Book One — The Ingmarssons

Lagerlöf opens on a summer morning in Dalarna. Young Ingmar Ingmarsson is plowing his field, thinking about whether he is worthy of his fathers. The farm below him — gray outhouses, spreading pear trees, great haystacks — is the Ingmar Farm, held by the same family for generations. When Big Ingmar was alive, the neighbors followed his lead in everything. Young Ingmar has not yet found a way to fill that authority, and he knows it.

The rest of Book One moves through the family's history, tracing the practice that has sustained it: the method of asking, in every difficulty, what the fathers before them would have decided. Lagerlöf shows this method working across generations — in decisions about the farm, about marriages, about the parish. It is not superstition; it is a form of moral continuity, tested by time. Young Ingmar uses it consciously, imagining his dead father on a heavenly farm and carrying the conversation.

The book ends with young Ingmar's marriage to Brita — a disgraced woman the parish has rejected. He chooses her not from passion alone but from a conviction, arrived at through the family method, that it is what his father would have done. At the close, Lagerlöf gives him a vision of the assembled Ingmar fathers endorsing the choice. The valley is at peace. Then Book Two begins, and Hellgum arrives.