Character guide

Niels Lyhne

major

Also known as Niels, Lyhne, Niels Klim

Niels grows up caught between the practical world of his family and a restless hunger for poetry, greatness, and transcendent love. He gives himself wholly to friendships, to women, and to the dream of being an artist, but his gift for enthusiasm outruns his power to hold anything fast. His story matters because every early hope he forms — for art, for faith, for a love that will not sink — becomes a test of whether a man can live without illusions.

Fennimore

major

Also known as Poor Fennimore, Dearest Fennimore

Fennimore presides over the villa where Erik paints and stagnates, sending her love in letters that seem casual but carry weight. She is bound to a husband whose creative well has run dry, and her own needs have nowhere to go. When Niels arrives to save his old friend, the loyalty he intends to give Erik becomes entangled with the pull he feels toward Fennimore, setting the middle of the novel on a course none of them can steer.

Erik Refstrup

supporting

Also known as Erik

Erik and Niels grew up blowing up toy ships and dreaming of greatness together, but Erik's gift was always the smaller stream. Married to Fennimore and stuck at a fjord villa among neighbors he calls dromedaries about art, he writes to Niels in a voice so unlike himself that Niels drops everything to come. His need for rescue — and his blindness to what Niels's arrival will cost — makes him the hinge on which the novel's central betrayal turns.

Mrs. Boye

supporting

Also known as Mrs. Boye Philistine

Mrs. Boye moves through the social world with an ease and irony that Niels, fresh from the provinces, finds intoxicating. She introduces him to circles where ideas are traded like currency, and her knowing manner seems to promise a richer life than the one he left behind. But her cleverness has its own limits, and the education she offers him is as much about disillusionment as about art — a first lesson in the difference between the world's polish and a soul's real hunger.

Dr. Hjerrild

supporting

Also known as Hjerrild

Dr. Hjerrild is the friend who stays when others have fallen away, bending close to catch Niels's whispered words and offering comfort without demanding belief. He watches Niels refuse the consolations of faith and, standing at his window under the stars, thinks he would rather save the man who was not converted at the last moment. His presence gives the novel its moral counterweight: a clear-eyed witness to how a life of honest doubt meets its end.

Gerda

supporting

Also known as little Gerda

Gerda is the twelve-year-old who sings teasing songs in the garden and grows into a tender, appealing young woman with a low, dreamy forehead and eyes as clear as a shallow lake. Niels falls in love with her openness and marries her, guarding her childlike faith as if it were a ewe lamb in a parable. She represents the one happiness Niels believes he can hold without irony — which is precisely why her presence in the early middle of the book carries such weight.

Bigum

supporting

Also known as Mr. Bigum

Bigum belongs to the small-town circle of teachers and clergymen who shape Niels's boyhood, and he takes an affectionate, garrulous interest in the dreamy child. His talk runs on in endless, quirky channels, charming and exasperating by turns, and his warmth offers Niels an early taste of companionship outside the family. Through him the boy first senses that ideas and books might be a way of life, not merely lessons to be recited.

Bartholine

supporting

Bartholine grows up among the robust, earth-bound Blids, doing none of the dairy or kitchen work her family expects and feeling no kinship with their harvests and Christmas parties. She loves poetry with a convert's fervor, believing it holds the true measure of life, and she half-expects to become one of its noble, worshipped heroines. Her longing for a grander, more beautiful existence sets her apart from everyone around her and quietly shapes the atmosphere Niels grows up in.

Frithjof

minor

Also known as Frithjof Petersen, Mr. Frithjof Petersen

A painter and friend of Niels, part of the artistic milieu.

Young Lyhne of Lønborggård

minor

Also known as Young Lyhne, Lønborggård

Niels's cousin, a landowner and foil to Niels's artistic nature.

Edele Lyhne

supporting

Also known as Edele, Edele Beatrice, Little Edele, Miss Edele

Edele arrives in Niels's world as a newcomer whose beauty and delicacy set her apart from the ordinary life around him, and she becomes the object of his earliest, most fervent devotion. Her frailty and the shadow of illness give their attachment a tender, precarious quality, and Niels's prayers for her become the first real test of his childhood faith. When death claims her despite his pleading, the loss strikes at the root of his belief and turns him toward the solitary, doubting path he will walk as a man.

Madame Odéro

minor

An eccentric and wealthy widow who hosts salons.

Consul Claudi

minor

Also known as the Consul

A wealthy merchant and father of Gerda.

Helge

minor

Also known as King Helge

A legendary Norse king mentioned in Niels's childhood stories.

The Neergaards

minor

Also known as the old Councillor Neergaards

A family who host social gatherings Niels attends.

Councillor Skinnerup

minor

Also known as Skinnerup

A local official and acquaintance of the Lyhne family.

J. P. Jacobsen

minor

Also known as Jacobsen

The author, occasionally referenced as a narrative voice.

Mrs. Claudi

minor

Consul Claudi's wife, a socialite.

Miss Lyhne

minor

Niels's unmarried aunt, a minor relative.

Berendt Claudi

minor

Also known as Berendt Berendtsen Claudi, the present Claudi

A younger relative of Consul Claudi, a businessman.

Mr. Boye

minor

Mrs. Boye's husband, a minor figure in social scenes.

Trine

minor

Also known as poor Trine

A servant in the Lyhne household.