Ingmar Bergman's 1960 Jungfrukällan (The Virgin Spring) is unusual among his films in that it does not derive from the auteur director's own, original screenplay but rather from a medieval source text (a Swedish ballad), which was then adapted for the screen by Ulla Isaksson. In a radio interview conducted just before the premiere of Jungfrukällan in 1960, Bergman says that he first read the source ballad while in university, from Sverker Ek's 1924 anthology Den svenska folkvisan (The Swedish Ballad), where its title is “Töres dotter i Vänge” (The Daughter of Töre in Vänge).1 Bergman first considered producing a version for the ballet, but then, while on the set of Smultronstället (1957; Wild Strawberries), he decided instead to make a film adaptation (Billquist 1960, 206). He sent the ballad to Isaksson, with whom he worked on his next film, Nära livet (1958; Brink of Life or Close to Life), about three women in a maternity ward. Ulla Isaksson wrote the screenplay for Brink of Life based on two short stories she had published in 1954.2 In 1957, Bergman had scripted and directed another now classic film based on a medieval subject, Det sjunda inseglet (The Seventh Seal), so film critics have sought to explain why he turned to Isaksson for the equally medieval-themed Virgin Spring. Bergman himself said that sometimes (in those days) he just did not have the time to write his own scripts (Austin 1973, 123).3 More profoundly, he stated: “Jag ville inte att det skulle bli en projektion av mitt inre drama utan en fri, objektiv gestaltning” (Billquist 1960, 206) [I did not want (the film) to be a projection of my inner drama but rather a free, objective interpretation]. Isaksson would provide that outside objectivity. Along these lines, Frank Gado suggested that because some critics had objected to the “overblown rhetoric” of The Seventh Seal, Bergman turned to Isaksson, whose “novel set in the Middle Ages had been praised for its realistic manner” (Gado 1986, 242). Presumably, Gado is referring to Isaksson's Dit du icke vill (Where You Don't Want to Go, or Whither Thou Wouldst Not) from 1956, about witch trials and not in fact set in the Middle Ages but rather in the seventeenth century.4 It is also likely that Isaksson, as someone with a firmer religious belief, could write more in sympathy with the medieval source, which culminates in a Christian miracle.5 Some scholars, however, have expressed a desire that Bergman himself had written the screenplay. Gervais says of the ending of the film: “We may indeed be hearing far more of Ulla Isaksson's voice than Ingmar Bergman's” (1999, 68). So also Jerry Gill noted: “The Virgin Spring is a major work, but it was not written by Bergman, and thus is not really expressive of his ideology” (1969, 14–5); and Philip Mosley said: “The Virgin Spring ends in a forced, sentimental way” (1981, 79). Jörn Donner, on the other hand, writes that Bergman “manages to surmount the weaknesses of the manuscript [i.e., screenplay], create a shattering drama from something that was intended to be a sermon” (1962, 191). Vernon Young calls the work “selfless” and yet “deeply felt,” Bergman's masterwork (1971, 188).In any case, Isaksson wrote the screenplay, which in its published form is somewhat novelized, recording much the same dialogue as the film, but also providing prose descriptions for the settings and actions, with occasional interpretive comments (e.g., “Ingeri is a sturdy dark-haired girl, brave and frightened at the same time” [Isakksson 1960, 1]). Few scholars quote any of these prose passages, except Gervais, who does so for the scene in which the beggar frightens the young rover with a vision of hell (Gervais 1999, 67–8; cf. Isaksson 1960, 80–2). Vernon Young mentions the screenplay's unusual amount of “description, dense, concrete and sensuous” (1971, 188). Other Bergman scholars have sometimes confused this treatment for an Isaksson novel. Steene refers to “Ulla Isaksson's English edition of The Virgin Spring as a novel” (1987, 101). Laity writes (incorrectly) that “Bergman came to the film version of the ballad by way of novelist Ulla Isaksson, screenwriter for the film” (2007, 181). But as Bergman himself informs us, he found the ballad first, sent it to Isaksson, and she adapted it for the screen at his suggestion. While he is uncredited, Bergman must have contributed to the screenplay in some ways, at least during the filming in Dalarna. Cowie writes that “he and Ulla Isaksson wrote away in separate rooms at the Hotel Siljansborg” (1992, 181). The screenplay was then published in English in a novelized version.6 The screenplay volume (Isaksson 1960) includes a preface by Isaksson, the Swedish source ballad (from Ek's edition) in English translation (reprinted with commentary below), the novelized screenplay (with dialogue and prose descriptions of the action), and appended brief biographies of Isaksson and Bergman. This published screenplay is not identical with the film in every