Från vargtider och vallpojksår: En samling minnen från forna dagars Östra Nyland

Bengts, Josefina, 1875-1925Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.2
Word count
174K words
Chapters
18

Tags

Foreign Language Books Documentary Literature Rural MemoryHerding LifeChildhood MemoriesHeartwarming NarrativeAutobiographyEastern NylandOral TraditionCultural ChangeFolk CustomsWolf Legend

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Från vargtider och vallpojksår: En samling minnen från forna dagars Östra NylandAuthor: Bengts, Josefina, 1875-1925,Language: Swedish, Class: PT: Language and Literatures: Germanic, Scandinavian, and Icelandic literatures, Release Date: Aug 1, 2018

Editor's review

This is a collection of local memories written in Swedish, in which the author Josefina Bengts records everyday life in the old days of Östra Nyland from a first-hand perspective. The two themes named in the title, "the age of wolves" and "the years of the herd boy," already point to the book's two main threads: memories of fear in a wild environment and the experience of growing up through children's labor. As a free Project Gutenberg e-book, its value lies not in academic systematicity but in the vivid texture between oral tradition and local chronicle—rumors of wolf sightings, the daily life of herding boys, village relationships, and the rhythm of the seasons are all preserved in plain narrative. It suits readers interested in Nordic rural history, folk memory, and oral history methods, and can also serve as supplementary material for the theme of "childhood and the wild" in comparative literature. It is best read as fragments of memory rather than as a strict history book; note the dialect coloring and local terms in the narrative, and consult maps or local history background as needed to understand spatial relationships.

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Reading tips

  1. Begin with the table of contents or the opening fragments to grasp the two memory threads, "wolves" and "herd boy," then skip-read by theme.
  2. Prepare a simple map of Östra Nyland and mark place names as you encounter them to help reconstruct spatial relationships.
  3. After each group of reminiscences, note in a few sentences the sensory details and dialect words in the narrative for easier comparison.
  4. If used for research, read it alongside other Nordic oral histories or childhood memoirs, keeping in mind its fragmentary nature.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18

FAQ

Is this book a novel or a historical record? It is reminiscence-based non-fiction, a collection of the author's memories of life in the old Östra Nyland, with the flavor of oral history and local chronicle. It is not a fictional novel, nor is it a strictly systematic history book. It is best read as fragmentary preservation of personal and local memory.
Can I read it without knowing Swedish? The original book is in Swedish. Without Swedish, you will need translation tools or a parallel translation, and comprehension will suffer. It is better suited to readers with some Swedish reading ability or those willing to read slowly with辅助 tools.
What does "the age of wolves" in the book refer to? Judging from the title and content, it refers to the fear and rumors brought by wolves in the old wild environment, along with the accompanying memories of herding life. Specific details should be based on the original narrative and should not be overextended into ecological history conclusions.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Bengts, Josefina, 1875-1925 Author

Josefina Bengts (1875–1925) was a Finland-Swedish author who recorded local memories. Only one of her works is held in this collection: Från vargtider och vallpojksår: En samling minnen från forna dagars Östra Nyland, which may be rendered as From Wolf Times and Herding-Boy Years: A Collection of Memories from the Old Days in Eastern Nyland. Judging from the title and subtitle, the book is a memoir-like piece of regional prose drawing on everyday life in eastern Nyland, Finland, in earlier times, including the rural setting under threat from wolves and the life of herding boys. Her writing is based on firsthand experience and observation, plain in style, preserving local folklore and oral memory and offering some documentary value for understanding nineteenth-century Finnish rural society. Because public information is limited, details of her life, education and other writings are unknown; this note relies only on the work held here and the subject matter indicated by its title.