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At long last it was time for the weary farmer Karl Oskar to go to his eternal resting place. He became a farmer after toiling as a sharecropper, and he became an American, though Sweden lay close to his heart. He labored long and hard as a settler, too. Although he never laid eyes on Småland again, he did not regret leaving it behind. Till the end of his days Karl Oskar reviewed a map of the Ljuder of his childhood, the territory of his parish appeared to him to have the shape of a heart. In Last Letter Home, Vilhelm Moberg writes, "Somewhere in the center of that heart lay a farm where the old emigrant had taken his first steps on earth."
That map is remarkably accurate one hundred years later. Though Karl Oskar could not, the people of today can visit this area anytime. One can quite easily reach Ljuder Parish by train, car, bus or airplane. One can see those stony fields, huddled tenant farms, endless stonewalls, and those hardy juniper bushes. One can stand still in the silence of the forest and have a feeling of eternity.
Thousands of people make the trip each year, perhaps because they have seen Kristina from Duvemåla in Gothenburg or Malmö. And now, perhaps the première at Cirkus in Stockholm, has awakened some curiosity.
Come along on a tour via the various roads in Vilhelm Moberg's beloved Småland, and visit the villages, parishes and farms which the emigrants left and together laid the foundation for Moberg's collected works. Follow along to the Swedish province of Småland where Kristina always, always longed to revisit.
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