Selma Lagerlöf is widely regarded as one of Sweden’s greatest writers of all time, with classics such as Gösta Berling’s Saga, Jerusalem and The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.
At the same time, Lagerlöf’s texts are considered highly problematic and inappropriate by today’s politically correct cultural elite. Now, the Norwegian publisher Verbum has announced that it will stop selling her book Christ Legends – on the grounds that it is ‘racist’.
Originally published in 1904, the short story collection Christ Legends describes how three men meet Jesus, who performs miracles and cures them of ailments.
The first man is old and becomes young again, the second is a leper but is healed by Jesus’ blessing – and the third is a black man whom Jesus transforms into “a beautiful white man”.
It is the latter description that is said to be extremely racist and unacceptable. Verbum’s publishing director Fredrik Berentsen deeply regrets that the book was not censored.
– What happened is probably that the editors in 2002 did not pay attention and thought that it was already a quality-assured text, he says, promising to stop selling the book immediately.
– The latest edition has sold 1,500 copies and nobody has complained to us about this. But it’s clearly our responsibility that this has been left behind, so we just have to regret that we have done too bad a job. But we will stop selling the remaining 400 books of the edition immediately.
“A punch in the stomach”
The reason the publisher stopped selling Lagerlöf’s classic is that parts of the Norwegian cultural establishment – including library researcher Anne Kristin Lande – condemned the book’s content.
– It goes without saying that this happened in the 1950s, but that Verbum Publishing thought it was okay to publish such racist texts in 2002 and 2013 is incomprehensible, she says.
– When I came to the sentence that he was transformed into a white man, I felt it like a punch in the stomach, says Halvor Moxnes, professor emeritus of theology.
Literary scholar Kari Løvaas argues that the book was written “in a racist age” – but that the publisher should write a “contextualising preface” to avoid offending the country’s students, rather than stop selling the book altogether.
The fact that older works are either censored or not reprinted at all is not unique to Lagerlöf’s works, but is now almost standard procedure when allegedly sexist or racist passages are found – with Femböckerna, Pippi Långstrump and Ture Sventon being just three of countless such examples.
