sweden, giving the author ample opportunity for an extended series of geography lessons. It sounded dull, but I was pleased to discover that in fact it's nothing of the kind. The geography is always firmly in the service of the narrative, the lead characters are well drawn, and the style is moving and poetic. But what surprised me most was that I'd never heard how it came to be written.

According to the introduction, the author's original inspiration was a terrible story she had heard from her grandmother about an incident that had occurred when the grandmother was herself a little girl. There was a white goose on the farm, and one spring day he took it into his head to fly off with a flock of wild geese who were passing by. The family was of course sure they would never see him again. But many months later, Selma's grandmother was astonished to see that the goose had returned. And he was not alone; during the summer, he had found a mate, a beautiful grey goose, and they were accompanied by half a dozen little goslings. Delighted, Selma's grandmother led the goose family to the barn, where they could eat from the trough with the other fowl. She closed the door so that they wouldn't fly off again, and ran to tell her stepmother. The stepmother said nothing. She just took out the little knife she used for slaughtering geese; and an hour later there was not one goose left alive in the barn.

For me, this resonated with what many other people also find the most memorable episode in the book. One night, Nils is woken by a stork, who says that if he follows him he will show him something important. They fly to the seashore, where there is a strange city, quite unlike anything one would expect to find on the Swedish coast. Nils goes in through the huge gate and discovers people dressed in rich clothes from a bygone age. No one seems to notice him at first. He finds his way to the merchants' quarter. People are selling all kinds of precious goods: embroidered silks and satins, gold ornaments, glittering jewels. And now he realizes that the merchants can see him. They are holding out their wares to him, offering all these treasures. Nils tries to make them understand that he could never afford any of it, he is a poor boy. But they persist, and using gestures tell him that he can have anything he wants, if he can just give them one small copper coin. He searches his pockets over and over again but finds they are empty. In the end, he leaves the city, and when he turns round again it has disappeared. "It is the lost city of the sea traders," explains the stork. "They were drowned beneath the waves long ago, but once every hundred years they come back for a single night. The legend is that if they can sell a single thing to a mortal, they will be allowed to return to the world; but they never do." Nils feels his heart is going to break. He could so easily have saved all these good people and their city, but he has failed them.

It seemed to me that both stories expressed the same feeling with quite unusual clarity. If only...