Earlier this year, I was delighted to receive a copy of Laura Lugnet’s translation of a Swedish children’s literature classic, “The Children from Frostmo Mountain.” Originally written in Swedish by Laura Fitinghoff and published in 1907, the story follows seven orphans as they travel from their home village in a “Year of Need.” In such years, the introduction explains, the snow stays on the mountain villages well into the summer, and the frost comes before food ripens. Severe shortages would drive families to beg bread at the farms further south where there has been more at harvest time.
The deprivations in the story are severe and, frankly, hard to read about. At the beginning of the story, the children’s father has died after severe alcoholism and their saintly mother has succumbed to illness. Newly orphaned, the children will be put in the poor house. Faced with the prospect, Ante, age 14, chooses to take on the responsibility for his six younger siblings and the family goat. They flee the village while it is still winter, bitterly cold, and they lack adequate food and clothing.
The story has several parallels to the original Boxcar Children story. When Gertrude Chandler Warner wrote the first version in the 1920s, the father of the family was not mysteriously deceased but instead, like the Frostmo Children’s father, an alcoholic. Like the Boxcar Children, the Frostmo children display a superhuman work ethic. That said, they are also delightfully believable characters who squabble and embarrass themselves in ways that real children would.
While the Boxcar Children, against impossible odds, find a fairytale ending, “The Children from Frostmo Mountain” maintains a grim sense of realism. No one wants to adopt a group of seven siblings, and there is no wealthy relative waiting in the wings. As such, the siblings struggle through a difficult journey, vulnerable to criminals, and are gradually adopted into families that can use them.
In this way, the story reveals a different set of assumptions about children and how to raise them than we have today. It is at times grim, and the narrative seems hard-hearted. And yet, how much more realistic is the portrait when compared to the fanciful fairy tale of the Boxcar Children? In a speech by Fitinghoff, published at the beginning of Lugnet’s new translation, the author describes her desire to make literature with working-class children as characters in their own right instead of merely “lessons” for the well-educated and affluent children.
The narrative is at its best when the children transform people around them by virtue of their natural child-like qualities. As Fitinghoff has developed such believable children, children who are loud, dirty, disruptive, their good qualities are all the more believable. When they stay in the house of a slovenly man, he is moved to remember his family who has left and inspired to pick up the work as a shoemaker that he has neglected.
The families who adopt children along the way seem in some ways to use the children, one family taking the two youngest because they are childless, another taking a girl who resembles their own deceased daughter. And yet, the children also inspire real generosity in these families and transform people through their innocence and vulnerability.
Because they are so lacking protection and in need of charity, the children develop a keen sense of awareness about people and places, discerning who is a threat and identifying signs of disorder and vice. As I predicted, with good people and the good places that they cultivate, there is immense coziness. Even while hiding as fugitives in the woods, the children create for themselves cozy domestic order, recalling their mother’s lessons and seeking to find solace and stability in extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
There were several Swedish-isms in the book that made it harder to understand. For example, “karsk” is some kind of alcoholic drink that some vicious farmhands try to force on the children. Other types of food and clothing had Swedish names that were not easy to follow. In addition to unfamiliar vocabulary, the syntax is, at times bewildering. For example, this passage: “Manke had bewildered, angry, anxious, and regretful, gone after Gullspira…” demonstrates the tendency to apply a string of adjectives in a way that can make the story hard to follow.
In an email, Laura Lugnet described the story as “vivid” and full of characters who are “shining examples of virtue, faith, piety, and joy.” Indeed, they are. Whatever was unfamiliar or hard to follow in the text was compensated for by heartfelt characters whose struggle compels interest and compassion. For a story that is different from the contemporary and far from run-of-the-mill children’s literature, “The Children from Frostmo Mountain” offers an immersive experience of 1800s Sweden.
