Rinaldo

Rinaldo, a former cavalry soldier who lost an eye, serves the parish as an itinerant schoolmaster. His lessons are meant principally to equip children to read Luther’s Little Catechism, but he also introduces Robert Nilsson to books, the wider world, and information about North America. By teaching—and then lending practical help—Rinaldo becomes an important intermediary between the parish’s inherited habits and the knowledge on which emigration decisions depend.

Appointment and the Parish School

The parish engaged Rinaldo in 1836. His employment was organized around a modest, shared arrangement: he received twelve bushels of rye each year, one shilling for each day he taught a child, and room and firewood from the parents. Rather than teach in a permanent schoolhouse, he travelled from one end of the parish to the other, holding classes in peasants’ homes. Each household lent him a spare room or attic, and Rinaldo decided how long the school would remain there.

His formal task was to teach children to read well enough to memorize the Little Catechism. He sometimes went beyond that remit to include arithmetic, writing, Swedish history, and geography—subjects regarded as worldly and of little use. This distinction reflects the narrow purpose assigned to parish schooling: literacy was chiefly justified as a means of religious instruction, while broader knowledge depended on a teacher willing to extend the curriculum.

Rinaldo’s own history gives his presence a distinctive authority among his pupils. Although he had only one eye, he had seen more of the world than most parishioners with two. He had travelled as far as Gothenburg and seen the sea, and he told the children about his adventures. Robert and the other pupils found these accounts more engaging than the catechism and biblical history combined. The schoolmaster’s experience thus made distant places imaginable in a community where few had travelled beyond familiar surroundings.

Robert’s Education and First Books

Robert attended Rinaldo’s school for six weeks a year over three successive years. He learned readily, acquiring both reading and writing in his first year. When school ended, Rinaldo gave him a copy of History of Nature, warning that children who stopped reading after their schooldays would soon lose their ability. The gift was meant to keep Robert reading; it was also his first possession of his own kind.

For more than a year, Robert did not open the book. Yet his curiosity about the world had already taken hold. While working with Karl Oskar felling trees and preparing timber for shipbuilding, he imagined the ships carrying it toward Karlshamn and wished to travel there to see the sea. Rinaldo had supplied both an example of far-reaching experience and the literacy with which Robert could pursue knowledge beyond the parish.

The North American Guide

When Rinaldo held school at Nybacken in the spring, Robert asked whether he knew a book that truthfully described North America. Rinaldo had seen an advertisement in Barometern for Description of the United States of North America, priced at forty-eight shillings, or one riksdaler, including postage. He ordered it for Robert and advanced the price until the boy could repay him. The schoolmaster helped willingly: Robert was his only pupil who read books of his own accord.

Robert read the book three times from beginning to end during summer nights in his room. Addressed to ordinary, uneducated people considering emigration, it presented itself as an entirely truthful account, even where its claims might seem fabulous to inexperienced readers. Robert learned its important chapters by heart, or nearly so, and passed the information on to Arvid. The book’s assurances about American society and conditions therefore reached a second prospective emigrant through Robert’s retelling. Rinaldo did not make the decision for either young man; he made the printed account accessible, and his advance removed the immediate obstacle of its price.

A Teacher at the Edge of Departure

Rinaldo’s influence belongs to the larger movement of information that unsettles the old peasant communities. News of fertile land travels through rumor, printed accounts, and neighborly exchange; in Robert’s case, a chain of assistance runs from a newspaper advertisement to the schoolmaster’s order, from the book to Robert’s repeated reading, and from Robert to Arvid. Rinaldo’s classroom, established for religious literacy, becomes an unintended point of access to arguments about another continent.

The schoolmaster’s contribution remains specific and practical: he teaches Robert to read and write, gives him a book to maintain those skills, identifies a guide to North America, and lends the money needed to obtain it. The emigrants’ later preparations and departure belong to the Nilsson family and their companions, not to Rinaldo. His significance lies in the quiet work preceding that departure: opening a path from literacy to self-directed reading, and from reading to informed conversation about leaving home.