Summer

Summer is both a season in the story and a recurring measure of Goldmund’s changing life. Its green abundance offers temporary shelter and pleasure, yet never guarantees permanence: the quiet life he builds with Lene is already shadowed by questions of winter and departure, while later summers register years passing, the end of a close friend’s absence, and Goldmund’s return looking gravely changed.

Seasonal Time and the Wanderer

Summer belongs to a cycle that Goldmund experiences through repeated movement. After winter hardship, thaw brings floating ice and the scent of violets beneath rotting leaves. He crosses forests, mountains, fields, and villages, moving from farm to farm and from one brief attachment to another. The seasons recur, but they do not simply repeat: each familiar passage arrives differently, and the changing landscape keeps his attention alive even as the pattern of wandering becomes habitual.

The cycle also has a cost. Summer sinks away, then autumn follows; Goldmund struggles through bitter months before wandering through spring again, while high summer repeatedly gives way to evening. Years pass in this rhythm. For a time, he seems absorbed by hunger, love, and the onward rush of the seasons. Yet at moments of rest, looking over valleys in flower or decline, he becomes intensely attentive as an artist. He wants his mind to arrest life’s passing and give it meaning, an ambition set against the very motion that carries him onward.

A Summer Shelter with Lene

During the plague, Goldmund, Robert, and Lene find an empty log cabin in a small birch forest. They take a goat and make the cabin into a temporary home: Goldmund and Lene gather straw, fern, and moss for bedding, while Robert cuts birch posts for a partition. They later finish the rough divider with plaited juniper, improve their beds, build a hearth, and gather supplies from the sparse countryside. Lene tends the goats and gathers berries; Goldmund searches the region for food. Their shared labor makes the shelter more comfortable, but does not change its provisional nature.

For Goldmund, life with Lene combines intimacy with an unshakable awareness of mortality. As she sleeps beside him, he listens to her heart and thinks of the carts carrying corpses. The contrast is not an interruption of the scene but its governing tension: life is beautiful precisely while it remains vulnerable and brief. The cabin offers warmth, companionship, milk, and a measure of settled routine, but it cannot erase the plague or Goldmund’s instinct to move on.

Lene’s question about what they will do when winter comes reveals the difference between her hopes and the travelers’ assumptions. Neither Goldmund nor Robert answers at first; Goldmund eventually reassures her that the plague will not last forever and that she can later return to her parents or find work. His answer treats their present shelter as something they can keep for as long or as short a time as they choose. Lene understands that neither man regards the cabin as a lasting home, and her joy is shadowed by that recognition.

Before summer has fully ended, the refuge breaks apart. While Goldmund is away, an attacker threatens Lene; Goldmund intervenes and kills him. Later, as Lene is dying, he stays with her, then burns the cabin and leaves, taking only a piece of flint. He releases the goat rather than killing it for food. The end of the hut’s life turns the season’s shelter into a loss that Goldmund carries into his renewed wandering.

Summer Under the Plague

Summer’s beauty persists alongside the Black Death, but the countryside’s ordinary rhythms have been dismantled. Goldmund and Robert encounter a silent farmhouse where the entire family is dead, and the abandoned livestock make the absence of its inhabitants plain. As they continue, some villages bar strangers while others allow them to pass; deserted farms, unburied bodies, and animals left without care recur across the landscape. The travelers milk and feed livestock, and take food where they find it, but abundance does not restore security or social order.

Robert responds to the danger with persistent fear, watching himself for signs of illness and using smoke as a supposed precaution. Goldmund does not share his fear in the same way. Having already faced mortal danger during the winter encounter with Viktor, he regards plague as a form of death that cannot be fought through physical resistance. His attention instead turns to observing the suffering around him. He encounters abandoned families, desperate celebrations, corpses, and the search for scapegoats; in one town he watches a mob burn the ghetto. Summer’s landscape is thus not a pastoral refuge but part of a world where fear deforms social bonds and turns suspicion into violence.

A fresco of the Dance of Death gives Goldmund a way to recognize both the force and the limits of artistic representation. Its skeletons lead people of every rank toward death, and he respects the unknown painter’s work as a stern lesson. But the image does not match his own experience. For him, death is not only a judge or executioner: it also carries a maternal, intimate pull, and its approach makes the light of life feel more intense. The difference matters to Goldmund as an artist. The painting renews his desire to reach Master Niklaus, but it also clarifies that his own vision of death cannot be reduced to the image of an unavoidable end.

Passing Time and Return

Later, summer measures time through the changes that take place during Goldmund’s absence from Mariabronn. While Narcissus waits, the chestnut tree loses its blossoms, the beech leaves darken, and the storks raise their young and teach them to fly. These seasonal changes make the duration of the separation tangible. Narcissus’s longing deepens as the weeks pass: learned and devout companions remain around him, but none can take Goldmund’s place as an equal who challenges and completes his thinking.

The summer passes before Goldmund returns. He comes on foot in light rain and goes directly from the portal to his workshop. To Erich, who has been continuing the altar work in his absence, Goldmund is recognizable yet profoundly altered: older-looking, gray-faced, tired, and walking painfully. The return does not restore the untroubled companionship of the earlier years. Instead, the season’s close brings Goldmund back to Mariabronn bearing the visible signs of hardship and illness, while Narcissus’s long wait ends in reunion shadowed by the possibility of further loss.

Across these episodes, summer holds together flourishing and decline. It gives Goldmund a brief domestic life, sets the duration of his wandering, and supplies the images through which the novel makes passing time visible. Its recurring abundance never cancels death; rather, the season’s loveliness sharpens the awareness that shelter, youth, companionship, and life itself can pass.