THE REMARKABLE atmosphere Stieg created in The Millennium Trilogy, with its characteristic moral rigor and wealth of biblical references, is the one that permeated our early years in Västerbotten County. It’s an atmosphere far removed from that of classic crime novels, but one favored by our great writers, such as Per Olov Enquist, the author of The Royal Physician’s Visit, or Torgny Lindgren, who wrote The Way of a Serpent. Both of these men, like Stieg, came from that isolated region in northern Sweden.
Historically speaking, the rest of the country had been under the authority of the Lutheran Church since the sixteenth century, but in the North, dissident and extremely austere Protestant movements sprang up in the nineteenth century, notably the Religious Awakening led by the radical pastor Lars Levi Laestadius. The mission of such movements was to save the populace—mainly workers and peasants—from the ravages of alcoholism. Music and dancing were forbidden, women were not allowed to wear makeup, and so on. These breakaway movements mostly disappeared by the mid-twentieth century, after the advent of the industrial society and massive urbanization.
The world of my childhood was peopled by dissident, conservative country folk who belonged to SEM (the Swedish Evangelical Mission), while Stieg’s youth was instead dominated by communist and Social Democratic workers, but all of these people—obstinate, loyal, honest, with a deep sense of morality—were much alike.
Founded in 1856, SEM is a movement dedicated to the renewal of faith within the Lutheran Church. One of its founders, the great lay preacher and author Carl Olof Rosenius, was born in Anäset in Västerbotten County, where my paternal grandmother grew up. One of SEM’s articles of faith is that every Christian must live in a direct relationship with God, taking full responsibility for his or her actions—a relationship that begins, of course, in daily life. Since a personal reading of the Bible is one of the essential pillars of religious observance, the movement has always had a strong focus on literacy and education, and one of its major concerns has been the dissemination of religious texts. In 1868, the door-to-door salesmen who handled that task received the authorization to preach, and their influence is still felt today in the region where Stieg and I grew up, which is sometimes called the Bible Belt, like its namesake in the United States. SEM collected money to provide for the work of its preachers and missionaries in Africa and Asia, so even as a child, I was aware of our responsibility toward these continents.
Every village had its small congregation houses where the villagers gathered. Because of the great distances to be traveled, however, people out in the countryside could not attend church regularly, so their pastors and lay preachers, who were sometimes their neighbors, would visit them. And if there was only one book in the house, it was the Bible. I think that even Stieg’s communist grandparents had one. The Bible had been a nurturing presence in their childhood, as it was in the lives of every Swedish citizen, because until 1996, everyone was automatically born a Lutheran in Sweden, where church and state were not separated until 2000.
Life was hard in the North, and not just when a family was visited by illness or death; the Bible brought courage and comfort to people who struggled daily to survive in the fields, forests, and the few factories there. For Stieg and me, the Bible was not so much the New Testament, the Jesus who asks us to turn the other cheek, but the formidable Old Testament, blunt and violent, like the age-old way of life up in our territory. Without officials or judges, and with mostly itinerant pastors, society had no fixed hierarchy, so people had to shape rules for themselves in order to survive together. That was the context in which Stieg and I were raised by our grandparents, who lived by the values of older times, and this upbringing gave us a strong moral compass, a faculty doubtless more developed in us than it is in most people of our generation. Some things are done and others are not. Period.
We were not believers, but when we traveled we always visited churches and cemeteries. I loved—and still do—to light candles in memory of the loved ones I have lost.
In our apartment in Stockholm, we each had a Bible that, like the Koran, was always somewhere among our clutter of books. Stieg used his, of course, to help him write about the murders of the young women in the first volume of the trilogy: taking inspiration from real police reports, he then culled from the Bible the verses he could use to create an enigma.