The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf

First published:Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige, 1906 (English translation, 1907)

Type of work: Adventure tale

Themes: Nature, animals, and friendship

Time of work: The early twentieth century

Recommended Ages: 10-13

Locale: Sweden

Principal Characters:

• Nils Holgersson, called
• Tummetott, a fourteen-year-old boy whose laziness and cruelty have made him a disappointment to his parents
• Morten Gander, a tame gander on whose back Nils rides
• Akka from Kebnekaise, the ancient leader of the flock of wild geese
• Mr. Smirre Fox, the persistent foe of Nils and the geese
• Herr Ermenrich, a stork at Glimminge Castle
• Osa the goose Girl, a child who, like Nils, tended geese in the summer
• Little Mats, Osa’s small brother

The Story

The Wonderful Adventures of Nils contains all the components of a good adventure tale: travel, danger, discovery, and a certain element of magic. The son of Holger Nilsson, a poor farmer in West Vemmenhog, Nils is a totally disagreeable lad. His hardworking parents despair over his self-indulgence and mean temper. Left alone while they go to church, Nils captures an elf who retaliates by shrinking Nils to his own small size. Nils’s shock at his new form is accompanied by the realization that he can no longer bully the barnyard creatures but is now at their mercy. Nils searches the farm for the elf in hopes of being changed back into a regular boy. When some wild geese pass overhead, he grabs the neck of his father’s gander just as it flies away to join them. Thus Nils’s adventures begin.

It does not take long for Nils and the gander, both out of their natural element, to realize that they must depend on each other. In forcing the gander to drink at the end of the day’s long flight, Nils performs his first act of kindness. It is not long before he is trying to help the wild geese as well, although in his first attempt, the geese end up having to rescue him. They spend the night on the ice, usually a place safe from predators. However, movement of the ice toward the shore of Vomb Lake enables Mr. Smirre Fox to attack one of the geese. Forgetting his size, Nils runs after what he thinks is a dog. He succeeds in diverting attention from the goose long enough for it to escape, but in so doing, he must take refuge in a small beech tree. In the morning, he sees the geese fly overhead and assumes he has been forgotten. Instead, the geese come back one by one, flying so low that the fox exhausts himself in trying to catch them, and Nils is able to escape.

Nils’s personality does not change overnight. At the beginning, his motivation for staying with the geese is purely selfish: He longs for excitement, and he hates the thought of facing his parents. Behind many of his conciliatory acts is the fear of being sent home. On the advice of Akka of Kebnekaise, he tries to protect himself from wild beasts by getting on good terms with the birds and small animals. Unfortunately, they are aware of his former cruelty and refuse to help him. His part in reuniting Sirle Squirrel’s wife with her babies is less an act of atonement than one of appeasement. He saves Herr Ermenrich’s Glimminge Castle from the gray rats for the same reason that he has rescued the goose: to vindicate himself and prove that being small and human does not make him inferior. Slowly, as he receives gratitude for his kind acts, he begins to want to do them for themselves.

The plot of The Wonderful Adventure of Nils is episodic. The migration of the geese takes Nils and the gander to every part of Sweden, and in every place they alight, a new experience waits. At first, Nils revels in his new life. He sleeps tucked under the gander’s wing at night and explores his new surroundings by day. Only gradually does he begin to miss human contact. He remembers companions with whom he shared goose-tending duties the past summer. At that time, he cared little for Osa the goose girl and Mats, as he cared for no one. Nevertheless, when he encounters them again, he runs to them eagerly and is ashamed and grieved when his size terrifies them. In hearing the story of an old peasant woman who has died far from her children, Nils thinks of his own parents. No longer is he afraid to return to them; now he hopes to make reparations. Once he heard an owl say that if the boy brought the gander home safely, he might be restored to human form. That seems to be the hope that sustains him as the story ends.

Context

Although Selma Lagerlöf’s short stories are still anthologized and her adult novels are still read, it is The Wonderful Adventures of Nils which has retained universal appeal. A contemporary of August Strindberg, Lagerlöf inevitably faced comparison of her work with that of her countryman. Judged by Strindberg’s standards of naturalism, Lagerlöf was dismissed by many turn-of-the-century critics as an obsolete romantic. She is a romantic, although such a classification has hardly discouraged her readers.

Lagerlöf draws on a strong sense of place: the home in Mrbacka where she grew up had been in her family for hundreds of years. In the rural areas of Sweden, entertainment was of the homemade variety—reading, recitation, music, and storytelling. When the child Selma grew to adulthood, she would recall many of the stories, both true and supernatural, and weave them into her novels.

In none of her works does the blend of the real and the unreal work better than in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. When the National Teachers’ Association asked Lagerlöf to write a book to teach children the geography of Sweden, she spent three years studying the material she wanted to include. By using a boy changed into a Tummetott, or Tom Thumb, with an aerial view, she devised an ideal way to present not only the geography of Sweden but the history, myth, and natural science as well. When she finally began to write, her native storytelling ability and the imaginative setting she had invented combined effectively to get across the information.

For her service to the Swedish schools, Lagerlöf was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Uppsala in 1907. The next year, the entire nation honored her on her fiftieth birthday. Then, in 1909, she became the first woman and the first Swede to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. In presenting the award, the president of the Swedish Academy praised her “wealth of imagination, idealism in conception, and fascinating presentation.”

The Wonderful Adventures of Nils has been translated into many languages and is read by children everywhere. In writing her geographical reader for Swedish students, Selma Lagerlöf has introduced Sweden to the world.