Markings

Markings is Dag Hammarskjöld’s lifelong journal of brief prose and poetic reflections, and the posthumous publication that disclosed the religious dimension of his public life. Begun in 1925 and discovered after his death in 1961, it records a private search for vocation, self-knowledge, and spiritual clarity alongside the career of a diplomat and United Nations Secretary-General.

Form and Composition

Hammarskjöld kept the journal throughout his adult life, but its entries are not precisely dated before 1953. Their brevity and movement between prose and poetry give the book the character of a record of inward thought rather than a continuous account of public events. The form offers glimpses of a private life without arranging them into a fully dated chronology.

About three quarters of the way through the book, Hammarskjöld explains what the notes mean to him. He describes them as signposts set up after reaching a point at which they were needed. They preserve ideas he believed strongly but did not wish to speak about while he was alive. The journal is thus both personal record and deliberate reserve: it makes those convictions available after his death, although he had kept them largely outside public discussion.

Vocation and Self-Formation

The journal traces a strong sense of vocation. At its beginning, Hammarskjöld describes being driven forward into the unknown; as the way grows more difficult, his high expectations meet uncertainty about whether he will reach the destination toward which he feels drawn. The tension between forward movement and doubt makes vocation a continuing discipline rather than a settled assurance.

That calling is not merely professional. Hammarskjöld links it to a mystical search for a clear, pure note in silence and to the work of developing the self. He frames the task as becoming oneself, and hopes to become a mirror in which the greatness of life can be reflected according to the purity of heart attained. In this account, achievement is not an end in itself: he warns himself against allowing success, accomplishment, or toil to conceal their emptiness, and treats the pain that presses a person beyond the self as a reason to continue.

Publication and Public Meaning

After Hammarskjöld’s mysterious death in a plane crash in 1961, while he was attempting to negotiate peace in Africa, the journal was found in his New York apartment and published as Markings. It became one of the classic religious texts of the twentieth century. For his closest associates, the book disclosed a side of him they had not recognized: religious feelings and experiences had helped motivate his work, though few people knew it.

The publication unsettled some readers precisely because it complicated the image of the public diplomat. A review in The New Republic described the journal as an embarrassing discrepancy for some of Hammarskjöld’s admirers, while a critic in Look questioned how his inward sense of a redemptive role could coexist with his sober public reputation. These reactions show that Markings did not simply add private details to a familiar career; it prompted readers to reconsider the relation between his spiritual convictions and his public identity.