Home of shadows

Home of shadows is an expression that turns a secret, forbidden place into an apparent refuge and, in Annette Lundström’s account, an entire sacred world. Its changing meanings connect Karl Lundström’s attempt to justify his abuse of Linnea Lundström with Annette’s belief in a country where adults and children belong together. The phrase offers the language of sanctuary, but what it shelters is exploitation.

The phrase as secret place

Karl first uses the expression while speaking with Sofia Zetterlund. He describes men who instinctively found one another, were careful in choosing their wives, and met in the home of shadows. He claims that he and the other men were free to exchange wives and children, and that Annette and the other wives tacitly consented. These are Karl’s claims, not an independent account of the women’s agreement; the language of mutual choice helps him present a system of abuse as a private arrangement among adults.

Sofia recognizes the phrase from a preliminary report and asks what he meant by it. Karl answers that it is an image, a metaphor for a secret, forbidden place. He says that poetry, psychology, ethnology, and philosophy can make a person feel understood, and casts himself as isolated in his own time. In his usage, the expression names both concealment and imagined belonging: the men are hidden from public judgment, yet supposedly joined by a shared desire and a body of cultural references.

That explanation is part of a defense rather than a neutral definition. Karl insists that he has not done anything wrong and describes his conduct as an impulse that men possess but suppress. When he cites ancient poetry and later writers, including Nabokov and Pasolini, he presents the recurrence of similar desires in literature as evidence that his own desires should not be condemned. Sofia recognizes language from his police interviews. The phrase therefore belongs to a continuing rhetorical effort to transform secrecy into a historical and intellectual tradition.

Karl’s justification and its contradictions

Asked again about the meaning of the expression, Karl treats it as a place where forbidden desire can find cultural consolation. His argument moves from the existence of desire to a defense of conduct: because similar thoughts and feelings existed in antiquity, he claims that what was once culturally accepted has only become wrong through later social teaching. He extends that reasoning to Linnea, asserting that neither his desire nor its effect on her is fundamentally wrong. The language of the home makes this argument feel intimate and protective, while its secrecy marks the harm it is designed to conceal.

A letter to Linnea, written during a flight only weeks before Karl’s arrest, gives the phrase a more unsettled form. The handwriting is beautiful but difficult to decipher. The letter begins with encouragement about Linnea’s talent and patience, then breaks into fragments about wounds that devour the soul and Karl’s need to seek shadow. He returns to the home of shadows as the place he intends to seek. The movement from reassuring a daughter to speaking of his own spiritual injury gives the expression a private, increasingly disordered quality.

In the same letter, Karl argues that history and the desires of others sanction what he has done, yet admits that his conscience still tells him something is wrong. That conflict unsettles his public defense: the claim that society merely taught him to feel guilt does not silence the guilt he reports experiencing. He invokes the Oracle of Delphi and Pythia, then wonders whether recognizing his own ignorance makes him wise. Several lines are illegible, followed by a large dark-red stain that Sofia presumes is red wine. The letter thus places the phrase beside an unresolved struggle between self-exoneration and moral knowledge, rather than providing a settled creed.

Annette’s sacred country

The expression returns when Sofia questions Annette. Annette initially rejects the suggestion that Viggo Dürer could be connected to it, describing him as prudish and concerned about upsetting people. She then lowers her head and recites a rule about behaving modestly outside the Home of Shadows, where people who do not understand the faithful may slander and imprison them. Sofia recognizes the language and remembers Karl’s earlier description of a sanctuary.

Sofia first wonders whether Annette means a physical place or a state of mind. Annette’s answer expands the metaphor into cosmology: the Home of Shadows is the original country, where humanity can be close to God. She calls it the land of children, but also a place for adults who understand ancient life, with men, women, and children hand in hand because everyone is a child inside. The language collapses distinctions between adult and child while making that collapse sound natural and sacred. Sofia recognizes the danger in the image: a country for children has been imagined by adults to serve their own desires.

Annette also locates the Home of Shadows wherever the faithful are and says it exists in the presence of chosen children of men. She names sacred ground in beautiful Jutland and forests in Polcirkeln. Sofia pauses at the recurrence of Denmark and Polcirkeln, then asks who led the faithful. The scene ends with the question, not an answer. Annette’s account may refer to an actual geography, a state of mind, or both; the evidence leaves that distinction open while showing how the expression binds belief to particular places.

Meaning and narrative function

The phrase changes register across its appearances. In Karl’s interview it is an image for a secret, forbidden place and a means of claiming cultural solidarity. In his letter it becomes a destination sought amid fragmented reflection and acknowledged guilt. In Annette’s speech it is a sacred country with a doctrine, faithful members, chosen children, and named locations. These shifts give the expression force without establishing that its meanings form a consistent system.

Sofia’s responses help expose the distance between the language and the conduct it conceals. She recognizes the phrase from reports and earlier interviews, listens as Karl builds his defense, and later connects Annette’s recitation to his description of a sanctuary. When Annette begins speaking in abstractions, Sofia finds that suppositions do not move the exchange forward and asks directly what the Home of Shadows is. She suspects that Annette’s psychosis may contain an element of truth and may even prompt a confession, but she does not treat that suspicion as proof of every claim Annette makes.

The expression’s central contradiction is that it promises refuge while describing a world organized around adults’ access to children. Its imagery of an original country and ancient fellowship recasts secrecy as belonging and exploitation as a return to innocence. The novel’s repeated use of the phrase instead makes it a revealing euphemism: each invocation widens the imagined sanctuary, while making clearer what its protective language is meant to hide.