# Dagmar Selamb — Downstream character guide

> Dagmar Selamb in Downstream by Sigfrid Siwertz.

**Role:** supporting

**Also known as:** Mrs. Dagmar Selamb, Dagmar, a Selamb

**First appearance:** 0000-part-i-i-the-cry

## Snapshot

A starved, half-forgotten Selamb found huddled under a reindeer skin, who dines in a frayed red silk frock and cries into the forest for her gun-toting son.

## Who they are

Dagmar lives in the wind-shaken house at Selambshof, grey-complexioned and ragged, so isolated she has not spoken to a woman in years. When Laura and Stellan arrive with boxes of food, she dives into a wardrobe to make herself smart, then hammers a broken zinc tub and shouts into the roaring wind for Tord to come and eat. Her mixture of terror, hunger, and a last glimmer of beauty makes her the novel's most pitiful image of what the Selamb decline produces.

## In the story

### [XIII: Tord's Exile](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/downstream_se/chapters/part-i-xiii-tord-s-exile)

Dagmar, formerly Dagmar Bru, is a free-spirited woman who leaves a sculptor and throws away the key to his studio. She moves in with Tord and marries him, then boldly visits the Selamb family at Selambshof.

### [V: Waste](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/downstream_se/chapters/part-ii-v-waste)

Dagmar participates in Tord's wild lifestyle but later pleads for Mattson's wife and fears loneliness.

### [VIII: Tord Sails Out to Sea](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/downstream_se/chapters/part-ii-viii-tord-sails-out-to-sea)

Forced off Järnö by Tord; recounts the brutal winter of starvation and isolation she endured with him.

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/downstream_se/characters/dagmar_selamb
- Book: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/downstream_se
- All characters: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/downstream_se/characters