Story 4 of 12 · Sweden · 1904
The Holy Night
Who it suits: Every age.
A grandmother tells a child a story on Christmas Day, and the child never forgets it. Selma Lagerlöf was born in 1858 at Mårbacka, a farm in the Värmland region of Sweden, and she grew up listening to stories told by her grandmother. In 1909 she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 1914 she became the first woman elected to the Swedish Academy.
“The Holy Night” opens Christ Legends (Kristuslegender), a book of stories about the life of Jesus that she published in 1904. In the story, a man goes out on a cold night to borrow live coals to light a fire for his wife and newborn child, and a hard-hearted shepherd discovers that nothing can harm the man who asks. Velma Swanston Howard, a Swedish-born writer living in the United States, translated the book into English in 1908.
The story is told by an adult remembering being five years old, on the Christmas Day when everyone else had gone to church and only the child and the grandmother stayed at home. The frame is part of the story: the narrator is remembering the grandmother as much as the legend.
In the book, The Holy Night is printed in full with five notes beside the words they explain, its map, its city view and its illustration.
