Emigranter till det nya Jerusalem, Frälsarens Kungliga Linie [Emigrants to the New Jerusalem, the Savior’s Royal Line].

Description

Real and spiritual emigration in turn-of-the-century Sweden.

Few printed documents distill the spiritual fever of fin-de-siècle Scandinavia with the wit, visual invention, and theological precision of this evocative graphic. At first glance, the broadsheet belongs within the commercial idiom of the shipping poster – a genre that had become a dominant visual for mass emigration across northern Europe. Yet every element of the design is in fact a calculated theological allegory. The ocean liner is no ordinary vessel: it is named Evangelium, its sails are labeled Sanning (Truth), and its pennants are inscribed with Jesu Blod (the Blood of Jesus) and Den Helige Ande (The Holy Spirit). The destination is not a port on any earthly chart, but Jerusalem’s Stad, i.e. Heavenly Jerusalem from the Book of Revelation. On the right shore, the point of departure is emphatically identified as Staden Fördärf or “Destruction City”. That phrase, instantly recognizable to any literate Protestant Swede, is the direct Swedish rendering of the opening location in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). This text had circulated in Swedish translation since 1727 and was among the most widely read books in Swedish nonconformist households.

In a single composition, the anonymous designer fuses the visual language of the emigrant-shipping industry with the metaphysical architecture of Bunyan’s allegory, setting both against the charged backdrop of a real and sensational mass departure of Swedish farmers for the Holy Land; an event that had gripped the nation since 1896 and was then being immortalized into fiction by Sweden’s great storyteller, Selma Lagerlöf. The result is one of the most conceptually sophisticated Swedish religious broadsides to survive from the period.

The Broadside in Detail

The broadside is a large chromolithograph printed on a single sheet. The composition occupies the upper two-thirds of the sheet in the form of a wide horizontal panorama. At the same time, a typeset text block fills the lower third, functioning simultaneously as an evangelistic tract and a mock shipping-line advertisement.

The central and dominant image is a large ocean-going steamship shown at three-quarter view, steaming confidently to the left across a deep, active sea. Along the hull, in large capital letters, runs the ship’s name: EVANGELIUM. Notably, the vessel uses both steam power and full sail, suggesting irresistible forward momentum. The fore-sail is labeled SANNING (Truth), and the main-sail repeats the same word, underscoring the dual witness of scripture and spirit. Two pennant flags fly from the masts: the forward one bears JESU-BLOD (the Blood of Jesus), while the aft pennant reads DEN HELIGE ANDE (The Holy Spirit). Smaller text on the vessel itself identifies the passengers as Herrens Apostlar (the Apostles of the Lord). Beneath the ship, occupying the full width of the water, we find the word TIDEN (Time) spelled out in large block letters, indicating that the ocean through which the vessel moves is Time itself; an elegant allegorical conceit.

To the left of the ship, on a rocky, elevated shore, stands the destination: Jerusalems Stad (City of Jerusalem), depicted as an idealized cluster of domed and spired sacred buildings, rendered in warm ochre and gold, and unmistakably evoking the skyline of the earthly Jerusalem as it was commonly imagined in Northern European Protestant iconography. A curving banner beside the city reads “Är resan stormig huru skön är himmel” (However stormy the journey, how beautiful is heaven). Below the city, at water level, a small rocky island is labeled Golgata. A tiny sailing vessel is moored beside an inscription reading Vårt skepp blifvit byggt upp på Golgata kulle (Our ship was built upon the hill of Golgotha), and nearby a second inscription identifies the passengers waiting on the shore as Förbundsfolket (People of the Covenant).

To the right of the ship, we find the port of departure, and here the designer deploys some of his most pointed satire. A lighthouse on the right shore bears the word GUDSORD (the Word of God), suggesting that even in the locus of sin, divine guidance is available to those who seek it. The shore itself is dominated by a large, ungainly building flying the banner of Staden Fördärf (Sin City, or the city of corruption). The building’s windows are labeled with the temptations and institutions of secular modernity: Krog (tavern), Vinstuga (wine bar), Biljard (billiard hall), and even Hospital. A figure by the door, labeled ‘evangelist’, appears to be proclaiming the route to salvation. On the right, a signpost reads ‘Hednaländer’ (Heathen Lands), in front of which a banner flying from the ship’s deck declares ‘Afgångstid: I dag’ (Departure time: Today), mirroring the urgency expressed in the text below.

