Elin’s status as a child born out of wedlock

Elin’s status as a child born out of wedlock is a fact she has known since early childhood, not a secret newly disclosed to her. It structures how others treat her and how she understands her mother’s life, yet Elin’s account resists reducing either of them to the stigma attached to her birth: she remembers hardship, but also her mother’s care, and affirms their shared identity as reborn in Christ.

Childhood and Social Stigma

Elin recalls that she had been reminded from a very young age that she was Ulrika of Västergöhl’s child born out of wedlock. When a boy speaks about her mother in a way that hurts her, Elin rejects his assumption that she knows nothing of the world. Her anger comes not from ignorance of her circumstances but from long familiarity with them.

The household’s visitors made the social circumstances of Elin’s childhood visible. Men came to see her mother, while women almost never did. When visitors arrived, Ulrika sent Elin outside and locked the door; in winter, Elin waited in the woodshed wrapped in a warm sheepskin. The arrangement kept the child apart from the adults’ business, but Elin remembers the sheepskin and her mother’s effort to keep her warm as signs of care within an isolated life.

Poverty and Loyalty to Ulrika

The family often had little to eat, and at times no food. Elin remembers being glad when a male visitor arrived during a shortage because she expected that food would soon follow. Her recollection connects material hardship to the visitors without treating her mother as blameworthy: Elin says she never thought Ulrika had done anything wrong.

Elin also recalls that some of the men were unkind to her mother. When one struck Ulrika, Elin threw a pressing iron at him and helped her mother push him outside. The episode shows Elin not merely as a child exposed to adult conflict but as someone who acted in defense of her mother. Her memory of Ulrika is protective and loyal, even when it includes painful circumstances.

As she grew older, Elin learned why men visited and why women did not. Once, hearing her mother during a nighttime visit, she mistook the sounds for those of a kitten and briefly formed bad thoughts about Ulrika. She spoke to her mother, who forgave her and explained what people had done to her. Elin remembers that conversation as decisive: afterward, she never again thought ill of her mother.

Paternity and Religious Identity

Elin has no certain account of her father. Ulrika thinks he may have been a cheerful traveler who spent a night at their cottage and played the violin, but she also names Per Persson of Åkerby as another possibility. Neither possibility gives Elin a settled paternal identity. She would prefer the traveler, while rejecting the possibility of Per Persson, whom she regards as an evil man who insulted her mother.

Against the shame others attach to her birth and her mother’s reputation, Elin invokes their religious identity: she says that both she and Ulrika are reborn in Christ and washed pure in His blood. Her status remains socially legible and emotionally consequential, but it does not determine her moral judgment of her mother. Elin’s own testimony replaces the outsider’s condemnation with a history of care, endurance, forgiveness, and faith.