detail (as is usually the case); most notably, it implicates the young boy in Karin's rape (Isaksson 1960, 63–4) and not just the two older goatherds. Isaksson also seems to assign some blame to Karin by saying she “flirts a little” (1960, 56; see further below).In light of the complicated and unusual aspects of Virgin Spring's origins and the critical confusion surrounding them, I will first discuss the film's ballad source in the context of related Scandinavian and Scottish ballads (a subject that is virtually unknown to Bergman scholars), and then examine how that ballad source is adapted by Isaksson and Bergman. The process of film adaptation has become more theorized in recent decades by critics such as Linda Hutcheon, Thomas Leitch, and Roger Stam. The examination of changes made (or interactions conducted) by screenplay writer and director to (or with) a prior source can illuminate the practice of even such an auteur director as Bergman. Further, within the history of film adaptations, working from a medieval ballad is quite rare (as against a novel, play, or comic book) and brings its own distinctive generic influences.7 After outlining the literary and cinematic adaptations made by Isaksson and Bergman, I append Ek's conjectural edition of the Swedish ballad, with notes indicating precisely how he combined the extant versions. I also append annotated translations of the Swedish and Icelandic versions. These combined materials will facilitate more detailed insights into the film and its sources.Bergman scholars and critics usually mention that The Virgin Spring is based on a Swedish ballad (or sometimes less accurately, a medieval legend, or a folk song), with reference to the English translation “The Daughter of Töre in Vänge,” published along with the screenplay by Ulla Isaksson (1960, ix–xii).8 Almost no critics cite a Swedish original for the ballad; Billquist is the sole exception (1960, 206–8).9 A few scholars quote Birgitta Steene's comment that “the student of folklore can easily show that the ballad of Töre's daughter exists in many versions” (1968, 89), without, however, examining those versions and the placement within them of the particular source ballad used by Bergman. As it happens, that version is quite anomalous within the tradition; it is a much-altered modern reconstruction by Swedish scholar Sverker Ek, as I will demonstrate below.First, it might be informative (as is customary in ballad scholarship) to look at related ballads across the Scandinavian corpus, and also at an analogous Scottish ballad (Child 1957, no. 14). Bergman's source ballad is classified with all those related to it in subject matter (from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the Faroes, and Iceland) as “TSB B21” in the standard index Types of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballad (Jonsson et al. 1978). It is labeled “Herr Truelses Døtre” (Herr Truels's Daughters), the title of a version taken down in the standard Danish collection Danmarks gamle Folkeviser (DgF 1895–1898, no. 338, 6:114–40). The TSB subclassification letter B refers to legendary ballads, ballads with Christian themes including saints’ lives and miracle stories; number 21 is more narrowly one of the ballads concerning anonymous martyrs.In Iceland, the related ballad is titled “Kvæði af vallara systrabana” (Ballad of the Sister-Killing Rover) or “Þorkelsdætra kvæði” (Ballad of Thorkell's Daughters) (Íslenzk fornkvæði no. 15, as first numbered in Grundtvig and Sigurðsson 1854). It can be subclassified as both a “murder ballad” and a legendary ballad, incorporating a miracle of the Virgin Mary. Sisters Katrín and Signý wake up a little late (in versions B, ed. Jón Helgason 1962, 3:224, and E, 1965, 5:37),10 wash up and then set off onto the heath on their way to church, dressed in fine clothes. Halfway along the road, they meet a vallari, a tramp or wanderer, or “rover” to use an older English word that can mean both a wanderer and a thief (most of the Danish versions use the term Røver). In a detail confined to the Icelandic versions, the rover asks whether the young women might be elves (one never knows what sort of supernatural creature one might encounter on an Icelandic road) or even princesses (quite rare in Iceland, set apart from the Scandinavian monarchies). They give a Sunday answer, “Þorkels dætur erum við, / Maríukirkju þjónum við” (Thorkel's daughters are we, servants of the Church of Mary; st. 9).11 The rover quickly gives them a dire alternative, a variation on the usual highwayman's demand. Instead of “your money or your life,” he says in effect “your virginity or your life”: “Hvort viljið þið heldur láta ykkar líf / eða vera mitt eigið víf?” (Would you rather lose your life / or would you rather be my wife?; st. 10). Each sister considers this a hard choice, but they choose to die; the rover then obliges murderously with his tygilkníf, a little knife carried on a thong around his neck. Like the penknife of