Nils Holgerssons Wonderful Journey Through Jämtland

Atop Östberget Tuesday October 4

Everyone who has travelled in the fjäll of Sweden knows how bad the fog can be, how it rolls over the landscape so that you simply can’t see a bit of the beautiful high fjäll that rises up all around you. You can even run into fog in the middle of summer, and in the fall it is hardly possible to avoid it. Concerning Nils Holgersson, the weather had been good enough so long he was still in Lappland, but before the geese had time to shout that they were in Jämtland, the fog had lain heavy about him, so thick he could see nothing of the countryside. He flew over it for a whole day not knowing if he had come to a country full of mountains, or covered in flat plains.

Towards evening the geese landed on a green spot that sloped down on all sides, so he knew that he found himself on the top of a hill, but he couldn’t tell if it was big or little. He believed that he had to be someplace where people lived, because he thought he could hear people’s voices, and the creaking of wagons rolling along on a road, but he wasn’t sure about that either.

He would sure have loved to have been able to find his way to a farm somewhere, but he was afraid of getting lost in the fog, and didn’t dare do anything but stay with the geese on the hilltop. Everything was dripping wet and damp. Small drops hung from every blade of grass and every little plant, so that if he moved at all he got a proper rain shower over himself. “This isn’t much better than the valley up in the fjäll,” he thought.

But he did dare to take a couple of steps, and when he did he saw a building right in front of him. It wasn’t particularly big, but it was many stories tall. He couldn’t see the top of it. The door was shut, and the whole building seemed to be empty. He saw that it couldn’t be anything other than an lookout tower, and that he could get neither food nor warmth inside. But he quickly hurried back to the wild geese. “Dear Mr. Mårten Goose!” he said, “let me onto your back, and carry my up to the top of the tower over there! Here it’s too wet to sleep, but up there I’m sure I can find a dry place to lie down.”

Mr. Mårten Goose was quite ready to help Nils. He left on the balcony of the tower, and there the boy lay and slept peacefully through the night, until the morning sun woke him.

But when he first opened his eyes and looked around, he couldn’t understand what he saw or where he was. Once at a market he had been in a big round tent and seen a great big painted panorama that ran along the inside wall all the way around - and he thought he was in such a tent now: a big round tent with a nice red ceiling, while on the walls and floor a beautiful and sweeping landscape was painted. There were big villages and churches, fields and roads, a railroad, and even a city. But he soon noticed that this was not the case. Rather, he stood on the top of lookout tower with the red morning sky above and with real country around him. But he was so used to seeing nothing but wilderness that it really isn’t all that strange that he mistook a busy countryside to be just a painting.

But there was something else, something more, that made the boy think that what he saw wasn’t real - it was that nothing seemed to have its proper color. The lookout tower where he stood rose up on top of a mountain, the mountain was on an island, and the island was near the eastern shore of a big lake. But this lake wasn’t gray the way lakes usually are, rather, most of the surface was pink as the sky at dawn, and in the deep bays it glittered nearly black. And the shores around the lake weren’t green, instead they were light yellow because they were covered with the stubble left on the grainfields and the yellowing autumn woods. Around all that yellow there was a wide band of black coniferous forest. Maybe it was because the leafy trees had yellowed, but the boy thought a spruce wood had never looked so dark as it did that morning. Beyond the dark spruce woods in the east he could see distant blue hills, but to the west, on the edge of sight, ran a long shimmering line of bare jagged mountains in many shapes. They wore such a mild and shining color that he couldn’t call it red nor white nor blue. There just wasn’t any name for it.

But the boy turned his eyes away from the mountains and the dark woods to get a better look at the land close by. In the yellow belt around the lake he could make out the one red village and white church after the other, and due east, on the far side of the narrow water that separated the island from the mainland, he saw a city. It spread out upon the lakeshore, a mountain stood behind and protected it, and all around it was surrounded there was a rich and populous tract. “This city has the sense to find itself a good location,” thought the boy, “I wonder what it’s called.”