Vilhelm Moberg

Vilhelm Moberg is a wonderful Swedish author, who is probably most known for his four books called "The Emigrants".

During the 19th century, a lot of Swedish farm families emigrated to the United States because of extreme poverty in Sweden. Moberg has depicted this in a wonderful way in his books, where we follow a few families from their struggle to survive and make a living in Sweden to their settlement in the New World.

Moberg has written a lot of other books, most of them are set in the part of Sweden where he grew up, a county called "Småland" in southern Sweden. He describes the landscape and the surroundings amazingly well, and you can clearly tell this is a place he loved!

I think I like Vilhelm Moberg and his books for another reason too ... my mother's family is actually from this part of Sweden, and my great-grandfather went to school with Vilhelm Moberg!! I have visited the places he has written about several times, and that makes the books so much better and so much more realistic!

"The Emigrants" books have been filmed by Jan Troell, and the main characters are played by Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman.

"From the preface of Vilhelm Moberg's emigrantion epic

This is a story from a group of people, who emigrated to North America from their homes in Ljuder, Småland. They were the first to move from their neighbourhood. They came from the land of small cottages and large families. They were the people of the soil, and for thousands of years they had farmed the land they left.

Through all vicissitudes the farm remained their home and the provider of life's necessities. All indispensable things were taken from the earth. Man was dependant on the Lord's weather, giving him good years and bad, but on no other power under the sun. Life was led quietly, while the farmer's year completed its circle. And so it remained, generation after generation, through the centuries.

But in the middle of the nineteenth century after the birth of Christ, this order of unchangeableness was shaken in its foundations. Newly discovered forces were exploited, carriages could be driven without horses and ships could cross oceans without sail. The different parts of the globe were brought closer together. And to new generations, who had been introduced to the art of reading, the printed word came with a message from a country far away, emerging from the mist of fairy-tales, taking the clear and tempting shape of reality.

The new country had land, but no one to cultivate it, and bid farmers without land to come. It opened itself to those who longed for a kind of freedom they were denied at home. And in every part of the old country there were a few men and women, who obeyed the summons and started the dangerous enterprise of emigrating to another part of the world.
The most audacious were the first to make the move. The bold ones were the first to set out on the hazardous voyage across the wide ocean. Those who stayed, the inert and the hesitant, called them adventurous.

The first emigrants knew little about the country awating them. And they could not know, that more than a million men, women and children were to follow them from home. They could not have a feeling or guess, that a cultivated area, larger than their old country, would be the fruit of the enterprise they had begun in uncertainty, under the sign of daring, as a perilous adventure.

The men and women of this story hae long since left this life. A few of their names can still be discerned on disintegrating gravestones, erected thousands of miles away from the place where they were born.

Back home their names are forgotten and the adventure of their emigration will soon be part of the fairy-tale or legend. "

Taken from the theatre programme to Kristina Från Duvemåla, 27 March 1997.

This page is part of a frameset! If you can't see it, click here to go to the main page!