Scottish ballads (see below), it apparently is sufficient to the task (its smaller size makes it personal and phallic; nasty, brutish, and short). In Icelandic version B (Jón Helgason 1962, 3:225) the rover uses the same knife to cut from the sisters the lovely silken shirts they had taken out especially that morning for their journey; their handiwork was innocent, his disgraceful (háðug). He covers their bodies with a little dirt and then (and here is the legendary part) a light glows above their shallow graves (in versions H and I, ed. Jón Helgason 1968, 6:85 and 6:115, this event happens at the very end of the ballad).Presumably the rover does not notice the miraculous light as he takes off down the road and then arrives at Thorkell's farm, where little Ása (apparently the youngest sister) is reluctant to let anyone in through the door at night. But the rover picks the latch with his thin fingers, his thief's fingers, and then offers Ása a slightly different bargain: “Ása litla, sof hjá mér, / silkiserkinn gef eg þér” (Little Ása, sleep with me / a silken shirt I'll give to thee). In a classically ill-advised move, the thief thinks to use his newly acquired merchandise to purchase what he had previously sought to gain through violence; he attempts to bribe the young sister with the same clothes he got by killing the older sisters. Little Ása recognizes the shirts by their needlework (sauminn), goes to the greenwood to fetch her father, and announces the killing with childlike directness: “Heyrðu það, Þorkell faðir minn, / kominn er dætra baninn þinn” (Hear me, Thorkell, father mine / your daughters’ killer has come tonight; st. 26). The father, who apparently had been playing his harp when Ása brought him the bad news, throws it down so hard that its strings all burst apart. (In versions I and J, ed. Jón Helgason 1968, 6:115, st. 21 and 6:124, st. 19, Thorkell also upturns the table, spilling all the mead onto the floor.) Father Thorkel can get no joy from the harp (or the mead) and responds with the violence he feels toward his daughters’ murderer, who on the morrow is hanged high like the dog that he is.The Scottish ballads (Child 1957, no. 14) take a different narrative turn that may seem ill-considered, although it must have had its appeal.12 Three girls have set off to gather flowers when they meet a “banisht man” who asks, “It's whether will ye be a rank robber's wife, / Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife?” (version A, st. 5). He kills the first and second sister, but the third replies: “I'll not be a rank robber's wife,Nor will I die by your wee pen-knife. For I hae a brother in this wood, And gin ye kill me, it's he'll kill thee” (sts. 13–14).When asked, she says this brother's name is Baby Lon; in version 14C, she says: “My youngest brother's a banished lord, / And oftentimes he walks on this road” (st. 17). The banished man realizes he is the very brother of whom she speaks, that he has killed (two of) his own sisters, and so (in shame or despair) he takes his own life with his wee pen-knife. The irony here does not involve the fatal journey to church or the stolen clothes (both fine motifs in the Icelandic and Swedish versions), but rather, the man having unknowingly killed his own relations (presumably had he been unrelated to his victims, he would have wandered on cheerfully after killing them).Swedish versions of the ballad (about twenty-five in total in SMB), comparatively speaking, combine features found in the Icelandic and Scottish versions while expanding upon the legendary, Marian aspect. There are two or three daughters, so the collective title in SMB 47 is “Herr Töres’ döttrar” (Herr Töres's Daughters). The associated miracle is not a shining light but rather a spring welling up from under the daughters’ dead bodies; it leads to the establishment of the parish church at Kärna, near Linköping in Östergötland, a foundation traditionally assigned to the twelfth century (Broocman 1760, 208).13 The personnel varies; in version A, the wife's name is Karin; the three unnamed sisters are killed by three unnamed “Wallera” (robbers; see below). Presumably they had forced the sisters to respond to the same highwayman's demand, “be our wives or lose your lives” (part of stanza 8 is missing), to which the daughters reply incrementally: “Intett wilie wij wara wallerwj[f] / fast heller wilie wij mista wårtt Vnga lijff” (st. 9; We want not to be robber-wives / rather we would lose our young lives). The robbers chop off the heads of the girls and later reveal their deed to Fru Karin via the stolen clothing. Thöres (as he is called in version A, rather than Töre) kills two of them, but the third robber says his parents were Thöres and Karin from Vänge (the kinship motif, as in the Scottish versions), so Thöres spares him.14 He vows to build a church, a more material form of penance than in the Icelandic and Scottish versions. In SMB (Jonsson 1986) versions B, C, and D, the wife's name is