The Wonderful Adventures of Nils,
By Selma Lagerlof
Selection read by writer and memoirist Reeve Lindberg.

Nils is a Swedish farm boy. He’s also a teen-ager. One day he’s feeling particularly tired of doing what his parents want him to do--like going to church--so they leave him home alone. Does this work out well? Listen to our story to find out how something that starts out badly can turn into the adventure of a lifetime.

THINGS TO DO ONLINE

Wild geese of the world
There are wild geese in North America as well as Sweden, Norway and Finland. Find out at the True Geese of the World site which ones gave Nils a ride and taught him so much. Clue: You’ll find the “anser-anser-anser” here.

How Nils came to life
Here’s the story: Reading the tale of Nils Holgersson many years after it was written—60 years or so, in fact—a Dutch boy named Frans Lanting saw Nils as a hero. The way Frans saw it, Nils achieved Frans’s dream of becoming an accepted member of the animal world, which made him able to tell humans about the needs and deeds of animals. Now, as a world famous photographer, often for National Geographic, Frans lives the life he thinks Nils might have led, if he’d lived in the time of portable cameras.

Frans’ life now is to "stay with wild animals, and then…come back to my own people to tell them about life in nature." Take a look at Bonobo the ape in these online photos.

The Wonderful Adventures of Nils also sparked Frans’s interest in "native ways of looking at animals." He finds inspiration for his photographs in cave paintings, Chinese landscape paintings, and other artworks.

The leader of the wild geese tells Nils at the end: "If you have learned anything from this journey, Nils, you might no longer be of the opinion that man alone should rule the world. See, you people have so much land just for yourselves, so perhaps you could leave some marshy lakes and swamps and sea cliffs and distant forests to us. That way, we animals can live in peace. All my life I have been persecuted and hunted. It would be a good thing if creatures like us could find a refuge somewhere."


MORE THINGS TO DO

Illustrating Nils

What would a farmboy have looked like more than a hundred years ago? Can you draw a picture of Nils flying on the back of the great goose? Send us your drawings for our online gallery by finding someone to scan the illustration to a .jpg or similar file and attaching it to an email sent to us from the Contact Us section of this site.

Time to cook

Pickings for poor Nils while he was out with the geese were slim. But when he resumes his normal size, he can eat his fill of one of the best of all Swedish dishes, Swedish meatballs. Our recipe is given in the Camel’s Hump Cooks section.



FROM THE CHR LIBRARIAN

Selma Lagerlof, who wrote books for adults that made her the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1909), created The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and its sequel The Further Adventures of Nils as a way to teach geography to the children of Sweden, but also to pay tribute to her love of the land and its wildlife and to Sweden’s history and folklore. For adults, the classic in print is Gosta Berling’s Saga. There are also short stories such as Girl from the Marsh Croft and Scandinavian Kings and Queens.

Related books to charm children and adults is Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose, the short novel set in World War II England. Then, of course, there’s E. B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swans. And, if you’re looking for more books about living among animals, the stories in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, about Mowgli and his friends fills the bill, along with his Just So Stories.

Classy animation
Eastern European animation, particularly that from Czechoslovakia, has raised expectations for children’s ‘cartoons.’ At this link is information on a short (7 min. 25 sec.) Czech animation based on The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and aimed at children from about 6. CIFEJ, The International Center of Films for Children and Young People, which sponsors the site says they can only provide a contact in Czechoslovakia, but it’s well-worth looking over the site if you’re interested in fine films and animations—never “cartoons”—and high-quality new media for children. The updated CIFEJ site (to be ready in June 2001) tells about worldwide children’s film festivals and has much other enticing information. CIFEJ is based in Montreal. CIFEJ is under the unimpeachable auspices of UNESCO and Unicef.

Mad for Swedish music?
A play based on The Wonderful Adventures of Nils toured Sweden

Did you know?
Selma Lagerlof’s character is a national figure. He’s had a ferry boat named after him and you can visit the the “Nils Holgersson Farm” set on the Skåne Plain near the town of Skurup. Go online for more information, should you want to plan a trip to Sweden. For a traditional farmhouse from the late 17th c., go to the town of Svalov. This information comes from a wonderful online list of cafes in Sweden associated with museums and other historical attractions.

The Nobel connection

The Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe, who won the Nobel in 1994, cites as one of the two most influential books of his childhood, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. Again, the child’s vulnerability that goes with his “adventures” into the wide world of nature is something that sets the imagination alight.