Sheriff Lönnegren

Sheriff Lönnegren is the tall, physically formidable local officer who enforces the servant law and assists the church authorities against unauthorized religious gatherings. His appearances expose the coercive machinery facing farmhands and dissenters, but also its human ambiguities: he regards enforcement as his duty while understanding why the poor evade it, and his authority meets practical resistance from people alert to their rights.

Identity and Public Manner

Lönnegren arrives at Korpamoen in a long, wide uniform coat that hampers him as he steps down from his carriage; his height is so unusual that his head can be seen above a crowd at fairs. The narrative describes him as strong as he is tall. When stopping a fight, he may seize one combatant and use him as a weapon against the other. His routine language is equally forceful: he calls a wrongdoer a scoundrel, intensifying the insult for hardened offenders and criminals. Yet the community does not consider him a bad man. His severity belongs to the office he performs, rather than amounting to a simple portrait of personal malice.

Enforcing the Servant Law

The law’s demands become concrete when Lönnegren comes to Korpamoen seeking Karl Oskar’s brother, Robert Nilsson, a farmhand who has deserted the service of Aron of Nybacken. Aron has asked the authorities to bring Robert back. Lönnegren explains the master’s claim that he had chastised Robert under the servant law, and that the punishment was intended to correct him. The law, as Lönnegren presents it, does not allow a servant to answer a beating by leaving: Robert should have submitted and returned to service.

Lönnegren does not rely on bluster alone. He unfolds a large, stamped paper and cites the provisions that authorize a master to enforce a deserted servant’s return. In the name of the law, he asks Karl Oskar to reveal where Robert is. When Karl Oskar says he is not responsible for his brother and asks to see the document that would make him obliged to help the authorities, Lönnegren does not answer with another legal citation. He recognizes that the farmer knows his rights and is not easily intimidated.

That recognition makes the sheriff’s position complicated. He considers the task unpleasant: pursuing poor farmhands who try to escape the servant law is work he would rather not do. If the decision were his alone, Robert might be allowed to go. Nevertheless, Lönnegren treats the law as a duty he must carry out, and orders his man to search the farm. When the search fails, he accuses Karl Oskar of harboring the deserter and demands that he turn him over. Karl Oskar counters by asking whether the sheriff would report his own brother if that brother had fled a master’s flogging. The exchange turns enforcement into a personal and moral test, even as Lönnegren remains bound to his official role.

The Night Raid on Danjel’s Meeting

Lönnegren also acts against religious dissent. When authorities arrive at Danjel Andreasson’s home at night, they have driven without sleigh-bells so their approach will not be announced. The sheriff enters with Dean Brusander, an assistant pastor, a churchwarden, the village bailiff, and his hired man: three representatives of spiritual authority and three of temporal authority. Inside the low cottage, even Lönnegren’s physical presence is awkward; he cannot stand erect beneath the ceiling beam and strikes his forehead before addressing the gathering.

The meeting brings the conflict between religious conviction and public authority into the open. Danjel maintains that God’s Spirit has given him the power to minister, while Brusander insists that preaching requires a church appointment and threatens legal punishment for continued activity. Lönnegren’s task is to turn the confrontation into an enforceable case. He warns that Danjel will be called for questioning and sued in civil court, along with the others present. He orders the bailiff to write down their names. At the prospect of being identified, the neighbors rise from the table and edge toward the door, while Danjel remains unmoved, having lately expected persecution.

Lönnegren’s handling of the meeting is pragmatic as well as coercive. Danjel’s fearless answers threaten to make the investigation more complicated if the authorities treat the gathering as sedition, and the sheriff wants to finish the business quickly. The scene therefore shows him doing more than mechanically repeating the church’s condemnation: he manages the legal risk and seeks to contain the encounter, while still warning participants of prosecution and ensuring their names are recorded.

Authority, Evasion, and Departure

The contrast between Robert’s predicament and the family’s emigration clarifies how official control can be evaded or negotiated. Robert, a fugitive from service, dares not approach the dean to obtain papers. Karl Oskar, by contrast, intends to leave openly and asks Dean Brusander for the documents needed to separate from the parish. Lönnegren’s pursuit of Robert embodies the pressure that makes the servant’s departure dangerous; the later preparations to emigrate show another route out, one Karl Oskar chooses to pursue without pretending that he has nothing to hide on his brother’s behalf.

The sheriff’s character is shaped by this tension between personal judgment and public obligation. He knows that the law places a severe burden on poor servants and that a brother’s refusal to assist their recapture can be grounded in a claim about legal duty. He is nevertheless the officer sent to enforce the rules, whether the target is a runaway farmhand or a religious meeting. In his encounters with Karl Oskar and Danjel, the law appears not as an abstract command but as a contest over papers, testimony, names, and who has the power to decide where another person may go or what he may preach. Lönnegren’s blunt presence gives that contest a human face: forceful and intimidating, but not unaware of the hardship the system produces.