Marita/Märitha/Margita; in version E, the wife's name is again Karin. The singer of version E, Greta Naterberg (1772–1818), explained that Wallare meant röfvare or robbers; it has sometimes been taken to mean herdsmen (cf. modern Swedish Vall-hjon), as in the goatherders of Bergman's film.15 Versions A, D, and E have a refrain “kaller var deras skog / med skogen han löfjas (E)” [the forest was so cold / while the forest broke into leaf]. This cold, early springtime setting also makes its way into Bergman's film adaptation.The ballad translation that was published with Ulla Isaksson's Virgin Spring screenplay (1960), which has been taken (correctly) to be an English translation of Isaksson and Bergman's source, poses some difficulties as a representative of the ballad tradition. It does not correspond to any of the versions printed in the definitive collection Sveriges medeltida ballader (SMB 1986, ed. Jonsson, no. 47, 2:175–95). Instead of three sisters there is one, named Karin; her mother is named Märeta. Karin is both raped and killed by the rovers, rather than choosing death over rape. None of the rovers are spared, so the kinship motif is missing. It has not been realized before that Bergman and screenplay writer Ulla Isaksson were adapting a Swedish ballad version that had been heavily altered or “restored” (återställd), conjecturally emended, by Sverker Ek in his Den svenska folkvisan of 1924, a book which Bergman says he read at university (as noted above).16 Ek thought the church in Kärna had been named for a virgin named Karin (which is doubtful) and that according to legend, the spring had issued from her, instead of three springs from three sisters (which number admittedly seems excessive, to modern tastes).17 Accordingly, Ek composed a version where Karin is the only daughter, adding the epithet stolts (proud or noble) to her name, where all the other versions mention three sisters. He also changed a stanza (st. 30) to make the avenging father Töre kill all three rovers or herdsmen, eliminating the revelation that the third rover is their lost brother: “Han högg ihjäl en, han högg ihjäl två, den tredje gjore hand likaså” [st. 30; He killed the first, and the second too, / And then the third he also slew]. Ek discusses some of his other editing decisions in Studier till den svenska folkvisans historia (1931, 90–5; Studies on the History of the Swedish Ballad). He takes the epithet “Stolts Karin” from a then unpublished Norwegian ballad and suggests, based on occasional singular readings for plural (e.g., silkeserk, D 6.1), that the underlying version mentioned only one daughter. His reconstruction is fanciful and hardly tenable, however, since the Swedish versions all make it clear that there are three daughters. Nonetheless, Ek's version provided the inspiration for Isaksson's script and Bergman's film, which then adds a foster daughter, Ingeri, and a pagan subtext (see further below).Otherwise, Ek's version is wildly eclectic; it draws stanzas from all four main ballad versions (cf. Jonsson 1986 [SMB], A, C–E), thus adding a welter of detail to the narrative.18 Before leaving for church, Karin does not just put on a small cape as in version A.6, but also dons a silken shift (the work of fifteen handmaidens),19 as in version D.6, and lovely skirts as in version C.6. Ek regularizes these three stanzas so that each begins “Stolts Karin tog på sig” [Proud Karin puts on].4. Stolts Karin tog på sig en silkessärk,det var femton mörs handaverk.5. Stolts Karin tog på sig sina kjortlar små,det röda gullet i varje trå.6. Stolts Karin tog på sig sin kappa blå,så ville hon sig till kyrkan gå.(Proud Karin put on a silken shift,It was the handiwork of fifteen maids.Proud Karin put on her kirtle small,(With) the red gold in each row.Proud Karin put on her blue capeThus would she go to church.)The effect in the film is to make her seem a bit spoiled and vain (although hardly deserving of a comeuppance, as some critics seem to suggest).20We might ask whether the screenplay and film are influenced in any way by traditional ballad style and aesthetics. Isaksson said she admired how in the ballad “the various actions stand out sharply and clearly against each other and readily divide themselves into acts” (Criterion: The Virgin Spring 2005, 14); “the carefree tone of the first [act serves] as a contrast to the horror of the rape in the second; the third act's remorseless revenge clashes against the anguish and redemption in the fourth” (Criterion: The Virgin Spring 2005, 14).21 Certainly, the film's locations reinforce this structure, moving from the manor hall to the forest, then back to the manor hall and back again to the forest. Visual images connect these locales: the mealtime scenes in the first and third acts (with their visual allusions to Michelangelo's Last Supper); the identical clearing by the stream in the second and fourth acts. Töre's morning and mealtime prayers, and Karin's in the forest, also link these