Book Two — At The Schoolmaster's

Lagerlöf introduces the schoolmaster Storm and his household in the early 1880s. Storm has taught in the same parish for thirty years, a self-taught farmer who manages a hundred children single-handed and is respected by pastor and peasant alike. The parish itself is conservative: regular churchgoing in any weather, no appetite for lay preachers or revival meetings, no enthusiasm for being "awakened."

Lay preachers have long since learned to bypass this parish. "Those people don't want to be awakened," they say. Not only preachers but the "awakened souls" of neighboring parishes regard the Ingmarssons and their neighbors as sinners of the worst kind — not sinners who know themselves as such, but sinners who don't see what they're missing. Storm and the pastor stroll together on Sunday afternoons and find this completely satisfactory.

The chapter is a careful act of preparation. Lagerlöf builds the community in enough detail — the bells, the winter church processions, the mutual respect of schoolmaster and pastor — that the reader understands what the Hellgum movement will have to displace to take hold here. Storm's certainty that it cannot happens to be the last moment of that certainty he will enjoy.