Before the Frost

This harsh, elemental story dramatizes a Danish freeholder farmer’s hard-scrabble struggle to survive in 1850s Denmark. “Before the frost” ends up meaning the urgency man  has to prove himself as he approaches the big chill, death. That moral imperative shadows all his worldly drives.

Cow Jensen (named for his deft hand with cows) lives in constant urgency. At the beginning he rushes to complete the harvest. Then he rushes to bring in the hay before the rains rot it. 

Add the vertical urgency to maintain his social status. After he’s forced to sell his cow Merna to feed his family, the church deacon — who represents the civil as well as religious law and order here — moves him back a pew in church, because of his reduction in possessions and status. 

Jensen is a widower, responsible for his blossoming daughter Signe and two young nephews, Peder (about17) and Mads (about 6). As his crops fail and his resources and prospects dwindle, he negotiates Signe’s marriage to Ole, the neighbour’s strapping young son Signe likes. That procures a new cow and a share of Ole’s father’s pension. But it fails to secure his nephews’ future, so Jensen looks beyond.

The rich Swede Gustav wants to buy a swamp portion of Jensen’s land to cash in on the new “white gold,” sugar beets. Mads and Peder have never tasted sugar. Jensen initially rejects the offer because he needs the land to feed his cows. To Gustav’s manager, Jensen’s rejection of the deal shows he knows more about cows than about business. 

Jensen proves otherwise when he breaks his deal with Ole and proposes a sweeping sale to Gustav: all the land, the cattle, the barn home, but also responsibility for Jensen, his nephew labourers — and marriage to Signe. 

The deal closes with a shady rider: the old home will have to be burned completely and the hefty insurance payment turned over to Gustasv. The family moves in with Gustav to prepare for the wedding. The boys get their own sparse rooms. Signe learns to play a classical piece on the piano, a step up from helping her father deliver cows. Jensen gets to wield authority over the workers. But this family doesn’t name its cows. 

The story shows the way one dirties one’s hand in getting ahead in life. Arguably Jensen’s hands are never cleaner than they are when he shoves an arm up a cow to help deliver a new calf. After he washes that one up, he sinks into the swampy trenches of social advancement. 

  In the final scene the severely soiled old farmer is dressed more finely, boasts a better seat in the church — ostensibly closer to the alter, deacon and God — and he’s the happy father dancing with his beautiful well-dressed wife at her wedding. Signe radiates joy, transformed by her new station and life. 

      But Jensen’s face is a freeze of moral paralysis. The feet are bouncing but the face is stern. His ambition, proper for a father, has severely compromised his soul. Gustav’s prim and stately mother puts a gloss on the murderous consequences of Jensen’s deeds: “The things we do for our children.”