scenes. Traditionally, the most salient aspect of ballad narrative, however, has been called its tendency toward “leaping and lingering” (Gummere 1907, 91). In Ek's version, stanza 1, Töre's daughter oversleeps Mass. Her mother wakes her; she dons her best clothes. The text “lingers” on this action for three stanzas (sts. 4–6), with incremental repetition, and then “leaps” to the herdsmen in the forest (st. 7). The screenplay, on the other hand, most often avoids such a narrative structure, and many of its changes are the result of filling in the narrative in a modern novelistic and cinematic way. Hence, the action begins not abruptly with Karin oversleeping but gradually with the entire household waking up and beginning their daily farmhouse chores. The time is “between four and five in the morning.” A visibly pregnant Ingeri stokes the fire; her “puffing on the fire is the day's first sound” (Isaksson 1960, 1). She then prays to Odin, clutching the pole that leads to the roof-vent. Upstairs in the loft, Töre and Märeta pray to the Christian God (1960, 4). The housekeeper Frida “steps over the threshold of the manor hall” carrying some newly hatched chicks. She berates Ingeri, who then strains the milk. Lady Märeta descends and tells Frida she must ride to church with the candles to honor the Virgin Mary (1960, 10). Next, the farmhands and a beggar come into the hall and sit at the table. When they are done, Ingeri goes out to prepare Karin's lunch, putting a toad in the bread. (This scene is shortened a bit from the screenplay description; Ingeri does not spit on the bread, cut slices of meat, or wrap the loaves.)22 Only then does Märeta climb up into Karin's room to wake her up and help her get dressed, the actions with which the ballad begins. The screenplay and film certainly linger on this action, while also providing some character psychology; Karin wants to wear her Sunday best even though it is a Friday: “Now take out my yellow silk shift and my Sunday skirts and my blue cloak [the Virgin's color] and then I'll be happy, and you'll be happy and father will be happy! Oh mother, I will ride with such dignity to the church—you'll see! And Svarten [Blackie] will lift his hoofs so gently, as if he were in a pilgrim procession, and I'll look neither to my right nor to my left, only straight ahead. And think of the candles and the Holy Mother of God.” (Isaksson 1960, 19–20)There are, of course, heavy ironies in this speech, since Karin will instead stray from the path, and the candles will be scattered by her rapist and killer.Returning to Ek's particular ballad version, in the encounter with the three herdsmen, Ek chooses a rare textual variant crucial for the film. The herdsmen say: “Antingen villen i bli vårt vallereviv, / eller villen i mista ert unga liv” (st. 8) [Either you serve as our herdsmen's wife / Or thou shalt lose your young life]. As we have seen in other versions of the ballad, the sisters typically choose death before dishonor. But version D (st. 13), as adapted by Ek, interjects: “Först var hon tre valleres viv, / sedan lät hon sitt unga liv” (st. 13) [First she became the herdsmen's wife / Then she lost her budding young life]. The herdsmen violate their own conditions, both raping and killing young Karin.In the film, the herdsmen never deliver such an ultimatum; instead, it becomes increasingly and painfully clear that they intend to rape Karin.23 After their shared meal, the screenplay says that Karin lies back and “her skirts glide up . . . she flirts a little with them in this way. The flirtation has its effect” (Isaksson 1960, 55–6). This is one of the more significant places where Bergman does not follow the screenplay. Karin laughs when she tells her fairy-tale version of her own home, but she does not lie back and can hardly be said to be flirting; naïve and unsuspecting, she is enjoying the attention. But she begins to appear unnerved when the older brothers lean in and the tongueless one grabs the carving knife. Then, noticing that one of the goats does not belong to the brothers, she reveals that she knows they are livestock thieves, not innocent orphans as they claim. They stand up, and the boy throws the loaf down; the toad that Ingeri had placed in it jumps out, disrupting their shared, bucolic meal (and providing a demonic contrast to the Christian eucharistic feast, with the bread transubstantiating into the flesh of a toad). Desperately relying on her sense of social protection, Karin says: “I'm on my way to the church with the Virgin's candles.” But the two older brothers prevent her from leading her horse away, knock her down (the boy helps tackle her), clamber onto her and rape her. Here again, Bergman deviates significantly from the screenplay, which says that “the boy manages to throw himself prone across her breast” (Isaksson 1960, 63), whereas in the film, he is thrown down the hill by his older brothers and so does not physically participate in the rape.24 That change will have an