The Ring of Lowenskiold

A gold ring. A broken grave. A ghost who will not rest.

When General Benedict Lowenskiold of Hedeby dies, he is buried with the
ring given to him by King Charles XII — the one thing he prized above all
else. Within months, a peasant couple have broken open the tomb and stolen
it. What follows is swift and merciless: the family loses everything, is
driven into the wilderness, and the General begins to walk at night.

The ring moves through the world leaving ruin behind it — through confession
and concealment, false accusation and judicial murder. Thirty years on, a
woman named Marit Ericson, who lost three of her own to the Lowenskiold
family's thirst for revenge, finds the ring sewn into a dead man's cap. She
sees her chance. She sews it into the cap of young Adrian Lowenskiold, and
sends the curse home to Hedeby.

It falls to Malvina Spaak — a young housekeeper, terrified of ghosts but
steadier than anyone knows — to untangle what generations of pride and
cruelty have knotted. She is the only one who understands that the General
does not want blood. He wants his ring back.

Selma Lagerlöf — the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature
(1909) — was at the height of her powers when she wrote this trilogy.
The Ring of Lowenskiold is the first of three novellas, first published
in 1925. Set in the forests and estates of Värmland, it moves with the
assurance of a folk tale and the moral precision of a great novelist.
This translation renders Lagerlöf's voice — intimate, ironic, and
unerring — in modern English.