Below the panorama, a large italic display heading repeats the title. Translated, the body text beneath reads: “Emigrants to the New Jerusalem should not fail to secure their places, as only one ship is appointed to depart. You who have fallen do not delay, for there is provision for you. Grace is sufficient, you have not sinned away the love of Jesus, do not stay away.” The lower portion contains a double-column specification table under the heading Frälsarens kungliga linie. Each column presents the sailing details in the format of a genuine steamship timetable, but with every element constituting a biblical reference.

The Age of Swedish Emigration and Evangelical Revivalism

The present broadside was produced at the confluence of two of the most powerful cultural forces in Swedish life between 1880 and 1910. On the one hand, there was mass emigration of the Swedish population, especially to the United States; on the other, the extraordinary growth of Free Church evangelical movements outside the established Lutheran church. Both forces found their most vivid symbolic meeting point in the image of a ship crossing a vast ocean towards a promised land. For the emigrant ship companies, that promised land was America; for the evangelical tract producers, it was the heavenly Jerusalem.

Swedish emigration reached its peak in the 1880s, when hundreds of thousands of Swedes departed their homeland. Shipping lines such as the “Wilson” and “Allan” Lines advertised their routes ubiquitously, allowing the iconography of the ocean liner to become deeply embedded in the Swedish visual imagination. The present broadside directly and consciously appropriates that iconography, translating the secular shipping poster into the language of Protestant salvation.

The Swedish Exodus to Jerusalem in 1896

The broadside’s title gains its full charge only when read against a dramatic real event. In the spring and summer of 1896, a group of some forty men, women, and children from the parish of Nås in Dalarna, sold their farms and properties and departed for Jerusalem. Led by a charismatic evangelical preacher, they were drawn by the millenarian message of Anna Spafford, the American founder of the Jerusalem-based American Colony, who had spent time in Chicago preaching the imminence of Christ’s Second Coming. A parallel group of Swedish-American evangelicals, led by Olaf Henrik Larsson from Nås, departed from Chicago at approximately the same time. Their combined arrival in Palestine in 1896 effectively transformed the American Colony into a Swedish-American colony. The new colonists brought practical skills such as farming, blacksmithing, baking, and weaving, thereby enhancing the colony’s significance in Ottoman Jerusalem.

The event electrified Sweden. The image of ordinary farming families abandoning their ancestral lands for a religious experiment in the Levant was both compelling and disturbing to the Swedish public. It generated enormous coverage and debate and found its most lasting literary expression in Selma Lagerlöf’s two-volume novel Jerusalem (1901–02), which she researched by visiting the American Colony in 1899, interviewing the Swedish colonists, and meeting Anna Spafford in person. Lagerlöf’s novel became one of the defining Swedish literary events of the early twentieth century. It contributed directly to her receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1909 – the first woman to ever do so. The annual outdoor pageant Ingmarsspelen, performed in Nås every year since 1959, keeps the story alive to this day. This evocative broadside belongs to this period of intense Swedish engagement with the religious emigration, both as a literal possibility and as a spiritual metaphor.

The Bunyan Tradition in Swedish Evangelicalism

The design’s debt to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) is foundational. Bunyan’s allegory had appeared in Dutch in 1681, in German in 1703, and in Swedish in 1727, and by the nineteenth century, had become one of the most widely owned and read books in Swedish pietist and Free Church households, second only to the Bible itself. The Swedish translation of the City of Destruction was Staden Fördärf, as used here. In contrast, the “Celestial City”, which Bunyan called the destination of his pilgrimage, is transposed directly onto the image of Jerusalem across the water. The designer did not need to make the allusion more explicit than that. Any evangelical Swedish reader would have recognized it immediately. The broadside’s real rhetorical achievement is that it fuses three conceptual registers simultaneously: Bunyan’s timeless allegory, the secular shipping poster of the emigrant age, and the charged topicality of the real Swedish departure for an earthly Jerusalem.

The Artist

The broadside is unattributed. No artist’s signature or monogram appears on the present example or on the comparable examples known in the trade. This anonymity is consistent with the conventions of evangelical tract production in Sweden as elsewhere. Religious publishing societies and Free Church organizations routinely produced illustrated tracts and broadsheets without crediting individual designers, with the artistic contribution subordinate to the theological message. Both the chromolithographic technique (i.e., color separation) and the image’s composition nevertheless suggest an experienced commercial lithographer. Being a pre-1909 example of this broadside, it does not contain an imprint to identify the publisher either.