Selma Lagerlöf’s kind and poignant book of fairy tales and legends is an example of literary processing of the oral traditions of “folk Christianity” heard by the author in childhood from her grandmother, refracting in a charmingly naive tradition the plots of the biblical New Testament, and the lives of saints, and preserved for centuries in people’s memory Apocrypha.

Christmas and flight to Egypt of the Holy Family, childhood Christ and his adult years, the Way of the Cross and the execution on Calvary, the Resurrection and the events that followed – these are just some of what the medieval townspeople and peasants of Scandinavia (whose artless style Selma Lagerlöf stylizes very subtly) have been comprehending and coloring with the colors of fantasy for centuries.