Leaves & Pages

The Treasure by Selma Lagerlöf ~ 1904. Original title: Herr Arnes penningar (Herr Arne’s Hoard). Translated into English in 1923. This edition: Daughters, Inc., 1973. Foreword by June Arnold. Softcover. ISBN: 0-913780-01-4.  159 pages.

My rating: 10/10

“Why are they whetting knives at Branehog?”

So deep was the silence in the room that when the old lady asked this question all gave a start and looked up in fright. When they saw that she was listening for something, they kept their spoons quiet and strained their ears.

For some moments there was dead stillness in the room, but while it lasted the old woman became more and more uneasy. She laid her hand on Herr Arne’s arm and asked him: “How can it be that they are whetting such long knives at Branehog this evening?”

Torarin saw that Herr Arne stroked her hand to calm her. But he was in no mind to answer and ate on calmly as before.

The old woman still sat listening. Tears came into her eyes from terror, and her hands and her head trembled more and more violently.

Then the two little maids who sat at the end of the table began to weep with fear. “Can you not hear them scraping and filing?” asked the old mistress. “Can you not hear them hissing and grating?”

The crippled fish-seller, Torarin, who has stopped at the wealthy Herr Arne’s household to warm up and partake of the liberal hospitality of the household, is just as shocked as everyone else by the old woman’s outbreak. For didn’t his own little black dog, Grim, howl forebodingly and refuse to enter the gates of Herr Arne’s compound? Something sinister could well be afoot.

It is 16th Century Sweden, in the depths of winter. The sea is frozen; ships are trapped helplessly waiting for a thaw. Torarin hopes to take a shortcut home over the ice, and soon leaves. Grim rejoins him and Torarin shrugs off the omen. That night, however, a fiery glow lights up the night sky. Herr Arne’s buildings are on fire! Neighbours running to assist are shocked to find that the fire has been set from outside, and inside the hall Herr Arne, his wife, and their entire household lie dead in pools of blood; his famous treasure chest filled with silver is missing. A dying gasp from one man tells of three roughly dressed men coming down the chimney hole with long knives honed for the slaughter, surprising the household.

One person has survived the massacre, a fourteen-year-old orphan girl, Elsalill, loving companion of Herr Arne’s daughter. She is dazed and at first will not speak; Torarin ends up taking her into his own poor home, where she soon learns to drudge along with Torarin’s mother cleaning fish on the harbourside.

Then three richly dressed Scottish mercenary soldiers, marking time with many others while waiting for the sea to thaw, overhear Elsalill telling the tale of that horrible night; they mock her weeping and her contention that she will be revenged upon the murderers who killed her beloved friend even as she pleaded for mercy. And as they walk away Elsalill thinks that somehow they look familiar, and this proves to be true.

Meanwhile, the unavenged dead are not resting peacefully these winter nights, and Herr Arne’s daughter returns to the land of the living in order to beg assistance from Elsalill in righting her great wrong. But Elsalill has fallen in love with the very man who murdered her friend…

What a great little ghost story this novella was, evocative of a bardish tale told round a flickering fire in a land of sunless winter.  Swedish writer (and articulate lesbian feminist) Selma Lagerlöf  was an accomplished teller of tales, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1909 “in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception that characterize her writings”, and The Treasure is a fine small example of her much greater body of work.

Available for free online at Project Gutenberg, but perhaps best read out loud on a dark winter night with lights down low to a rapt audience of listeners.

Skål!