Fredrik Emanuel Thron

Fredrik Emanuel Thron is a farmhand from Kvarntorpet whose fifteen-year absence becomes a charged possibility in Robert’s imagination. Remembered through the story Jonas Petter tells at Åbro Mill, Fredrik is at once a notorious village rogue and a figure of escape: his history makes Robert think that a man who vanishes from service may be entered in the church book as untraceable, and that America is a land for someone who has taken the wrong road.

A Name Under “End of the Parish”

Robert first knows Fredrik not through personal acquaintance but through the church’s record of absence. At the yearly examination, the dean calls the missing farmhand’s name and asks after him. Someone answers that no one in the village knows where he is; the dean records, “Whereabouts unknown.” The yearly repetition has lasted fifteen years, the whole span of Robert’s life. That sparse official formula is the only thing Robert initially knows about Fredrik, and its very lack of detail makes him wonder about the missing man’s fate.

The entry marks a disturbing alternative to the fixed routes of rural life. Land is divided among owners, while the landless become servants; the roads, too, appear to offer a choice between returning to service and leaving the neighborhood behind. Robert imagines the dean calling his own name in the same annual ritual, with the same notation that he has not been heard from since 1848. Fredrik’s absence thus becomes more than a local curiosity: it gives Robert a possible image of what freedom from service might look like, even if that freedom is only recorded as not knowing where a person has gone.

Jonas Petter’s Story of the Failed Journey

At the mill, Robert asks Jonas Petter whether he remembers Fredrik of Kvarntorpet. Jonas Petter does, and recounts a reputation built on mischief and theft. Fredrik was described as lazy, a habitual thief, and a prankster who broke gates, released horses from church stables during services, and brought snakes into church. His conduct had made him unwelcome to the farmers of the parish.

The story’s decisive episode begins when Fredrik’s father, a cotter under the manse, persuades Lieutenant Rudeborg to hire his twenty-year-old son as a farmhand in Kråkesjö. Rudeborg sends him to fetch a pair of oxen purchased at a fair. Instead, Fredrik returns with smaller steers: he has exchanged the lieutenant’s valuable animals for cheaper ones and kept money from the transaction. When challenged, he insists that the animals are the same, explaining their smaller size by claiming they had gone without fodder. Their matching red coats and white forehead spots give his excuse a superficial plausibility, but witnesses establish that the oxen are not Rudeborg’s.

Rudeborg does not want to send Fredrik to jail, partly out of regard for his parents, but cannot bear having him in his service. He proposes that the neighbors contribute toward sending the young man to North America, paying half the fare himself. In the lieutenant’s view, America is suited to rogues who cannot live within the law at home; transporting Fredrik would rid the parish of a recurring nuisance more permanently than a prison sentence. The farmers readily contribute a few riksdaler each, and Rudeborg personally watches Fredrik leave by coach from Klintakrogen.

For a few months, the plan seems to have succeeded. Then Fredrik returns to Kvarntorpet. He never boarded a ship: he went only as far as Gothenburg, where he stayed at an inn, drank and caroused, and spent the travel money. When it ran out, he went home, looking well-fed and untroubled. He even thanked the villagers for their contributions, saying he had enjoyed spending the money and would gladly make another American journey if they financed it. The trip arranged to remove him had instead become an occasion for idleness and a boast about getting more from the community.

From Pariah to the Missing Man

The villagers’ response makes the failure of the scheme unmistakable. They spit at Fredrik when they see him, and Rudeborg, who had paid half the fare and watched him board the Gothenburg coach, now reports him to the sheriff for the oxen theft. But when Sheriff Lönnegren comes to Kvarntorpet, Fredrik has already disappeared. The authorities never manage to catch him, and Jonas Petter concludes that people say he took to the sea. The tale does not establish where Fredrik went or what became of him; the enduring fact is that, after his return and renewed flight, he is no longer seen in the parish.

That unresolved ending links the lively anecdote to the church-book record with which Robert’s thoughts began. Jonas Petter’s story explains the reputation behind the missing name, but cannot supply a destination or a confirmed fate. The annual “Whereabouts unknown” remains the only settled account of Fredrik’s absence. The gap between the detailed village tale and the bare documentary entry gives his disappearance its force: the parish can judge his conduct, remember his failed passage, and pursue him, but it cannot say where he is.

What Robert Makes of Fredrik

Robert listens while resting at the mill, where he is relieved not to be working as a hired man. Jonas Petter’s account of a man sent toward America on other people’s money reaches him not chiefly as a cautionary tale about dishonesty, but as evidence that one can leave the parish and escape being found. Robert is especially struck by Rudeborg’s claim that a country exists for people who misbehave at home. He imagines his own name entering the church record as missing, year after year, and concludes that America is the land for someone who has taken the wrong road.

The irony is sharp: Fredrik’s first American journey was not an emigration at all, but a stay in Gothenburg financed by villagers who meant to be rid of him. Yet his later disappearance lets Robert separate the idea of departure from the failed scheme that preceded it. Across the wider movement toward emigration, rumors of fertile land and new possibilities travel through peasant communities by word of mouth; in Robert’s private reasoning, Fredrik’s local legend makes that distant possibility personal. Fredrik does not appear as a confirmed emigrant, nor does his story reveal that he reached America. His narrative role is instead to make flight conceivable: an absence recorded as a blank in the parish book becomes, for Robert, an opening beyond the village’s roads, obligations, and watchful neighbors.