All 18 chapters across three books — from a plowman's morning in Dalarna to the pilgrim wagons leaving in July.
Jerusalem is divided into three books of unequal length. Book One (Chapter 1) is a long, sweeping portrait of the Ingmarsson family across four generations, ending with young Ingmar's marriage to Brita. Book Two (Chapters 2–8) follows the arrival of the Hellgum movement into the parish and its grip on Karin and the community. Book Three (Chapters 9–18) follows the consequences: an Atlantic shipwreck, the approach of departure day, and the slow dissolution of what held the valley together.
Four generations of Ingmarssons on one farm in Dalarna.
Four generations of Ingmarssons on one Dalecarlian farm. Young Ingmar inherits the farm and the family method: when a hard decision comes, ask what the fathers would have done. The book ends with his choice to marry Brita — and a vision of the dead fathers approving.
Hellgum arrives. The parish divides. Karin goes first.
The schoolmaster Storm's household and the Dalecarlian parish before any religious movement reaches it. Conservative, Lutheran, resistant to novelty. Storm is certain it will stay that way.
The Dal River floods in spring. The mission house is newly built. Something extraordinary happens there that the parish cannot quite explain — and that Lagerlöf does not quite explain either.
Karin Ingmarsson returns to the valley after her disastrous marriage to Elof Ersson, who deliberately ruined them before dying. Tims Halvor, who once courted her, is at the schoolmaster's table when she arrives. The old courtship and the new movement begin to intersect.
Storm discovers that his authority in the parish is not sufficient to keep the Hellgum movement from taking hold. Lagerlöf is gentle about this; she simply shows him being wrong in full view of a community that has always trusted him.
Ingmar, penniless after Elof's ruin, returns to the schoolmaster's as a student. He and Gertrude grow close in the careful, unexamined way of two people who have not yet decided what they are to each other. Karin, meanwhile, begins to be drawn toward the mission house.
Karin collapses after a dream-visitation from the dead Elof. Seeking explanation at the mission house, she encounters Hellgum. Her conversion begins. Lagerlöf renders it without mockery and without endorsement.
Ingmar returns from winter in the forest to find Karin fully converted to Hellgumism. She urges him to join. He cannot find a reason his fathers would have endorsed. He cannot refuse. He does nothing.
From a shipwreck on the Atlantic to the wagons leaving in July.
A French liner crossing the Atlantic in 1880. A sailor has a premonition. The ship sinks. Lagerlöf renders the disaster with documentary calm before connecting it to the Dalarna story.
Survivors of the L'Univers sinking. A woman hears the noise of catastrophe as an answer from God. A Norwegian ship finds bodies. The Atlantic disaster begins to connect to the Swedish village.
Old Eva Gunnersdotter, the most zealous of Hellgum's converts, walks to a meeting at the Ingmar Farm remembering when the movement was at its height. It has declined. The letters from America are all that remain of the original certainty.
Ingmar brings down the first log toward a new house he is building for himself and Gertrude. One log, five years in the making. They stand in the road and admire it. They are planning a future the Hellgum movement is already closing off.
The pastor struggles toward the Ingmar Farm in a blizzard, hampered by a drift that has banked in the same place for generations — because Big Ingmar never removed the boarding that caused it. The farm is on the edge of sale.
Hoek Matts Ericsson walks the parish on a beautiful spring day, unable to stop admiring the crops and the calves. His son Gabriel keeps reminding him that in the fall they will be in the valley of Sharon. The father brightens briefly at this and then goes back to the potatoes.
The Ingmar Farm is auctioned. Mother Stina walks there through the flowering May countryside, picking wildflowers and thinking the valley is lovelier than anywhere. The farm is sold to Tims Halvor and the Hellgumists. The community cannot forgive it.
Gertrude cannot bear to see Ingmar after his marriage to Brita. Lagerlöf follows her fear through its daily mechanics — the avoidances, the detours, the watching of the horizon — rather than through interior monologue. It is entirely devastating.
The authorities try to stop the departure with practical arguments. The Hellgumists have an answer for each one. An ancient dean's widow makes one last attempt, stranger than the others.
The pilgrims' wagons leave the Ingmar Farm on a July morning. The most moving moment comes not from the pilgrims themselves but from Beggar Lina — standing sober at the roadside, grandchildren washed and combed, doing honor to those who pass. Everyone cries, including Lina.