Horses

Horses are woven into the novel’s account of work, household subsistence, and migration. They appear not as a single animal or episode but as a recurring presence: costly to maintain on a small farm, demanding daily labor from hired servants, and suggestive of a New World abundance that emigrants know only through report. Their changing significance tracks the distance between the constraints of rural life and the possibilities imagined across the ocean.

Work and subsistence

At Korpamoen, a horse represents an opportunity as well as an expense. Karl Oskar calculates that he might earn money hauling timber if he owned one, but the farm’s one-sixteenth share is too small to feed it through winter. A horse consumes several barrels of oats, and Karl Oskar would need three additional acres to keep one. With only seven acres—most of them poor, sandy soil—to support himself, Kristina, and his parents, he cannot afford the animal that might help him earn more. The calculation makes the horse a measure of the farm’s limits: useful labor is out of reach when the land cannot sustain the means of performing it.

This scarcity contrasts with the arrangement recorded when Karl Oskar takes possession of Korpamoen. His parents, Nils and Märta, retain rights to winter and summer fodder for one cow and one sheep, alongside living quarters, arable land, use of the owner’s team, and an annual grain allowance. The horse is not named in those reserved provisions; the stipulated animals and resources instead set the bounds of the parents’ continuing support. The farm’s obligations are calculated in land, fodder, and grain, leaving little room for an additional animal whose upkeep would require more acreage.

Servant life at Nybacken

At Nybacken, horses are part of the routine that binds Robert to service. The farm has four horses, and he must fill their mangers morning and evening, curry them, clean their stalls, bring hay down from the loft, fetch oats from the granary, cut fodder, and carry water from the well. Their needs extend his working day before and after other chores, and they make his life one of constant proximity to animals and farm labor. Sundays offer no release from this responsibility: the horses still need attention.

The contrast between animals bound in their stalls and farmhands bound to the animals gives the work a sharper social meaning. Robert is the youngest worker, and everyone on the farm directs him from task to task; looking after the horses is one visible part of a wider subordination. During his first week of service, he decides that he must escape from all his masters, human and animal. The horses are not responsible for his condition, but their unceasing care needs make the structure of his confinement concrete.

Horses in imagination and departure

The horses Robert encounters in daily work differ radically from the animals described in his imagined America. Drawing on his description book, he tells Karl Oskar that wild horses and oxen exist by the thousands there, overrunning the fields, and that a person could easily catch a hundred in a day. This is a reported image, not an experience the emigrants have verified. Its abundance opposes the scarcity at Korpamoen, where the family cannot keep even one working horse without more land, and helps give the distant country the appearance of a place where resources are plentiful.

Horses also belong to the practical movement of emigration. On the road out of the parish, Karl Oskar rides beside the driver with Johan on his knee, while the children and Kristina travel in the wagon and Robert sits atop the load. The vehicle carries the family and their packed belongings toward the harbor, but the journey does not yet make them free of terrestrial limits: they reach the coast exhausted after a long ride, then face water with no land visible on the other side. The horses assist the departure from home; they cannot carry the emigrants across the sea.

Narrative significance

Across these appearances, horses connect labor to mobility while revealing how unevenly mobility is available. At Korpamoen, ownership is blocked by the cost of feeding an animal; at Nybacken, tending horses consumes Robert’s time and reinforces his lack of control over it. In Robert’s account of America, by contrast, wild horses signify an immense abundance that remains a promise rather than an established fact. The animal’s role shifts from unaffordable asset and daily charge to an emblem of imagined plenty, then back to practical transport on the road to departure.

The novel thus uses horses to keep its vision of migration grounded in material conditions. A horse can haul timber or pull a wagon, but its usefulness depends on fodder, land, labor, and access to transport. The difference between one horse beyond the means of a small farm and thousands supposedly roaming American fields captures the gap between the emigrants’ constrained present and the country they hope to reach.