Vilhelm Moberg - The Settlers

Moberg strove to debunk the old heroic myths of Swedish history. But in his tales of the immigrants to Minnesota, he succeeded in his own right in creating a significant popular image. The figures of Karl Oskar and Kristina, the ultimate commonfolk, speak so powerfully to our imagination that they assume a dimension larger than life. Like many other contrasts in his life, this ironic twist would have hit home with Vilhelm Moberg and appealed to his literary sensibility.

Moberg’s writing style has been a subject of discussion since the 1960s when critic Gunnar Brandell denied him a place among the great creative artists of modern Swedish literature. According to Brandell, Moberg wrote a solid everyday prose that did not adequately express shades of difference or depict characters in sufficient depth. Moberg lacked “lyrical resources,” Brandell concluded. 19

Since that time several writers have defended Moberg’s writing style. Gunnar Heldén pointed out Moberg’s strengths in dealing with three central motifs in classic lyricism: nature, love, and death. 20Sven Delblanc described Moberg’s prose style as en poesi i sak, that is, a style that pays steady attention to small details, thus creating a harmony and poetry of everyday life without reliance on the neat turning of phrases or on striking images. 21Finally, Philip Holmes explained Moberg’s use of alliteration, phrase-pairs, and repetition in his prose. These devices allowed Moberg to slow his narrative tempo and to strive “for clarity and fullness of expression.” 22

Holmes described the Old Testament and the medieval Swedish laws as major influences on Moberg’s writing style. Moberg strove in his prose to produce the thought patterns of rural people from the nineteenth century. Although unlettered, these people were confronted with and forced to sort out a new world of impressions and complicated emotions. Moberg’s task was to give a realistic voice to his characters. His success in finding this voice speaks for his creativity.

Roger McKnight

Gustavus Adolphus College

NOTES

1. Magnus von Platen, Den unge Vilhelm Moberg En levnadsteckning (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1978), 310.

2. Vilhelm Moberg, “Där jag sprang barfota,” Berättelser ur min levnad (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1968), 29–46.

3. Von Platen, Den unge Vilhelm Moberg, 9.

4. Moberg, “Från kolbitar till skrivmaskin,” Berättelser ur min levnad, 119.

5. Moberg, “Romanen om utvandrarromanen,” Berättelser ur min levnad, 292.

6. Moberg, “Romanen om utvandrarromanen,” 293, 298.

7. Moberg, “Romanen om utvandrarromanen,” 294. For similar comments in English, see: Moberg, “Why I Wrote the Novel About Swedish Emigrants,” Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly 17 (Apr. 1966): 63.

8. Gunnar Eidevall, Vilhelm Mobergs emigrantepos (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1974), 19–20.

9. For discussions of Moberg’s research methods, see Philip Holmes, Vilhelm Moberg (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 110–32; Ingrid Johanson, “Vilhelm Moberg As We Knew Him,” Bulletin of the American Swedish Institute (Minneapolis), no. 11 (1956); Bertil Hulenvik, Utvandrarromanens källor: Förteckning över Vilhelm Mobergs samling av källmaterial, ed. Ulf Beijbom (Växjö: House of Emigrants, 1972).

10. Don Josè [pseud.], “Vilhelm Mobergs amerikabagage nära att gå till Europahjälpen,” Svenska Dagbladet, June 4, 1948, p. 11.

11. Sven Åhman, “Vilhelm Moberg ser på USA,” Nordstjernan, May 26, 1949.

12. Gustaf Lannestock, Vilhelm Moberg i Amerika (Stockholm: Zindermans, 1977), 36. Much of our knowledge of Moberg’s life in America is derived from the two men’s correspondence and from this volume.

13. For works in English detailing Moberg’s impressions of America, see Moberg, The Unknown Swedes: A Book About Sweden and America, Past and Present, ed. and trans. Roger McKnight (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988); McKnight, “The New Columbus: Vilhelm Moberg Confronts American Society,” Scandinavian Studies 64 (Summer 1992): 356–88. Moberg expressed many of his opinions in letters to Lannestock; these letters are now in the House of Emigrants in Växjö, Sweden, and are referred to in “The New Columbus.” See also Lannestock, Vilhelm Moberg i Amerika (in Swedish). My comments here and five paragraphs below are based on these works.

14. Moberg, Min svenska historia (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1971), 1:14.

15. Sigvard Mårtensson, Vilhelm Moberg (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1956), 202.

16. Sven Delblanc, “Den omöjliga flykten,” Bonniers litterära magasin 42, no. 6 (Dec. 1973), 267.

17. Rochelle Wright, “Vilhelm Moberg’s Image of America,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1975), 34–40.

18. McKnight, “The New Columbus,” 384.

19. Gunnar Brandell, Svensk Litteratur 1900–1950: Realism och Symbolism (Stockholm: Förlaget Örnkrona, 1958), 261.

20. Gunnar Heldén, “Vilhelm Mobergs lyriska resurser,” Emigrationer: En bok till Vilhelm Moberg 20-8-1968 (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1968), 215–29.

21. Delblanc, “Den omöjliga flykten,” 266.

22. Holmes, Vilhelm Moberg, 126.

Moberg gave the Swedish title Nybyggarna to this the third and longest volume of his epic series. The Settlers is a direct translation of the original title. Moberg finished the novel in 1956 at his home at Väddö, north of Stockholm. By that time he had given up on his attempt to settle in America and was again residing in Europe.

The novelist’s initial plans called for The Settlers to be the final volume of a trilogy. He decided to expand his series to a fourth book only when he realized that the immensity of his subject matter “required approximately 1,000 pages in addition to the scope planned [for the Emigrant Novels] from the beginning.” 1

Moberg’s dissatisfaction with the American publisher Simon and Schuster’s editing and marketing of his books increased in the mid-1950s. This disappointment was partly due to the fact that sections of The Settlers and The Last Letter Home were left out or shortened in the American version, published in 1961. Moberg complained to his translator Lannestock that his novels had been “castrated” by the publisher. The novelist added that he would leave America out of all his future literary plans. 2

One of Moberg’s most serendipitous moments in Minnesota occurred several years before he began writing The Settlers. He came into contact with a friend who directed him to the Minnesota Historical Society archives, where he found the journals of Andrew Peterson, a Swede who emigrated from the province of Östergötland in 1849 and arrived in Carver County, Minnesota, in 1854. 3Peterson staked out a claim near present-day Waconia, married a Swedish woman from the area, and farmed there until his death in 1898.

Peterson was unique in that he wrote a daily journal in Swedish for forty-four years. He recorded family activities, farm doings, and church life. He also gave brief details about confrontations with Native Americans in 1862 and concerns about the Civil War. Moberg took copious notes on Petersons journals and used information in Petersons nine ledger volumes to form the skeletal outline of Karl Oskar’s life in Minnesota. 4

It is in The Settlers that Moberg begins to develop this Peterson-like outline. The details of farm life presented in the chapter “Man and Woman in the Territory” illustrate this development. Karl Oskar’s listing of his years’ harvests in “Starkodder the Ox” is also representative of the type of information found in Peterson’s journal in regard to everyday farm life. While the Peterson journals supplied Moberg with little imaginative material, they gave him much purely factual information about crops, harvests, and seasonal activities on a nineteenth-century Minnesota farm.