Jerusalem — who's who

The young farmer who opens the novel plowing his field on a summer morning and asking whether he is worthy of his fathers. His method of moral reasoning — what would the fathers have done? — is both his strength and his paralysis. He cannot join Karin in Jerusalem, cannot condemn her for going, and cannot save Gertrude in the process. He marries Brita to redeem the farm and lives with what that costs.

The elder sibling, more capable than her brother and more willing to act on conviction. Her conversion to Hellgumism and her decision to sell the family farm are the novel's central events. Lagerlöf does not judge her. The novel records the full cost — to Ingmar, to Gertrude, to the valley — without denying that Karin's faith is genuine.

Never appears alive, only in young Ingmar's memory and imagination. The patriarch whose farm and whose method of moral reasoning — asking what the fathers would have chosen — shapes every decision in the novel. Big Ingmar has no answer for Hellgum. His silence is the novel's central vacuum.

The schoolmaster's daughter, clever and given to fancies, who grows up alongside Ingmar with fond condescension and then recognizes, too late, that she loves him. Chapter 16 follows the psychology of her grief with extraordinary precision — the daily mechanics of avoiding the person you love on every road in the parish. She leaves for Jerusalem not from faith but from the impossibility of staying.

A self-taught farmer turned schoolmaster, the most respected educator in the parish for thirty years. Confident to the point of certainty that Hellgum's movement will not take hold in his parish. He is wrong. Lagerlöf gives him no satisfaction from being wrong; she simply records it.

The schoolmaster's wife, practical and warm and deeply attached to the valley. Her walk to the Ingmar Farm auction in Chapter 15, stopping to admire every hawthorn in bloom and thinking that nothing could be lovelier than this, is one of the novel's most moving passages. She represents those who stay not from argument but from love of the particular.

Present mostly offstage. A Swedish-American lay preacher whose religious certainty is treated as genuine by Lagerlöf rather than as fraud or manipulation. His letters are read at meetings like apostolic writings. The community's conversion to his movement is the novel's central event; his own nature is left deliberately opaque.

A prosperous young man who had courted Karin before her first marriage. He eventually wins her, converts to Hellgumism, buys the Ingmar Farm from Karin, and departs with the pilgrims. His prosperity is what makes the purchase of the farm possible — and what makes it, in the community's eyes, unforgivable.

An old woman living alone in a log cabin in the forest, forgotten by most of the parish before the Hellgumists came and found her. The movement gave her brothers and sisters who cleared paths to her cabin after snowfall. Chapter 11 follows her walk to the last Hellgumist meeting in her best clothes, remembering what the movement once was. Her faith is entirely serious.

A farmer from the north end of the parish, so deeply rooted in his land that his son Gabriel must constantly redirect his attention from the calf he is pricing or the potato crop he is estimating toward the valley of Sharon they are about to walk through. His attachment to the particular soil of Dalarna survives his conversion right up to the morning of departure.