Kinder Garten sacrifices his daughter Agnes when Jorgen Knudsen’s son leaves Agnes Knudsdatter in a cave in the forest to honor the Knudsen family’s pact with the troll. Recounted by Jorgen, the abandonment is presented not as an isolated act of violence but as an attempted restoration of an inherited tradition, followed by the rupture of the son’s family and his collapse.

Background: A Pact Recast as Heritage

Jorgen describes his son as believing that the troll was not a burden on the family but a blessing. In his son’s view, the family had gone wrong when Nils Knudsen refused to sacrifice one of Petra Mikkelsdatter’s children. The troll had brought the family to these shores, he believed, and its power could secure their deliverance again. He understood that possibility as a right and an inheritance, and concluded that the family must return wholeheartedly to its origins.

The Abandonment

Acting on that conviction, Jorgen’s son undertook to honor the pact as he believed it was meant to be honored. Jorgen compares his action to Nils Knudsen’s choice nearly one hundred and ninety years earlier: his son left Agnes Knudsdatter in a forest cave. Jorgen says he admired his son’s fortitude, a judgment that exposes the family’s inherited code from within. The act could be understood as sacrifice in service of tradition, even as its immediate human consequence was a child abandoned in a cave.

Family Rupture and Aftermath

Jorgen says that his son’s wife could not accept his vision or admire what he regarded as courage. She left him and took Grace Wheeler with her. Jorgen frames the separation as the blow that broke his son: he says his son loved his wife and daughters so deeply that he would sacrifice his own child for them, yet the sacrifice did not preserve his household. Instead, Jorgen says, his son lost his mind, and Jorgen had been caring for him ever since.

The account connects the old pact to a present family’s disintegration. What the son treated as ancestral duty and a route to collective deliverance became an act that separated him from his wife and one daughter, while Agnes was left behind. Jorgen’s admiration for his son’s resolve makes the episode’s inheritance especially stark: the tradition survives through repetition, but its cost falls on the children and the family it was supposed to protect.