Niels Lyhne — who's who

The son of Bartholine and Mr. Lyhne, raised at Lönborggaard in 19th-century Jutland. The novel is the story of his life from the years before his birth to the deathbed in the field hospital after the war of 1864. Plain in the world's sense, intensely inward, drawn to poetry and books and the imagined version of every person he loves. He becomes an atheist on the model of his aunt Edele. He spends most of his life inside his own head. Jacobsen measures, patiently, what that costs him and the people who love him.

Niels's mother. The eldest daughter of the practical, prosperous Blid family, she grew up reading poems and dreaming of a world the Blids did not believe in. She married Mr. Lyhne believing he would carry her into the world of poetry she had imagined; she discovered he had no such intention. She lives most of her life inside her reading. The source of Niels's inwardness and the first warning the novel gives about it. Her late trip with him to Lake Garda, where she finally sees the Italy she had imagined for forty years and dies at Clarens shortly after, is one of the book's quietest scenes.

Niels's father. A steady country gentleman of an old Jutland family, owner of the Lönborggaard estate. Once travelled in France and Germany and brought home tastes for engravings, German poetry, and French philosophy; once thought to be a poetic nature. By the time the novel begins, the appetite has gone out of him. He attends to his fields and the affairs of the parish with quiet competence and no enthusiasm. He loves his wife and his son in his own way, which is not Bartholine's way and not the boy's. The other side of the tug-of-war over Niels's temperament.

Mr. Lyhne's twenty-six-year-old sister, who arrives at Lönborggaard from Copenhagen in chapter 3 to recover her health. Beautiful, ironic, accustomed to the city, almost unbearably bored at the estate. The local pastor courts her in the language of religious consolation as her illness worsens. She refuses every offer with calm and good manners and dies in possession of herself. Her death is the first anchor of Niels's atheism — the moment, returned to throughout the novel, against which every later test of his unbelief is measured.

The candidate for holy orders engaged as Niels's tutor when the boy is twelve. Almost forty, broad-chested, slightly deaf, devoted to philosophy and the violin. Convinced — privately, at first — that his intellect has a wider span than other people suspect, and that he is a genius the world has not yet noticed. The novel's portrait is gentle and unsparing at once; Bigum is the first adult Niels watches sustain a private grandiosity that the world does not confirm.

Niels's closest friend from the student years in Copenhagen. A sculptor of real promise, broad-shouldered and sociable, with the easy confidence Niels does not have. He brings Niels into Mrs. Boye's circle. Years later he marries Fennimore and takes her to a manor at Mariagerfjord, where his work falters and he begins to drink. He is killed in a road accident at the very moment the affair between Niels and Fennimore reaches its crisis. The novel does not let either Niels or Fennimore off the hook for what his death exposes.

An older Copenhagen widow, witty, worldly, unattached. The center of a small salon where students and minor poets and the better sort of editor argue about Heine and the freedoms of married women. She takes Niels seriously as a man for the first time and conducts a relationship with him that he is too young to understand. She eventually sees that he is not the partner she needs and lets him go; she marries another man, a respectable one, and Niels learns it from a newspaper. The first of the women whose retreat the novel measures.

An editor and journalist in the Copenhagen circle around Mrs. Boye. The novel's most articulate voice on the question of unbelief — older than Niels, more cautious about declaring himself, attentive to the social cost of saying out loud what the new generation thinks in private. The Christmas Eve dialogue between him and Niels in chapter 9 is one of the book's set pieces: Hjerrild defending a life lived without God but quietly, Niels insisting that the position must be held in public if it is to be held at all.

Erik's wife. Niels first sees her in chapter 10 when he comes to visit them at the Mariagerfjord manor — younger than he expected, lonely in the country, watching her husband stop working and start drinking. The affair between her and Niels begins almost without a decision; it lasts only a few weeks. When Erik is killed in a road accident, Fennimore turns on Niels in a scene of fury the novel takes seriously. The chapter is the book's catastrophe. She does not appear again, but Niels carries her denunciation with him for the rest of the novel.

An opera singer, encountered by Niels at Riva on Lake Garda during the wandering year that follows the catastrophe at Mariagerfjord. Famous, older, recovering her voice after illness. The novel does not give them a love affair so much as a long, exhausted attentiveness across café tables and lake walks. She is the figure of the lowest point of Niels's drift — the moment when nothing is moving forward and the inward life is at its quietest. She returns to her stage; he goes home.

The young woman Niels marries late at Lönborggaard, after years of drifting. Gentle, religious, unworldly, the daughter of a neighboring family. She and Niels have a son. She loses her faith on her deathbed and dies frightened, in a scene the novel writes with terrible patience. Their son dies soon after. The test the novel has been preparing for Niels since Edele — the bedside of a believer who can no longer believe — and one he meets without consolation to offer.

Niels and Gerda's small son, born late in the marriage. Healthy at first, then suddenly ill, then dying. The chapter in which Niels prays for him — secular, modern, twenty years past Edele's deathbed, a father with a dying child and nothing else to do with the hands — is the novel at its most exact. The child dies anyway. Niels gets up from beside the bed and never prays again.