The Wonderful Adventures of Nils
SynopsisPlot
Nils is a young lad who likes nothing more than eating and sleeping. He is a naughty boy who is transformed into a very little dwarf and goes through many adventures with the young goosey-gander named Martin, the wild geese, and other forest animals
Story
About this book
Nils Holgersson is a lazy, mischievous boy on a farm in southern Sweden. After mistreating a tomte, a small supernatural creature from Scandinavian folklore, he is shrunk to that size himself. Tiny and vulnerable, he is carried into the sky by Martin, a young farmyard gander who joins a flock of wild geese flying north. Their route crosses Sweden from the flatlands of Skane to the far north, past animals, people, and local legends.
Selma Lagerlöf wrote the book in 1906 and 1907 as a geography reader commissioned for Swedish schools. Instead of a conventional textbook, she folded the geography of the country into a story, describing provinces, cities, industries, rivers, and wildlife through the eyes of a boy small enough to ride on a goose. She became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1909.
The book works on two levels: an aerial tour of early twentieth-century Sweden, with its farming regions, forests, mining towns, and coastlines, and the account of a boy who must depend on animals he once tormented. Nils remains a familiar figure in Swedish children's literature, and his image appeared on the Swedish twenty-krona banknote for several decades.
