Description
The Emperor of Portugallia is a novel written and published by Selma Lagerloef in 1914. The author herself called it the Swedish King Lear and indeed, the story does have aspects that make it resemble Shakespeare’s tragedy about the relationship between a father and his daughters. The story of the novel is set in Varmland, the province where Lagerloef was born, and it features a farmer and his daughter who moves to Stckholm when she comes of age. The father loves her daughter so much that, in her absence, he creates a dream world in his mind, a world in which his daughter is the Emperor of Portugallia and he himself is also an emperor. Most of the story is about the world that exists only in the farmer’s imagination and has been created to cope with having to wait to hear from his daughter. The folk tale-like parts are mixed with more realistic elements and the novel is written in the beautiful and emotional style that Lagerloef was and still is so much appreciated by the readers of her books. Selma Lagerloef is a Nobel Prize laureate – the first woman writer to receive the prestigious Prize – and the author of GöstaBerling Saga, The Miracles of Antichrist and numerous other novels, sketches and short stories, but what strangely made her name known all over the world was not these wonderfully-written stories, but her collection of tales for children featuring Nils Holgersson, a young boy who is shrunken by a kind of gnome and travels across Sweden with a group of wild geese using his own domestic goose as a vehicle. However different and far apart the Nils Holgersson tales and the story of The Emperor of Portugallia might seem, there are features that are common for both of them: the lively, imaginative style and the deep understanding of her characters, aspects contributing to the decision of the Swedish Academy to award the Novel Prize for Literature to Lagerloef in 1909.
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