Gösta Berling's Saga (Swedish: Gösta Berlings saga) is the debut novel of Selma Lagerlöf, published in 1891. The novel is a notable and still much read example of the 1890s wave of Swedish Neo-romanticism. Using wolves, snow, supernatural elements and eccentric upper-class characters to project an exotic image of 1820s Värmland, the novel can be compared to magic realism. The title is meant to give associations to the Icelandic sagas. The novel is set in Värmland, Sweden, the author's birthplace, between 1820 and 1830. The first sentence, "Finally, the vicar was in the pulpit," is one of the more famous in Swedish literature.
It was first translated by Lillie Tudeer in 1894 as Gösta Berling's Saga, but was unavailable in the US and soon out of print in the UK. This edition was re-printed in 1918 by the American-Scandinavian Foundation with edits and 8 additional chapters that had been silently omitted from the 1894 edition. It was also translated in 1898 by Pauline Bancroft Flach as The Story of Gösta Berling. Both of these editions are in the public domain and have been commonly reprinted by various publishers over the years.
A new translation into English by Paul Norlen was published in 2009.
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