The Work
Jerusalem was published in two volumes: I Dalarna (Part 1, 1901) and I det heliga landet (In the Holy Land, Part 2, 1902), both by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm. The English translation by Velma Swanston Howard was published in 1915 by Doubleday. At approximately 450 pages combined, the novel tells the story of the Ingmarsson family from Dalarna, Sweden, and the community of Swedish peasants who, following an American preacher, sell their farms and emigrate to Jerusalem in 1896 to await the Second Coming and serve the poor. The emigration of the 'Nås group' (Swedish Dalecarlian peasants) actually took place as described, and Lagerlöf visited Jerusalem in 1899 specifically to research the novel. Part 1 describes the preparations and departures; Part 2 describes the community in Jerusalem and its crises.
The novel won Lagerlöf the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1909 - she was the first woman and the first Swede to receive it. The citation specifically mentioned Jerusalem as one of the major achievements that warranted the award.
Biblical Engagement
Genesis 12:1 - 'Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee' - is the primary biblical pattern for the community's emigration. The Dalecarlian peasants' decision to leave their ancestral land - land that had been in their families for generations, that was tied to their identity, their memories, and their dead - is narrated as an reenactment of Abraham's call. The American preacher presents the Jerusalem call as a direct command of God, analogous to God's call to Abraham. Lagerlöf's sympathy is not with the preacher's program but with the seriousness and courage of those who respond to the call, even when - as the novel makes clear - the call itself is doctrinally questionable.
Luke 14:26 - 'If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple' - is the most demanding dimension of the radical discipleship that the emigration requires. To go to Jerusalem means to leave children behind with relatives, to break up marriages, to sever the ancestral ties that define a Dalecarlian peasant's identity. Lagerlöf narrates these separations with great tenderness and without judgment: the disciples are not wrong to take the demand seriously, but the novel is honest about the suffering the demand creates.
Psalm 122:1 - 'I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the LORD. Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem' - is the psalm of pilgrimage that echoes through the novel's imaginative world. Jerusalem is not merely a geographical destination but a theological symbol: the city of God, the center of sacred history, the place where heaven and earth intersect. The pilgrims' longing for Jerusalem is genuine and deeply rooted in the biblical tradition of pilgrimage and eschatological hope.
Matthew 10:37 - 'He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me' - is the theological justification that the preachers provide for the community's willingness to break family bonds. Lagerlöf presents this honestly: the disciples are genuinely trying to obey what they believe to be the word of God. The novel's tragedy is that this genuine obedience can produce genuine suffering, and that the line between genuine prophetic call and religious fanaticism is not always clearly visible from inside the movement.
The Book of Acts is a structural model for the Jerusalem community. Like the early Jerusalem church of Acts 2-4, the Dalecarlian community sells its property and holds goods in common; like the early church, it is defined by radical commitment to mutual care and to its eschatological mission. The parallels are not ironic: Lagerlöf presents the community's attempt to live Acts-church idealism with genuine respect, even while acknowledging its human failures.
Author and Context
Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1940) was born at Mårbacka in Värmland, Sweden, and educated as a teacher. Her first novel, Gösta Berlings Saga (1891), established her as the leading figure of a new Swedish literary movement that combined realism with legend, folklore, and Christian symbolism. Her personal visit to Jerusalem in 1899-1900 to research the novel was itself a form of pilgrimage: she spent time with the actual 'American Colony' (the community founded by American and Swedish Christians in Jerusalem in the 1880s) and with the descendants of the Nås emigrants.
Lagerlöf's Christianity was neither orthodox nor indifferent: she was deeply formed by Swedish Lutheran piety, particularly by the legends and folktales in which the Christian story was embedded in the natural world and in the rhythms of Swedish rural life. Her approach to the Jerusalem emigration is sympathetic but not uncritical: she takes the community's faith seriously as a genuine response to what they understand to be God's call, while also tracing honestly the human cost - the broken families, the failed harvest, the disorientation of peasants in an ancient Middle Eastern city.
The broader context was the late nineteenth-century millenarian movements that swept both Europe and America. The expectation of Christ's imminent return, the call to 'gather in Jerusalem,' and the formation of intentional communities dedicated to preparation for the Second Coming were features of many Protestant revival movements of the period. Lagerlöf's novel treats this phenomenon with historical seriousness and spiritual sympathy.
Themes
The novel's central tension is between fidelity to ancestral land and family and fidelity to what is experienced as divine command. The Ingmarsson family - particularly Ingmar Ingmarsson, who stays behind because he cannot bring himself to leave, and Barbro, who goes and returns - embodies both poles. Neither pole is clearly right. The land is not an idol: it represents genuine community, genuine tradition, genuine human flourishing. The call is not clearly fraudulent: those who follow it do so in genuine faith and genuine sacrifice.
A second theme is the nature of Christian community. The Jerusalem community's attempt to live in apostolic simplicity - sharing resources, caring for the poor, maintaining constant prayer - is both admirable and fragile. Its failures are not the failures of hypocrisy but the failures of human finitude: people break under the strain of maintaining impossible ideals.
Reception
The novel was immediately successful in Sweden and internationally. The Nobel Prize citation specifically mentioned its combination of narrative power, historical accuracy, and spiritual depth. Translations in most major European languages followed within a decade.
Legacy
Lagerlöf's Jerusalem is the foundational text of Swedish Christian literature and a major work in the tradition of the novel as a form of theological reflection on the costs and gifts of radical discipleship. Its honest treatment of the gap between eschatological aspiration and human limitation anticipates the twentieth century's sober reassessment of millenarian movements.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Genesis 12:1-4 (Abraham's call to leave his country), Luke 14:25-33 (the cost of discipleship), Psalm 122 (the pilgrimage to Jerusalem), Acts 2:42-47 (the communal life of the early Jerusalem church), and Hebrews 11:8-16 (the faith of Abraham, seeking a city not built with hands).
Further Reading
- Helena Forsas-Scott, ed., A History of Swedish Literature (1996) - the essential overview, with a substantial chapter on Lagerlöf. - Vivi Edström, Selma Lagerlöf (1984, translated from Swedish) - the most accessible scholarly biography. - Anita Goldman, Selma Lagerlöf: A Biography (2021) - the most recent English-language biography, the first written with access to Lagerlöf's complete correspondence.