Rediscovering Nils

When the miners heard the words, they thought it was their own longing that made the goose-cackle sound like human speech. "Take us along with you!" they cried. "Not this year," shrieked the boy. "Not this year."

—The Wonderful World of Nils, 373¹

The boy is fourteen-year-old Nils Holgersson, who, diminished to thumb-size by an angry elf, has joined a flock of wild geese led by the famous Akka from Kebnekaise on their spring migration, riding the back of his parents' big white goosey-gander. At the beginning of his journey, Nils is "an all-round good-for-nothing," "cruel to animals, and ill-willed toward human beings" (I, 6). When he returns home in the fall, he has escaped from foxes, bears, and humans, saved an old castle from an invasion of rats, watched the Great Crane Dance, rescued a little boy from drowning, closed a dead woman's eyes, been kidnapped by crows, made friends with eagles, storks, and ravens, and traveled all the way to Lapland. His adventures have developed his courage and initiative and sharpened his wits; they have also developed his capacity to love and care for others—both human and animal.

When the first volume of Nils Holgerssons undebara resa genom Sverige was published in 1906, it quickly became Sweden's bestseller of the year. Velma Swanston Howard, in her Translator's Introduction to the English language edition, quotes excerpts from the contemporary Swedish reviews, most of which hailed the book as equal to or surpassing the earlier works of Lagerlöf, Scandinavia's finest woman novelist and soon-to-be winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1909). (Not all critics reacted so favorably, however; for a summary of angry contemporary responses to Nils, see Nils Afzelius, "The Scandalous Selma Lagerlöf," Scandinavia 5, 2 (Nov. 1966): 91-99.) Less than a year after its first publication, Nils had been translated into Danish, German, and English. The sequel, Further Adventures of Nils, appeared in Sweden in 1907 and in America in 1911.

Nils still maintains a high reputation in its native country. The newly illustrated editions that appear there, and the numerous commercial depictions of the boy on the goose's back that are printed on packets of stationery, etched in fine crystal, or woven in straw to make a Christmas tree ornament all attest to its continuing popularity. Nor is it entirely passed over by English and American historians of children's literature. In A Critical History of Children's Literature, Elizabeth Nesbitt quotes from and discusses Nils at some length as one of the classics of early twentieth-century fantasy. Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Prichard, in their Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, call it a "strikingly original work" that "remains one of Sweden's outstanding contributions to children's literature." Roger Sale in his chapter on "Animals" in Fairy Tales and After: From Snow White to E. B. White offers an interesting analysis of Nils's opening chapters.

I would guess, however, that Nils is little known in America today, not only among children but even among adults with a professional or scholarly interest in children's books, excepting those with a special knowledge of Scandinavian children's literature. So I would like to point out, first, some probable reasons why Nils is not well known or popular, and second, some qualities that make it nonetheless deserving of more attention from both younger and older readers.

As far as the younger readers are concerned, Nils's main problem is shared, unfortunately, by most nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury children's classics. The ten-year-olds of today simply do not read as well as their counterparts of a hundred years ago. Novels of any length and complexity, with "long" sentences and "hard" words, may be beyond the reach of the very audience they were designed for. Nils carries an additional handicap in...