Places: The Story of Gösta Berling

Ekeby Story of Gösta Berling, The (EH-keh-BIH). Swedish estate around which the novel is centered. Initially a prosperous estate, it declines nearly to the point of ruin because of neglect after Margareta Samzelius, its capable and resourceful owner, is expelled by her husband when she is exposed as an adulteress. The chaos in the human world finds its manifestation in nature, and an overpowering storm brings near destruction to the whole province. However, rather symbolically, it is the constructive work ethic and love of another woman, Elisabet Dohna, that save both Gösta Berling and Ekeby by restoring communal morality and natural order. The fate of Ekeby gives an unambiguous expression of Lagerlöf’s Christian ethics, which seek a balance between joy and work, romantic adventure and doing good.

Ekeby’s prototype is Rottneros, situated near the Swedish town of Sunne, at the heart of the province of Värmland. Critics and biographers see in Ekeby an idealized portrayal of Mårbacka, Lagerlöf’s place of birth in Värmland. Geographically and culturally, Lagerlöf perceived her native province as a border territory: between Norway and Sweden, man and nature, culture and wilderness, the visible and the invisible, the real and the imaginary.

The world Lagerhof created in The Story of Gösta Berling emphasizes the constantly shifting and often indistinguishable boundaries separating the past from the present. Although textual references identify the 1820’s as the time frame of the narrative, the novel’s temporal as well as spatial characteristics continually contract and expand to include a kaleidoscope of narrative worlds, including those of Icelandic sagas, myth and romance, local folk tales, legends, and superstitions. The result of this act of vivid imagination is a powerful recovery of a sense of place which defies both linear time and traditional notions of the animate and inanimate in nature.

Lake Löven (lewh-ven). Lake around which most of the novel’s action concentrates. Modeled on Sweden’s Lake Frycken, Löven is introduced in the novel’s first chapter; the fairly detailed full-length portrait of the lake is painted by a striking combination of personification and realistic detail. The description of the adjoining landscape also proves significant as it underlines an organic merger between culture and wilderness: The cultivated fields on the lake’s shores and the deep forests assume in the distance the harsh, rocky features of mountainous semiwilderness. Human presence is a mere extension of the natural world without dominating it in any way. The lake and the surrounding flora and fauna thus possess a personality of their own and are capable of establishing and sustaining an intimate relationship with man.