effect in the subsequent revenge section of the film. Afterwards when Karin staggers around in shock, the more violent of the herdsmen brothers (“the tongueless one,” as Isaksson calls him)25 hits her on the back of the head with a fallen tree limb, and she collapses, dead. In the source ballad, the herdsmen cuts off Karin's head (Ek 1924, 89, st. 14). The tree limb is both more brutally primitive and derives more organically from the forest setting; throughout the scene, shots have been framed by the limbs of fallen birches. The brothers then steal her fine clothes, but not before the tongueless brother, enraged that Karin's saddlebag contains nothing valuable to him, scatters the Virgin Mary's candles with his feet in an act of willful, careless blasphemy, driving home for us the fact that the Virgin has not protected her servant.Having begun with a fuller, in some ways more violent version of the ballad, Bergman and Isaksson make a number of additional changes, as other critics have noted (see, e.g., Steene 1968, 91–5). It is possible that Bergman and/or Isaksson consulted other versions of the ballad, since the mother bolts the door on the herdsmen as she does in Danish version F (DgF 1895–1898, 6:130–2), and the miracle appears at the end as in Danish version F and some Icelandic versions (see above), rather than right after the sister is killed. That placement makes more dramatic sense, in my view, even though Pechter objects to the change (1961, 334–5; contrast Donner 1962, 192: “It is splendid to let the miracle with the spring form the final climax of the film”). In the original press book (reprinted in the Criterion booklet, Criterion: The Virgin Spring 2005, 13), Ulla writes that “the ballad exists in several versions,” but she may just be following Ek. In 1968, Bergman refers to “twenty-seven versions” of the Swedish ballad (Austin 1973, 122). He also claims that in the version he read originally, “there were seven daughters and seven robbers,” which is an exaggeration. Most of the Swedish versions mention three sisters and three robbers; Ek trimmed the sisters down to one.While blond Karin is now the only daughter, the family has also taken in a dark-haired peasant girl, Ingeri, who is pregnant and provides a foil for Karin. Ingeri is pagan rather than Christian; she calls on Odin in the manor hall and visits an Odinic figure, a bridgekeeper, while separated from Karin on their ride to church. Like Odin, the man appears blind in one eye, is accompanied by a raven (an addition to the screenplay; a lone raven croaking precedes the scene), and he does not reveal his true name. In Norse mythology, both the poetic and prose Edda describe Odin as accompanied by two ravens, Huginn and Muninn (“Thought and Memory”); see, for example, Snorri Gylfaginning, chap. 38 (Snorri Sturluson 2005, 32; Snorri Sturluson 1987, 33). Odin lost one eye when he pledged it at Mímir's well in order to gain wisdom (Snorri Sturluson 2005, 17; 1987, 17). Odin conceals his true name when traveling among men (Snorri Sturluson 2005, 21–2; 1987, 21–2). As another indication of the bridgekeeper's heathenism, the arms on his wooden chair have carved images of Odin and Thor, according to the screenplay (Isaksson 1960, 41).This setting in a transitional world between pagan and Christian belief (as was the case in eleventh- and twelfth-century Sweden) makes the film distinctive but also reminiscent of the customary world of Icelandic sagas, set on either side of the Icelandic conversion in the year 1000, when some figures pray to Thor and others to Christ.26 The conflicted Christian worldview of the film has puzzled many, but to me is one of its more appealing features.27 Töre, whose name is a version of Thor, is spiritually on the cusp of paganism and Christianity. His wife Märeta, whose name is a version of Mary, transitions from a self-mortifying version of Christianity to a more communal one. Karin is a servant of the Virgin Mary (as well as a spoiled if lovable only daughter),28 but she meets with a violent fate, the Marian miracle coming too late to do her any good.The screenplay and film do make something of a narrative leap from the rape and murder scene back to the manor hall. Having followed Karin and Ingeri on their way to the fateful clearing, the film has no need to represent the killers’ journey back along the same path.29 Such a decision to omit a duplicative action is common enough in films, of course, and not necessarily motivated by the ballad. In fact, the film leaps more completely than the ballad, which takes two stanzas to transport the herdsmen along the path to Vänge, whereas the film fades from the boy throwing dirt on Karin's corpse and then running off in the late afternoon, to the sky at dusk and the three herdsmen standing outside the manor's gate.The herdsmen are invited to eat with the household in another mealtime scene, with the boy becoming increasingly uneasy, especially when he hears Tore say the same grace th