A couple of weeks ago I was hot on the trail of a group of fictitious people you’ve probably never heard of, unless like me you’re lucky enough to have Swedish family. These were the Emigrants, the subjects of a four book series by author, journalist and playwright Vilhelm Morberg: The Emigrants (1949), Unto a Good Land (1952), The Settlers (1956) and The Last Letter Home (1959).

During the nineteenth century rural Sweden experienced a mass exodus to the United States, many settling in the Minnesota area, which is a lot like southern Sweden geographically and explains the lovely local accents and mannerisms if you ever watch Fargo.

Morberg invented a fictitious farmer, Karl Oskar Nilsson, and his family to describe this very real phenomenon that still has repercussions today.

We drove through the province of Småland, which looks lovely now but back then had a population the thin soil could barely support. We saw the real life farm house of Korpamoen, where the fictitious Nilssons lived. It’s about the size of a large garden shed and it looks idyllic, until you try to imagine raising a family of four there, and having to earn a living off the land.

We saw the crossroads of Åkerby, where the emigrants met together before beginning their journey to the port of Karlshamn, and where a monument to the Emigrants now stands. (And as I’ve also been to the Battery in New York, I can say I’ve been to both ends of their Atlantic journey, though mine was quicker and a lot more comfortable.)

We know the exodus happened. The emigrants didn’t, in advance, and so Morberg has to spend the first half of the first book detailing the reasons they upped and left, immersing us in the culture of nineteenth century Sweden.

He is telling the whole story. Most of the emigrants are driven by poverty, though there are other causes. Karl Oskar reluctantly concedes that emigration is the answer; his wife Kristina is firmly against it, and it takes the tragic and avoidable death of one of their children to convince her there really is no future here. The ex-prostitute Ulrika has became an Anabaptist, which puts her just as much at odds with Lutheran Sweden as her former profession. Karl Oskar’s inlaws are driven by missionary zeal, convinced that once they reach the New World they will receive the God-given gift of tongues to preach the gospel. (Spoiler: this turns out to be overly optimistic.)

The journey is harsh and brutal, and all that is achieved by reaching America is to shut the door on one set of problems and open it on another. More tragedies await them. And of course, however golden the future might eventually look, there is the heart-breaking knowledge that they will probably never see their families and friends who stay behind again.

Morberg is big stuff in Småland, even having a museum to himself – though I have to confess we didn’t feel like paying the 150kr entrance fee. We also saw the places where he was born and grew up. He was born in 1898, so would have known people who remembered the exodus. The memories and effects of it would have been embedded in the landscape and the culture all around him.

No wonder he wanted to write about it. He is describing the end of a world order that had lasted for centuries, hierarchical and traditional, and the carving out of a new one – new, free, small-r republican – against all the odds. (The books were written with 1940s and 1950s sensibilities, so don’t touch on the small matter of the native Americans.) Karl Oskar never feels entirely at home in Minnesota, but his children will fight for the Union.

Of course, Morberg could have written a history, or a series of articles. He was a journalist. But how would that engage the reader? How would it communicate the many themes that come out of that time: religious differences, grinding poverty, the clashing of cultures, how far we’ve come between then and now? Less than a hundred years later, the lives of most Swedes had vastly improved: how would he make people care what happened to their ancestors?

Sometimes only a novel will do. Or two, or three, or four …