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The Ring | Introduction

The short story ‘‘The Ring’’ by Isak Dinesen (whose real name was Karen Blixen) can be seen both as typical of its author’s literary art and as different from her most characteristic mode of expression. Its eighteenth-century Danish setting places it within the deliberate archaism of Dinesen’s storytelling, and its concern with fundamentals such as identity, sexuality, and violence echo such concerns in her other tales. On the other hand, ‘‘The Ring’’ has a simplicity not found in some of Dinesen’s other works. In its concise style, it resembles a folktale or an episode from a medieval saga. ‘‘The Ring,’’ which appears in the 1958 collection called Anecdotes of Destiny, adheres to the classical styles of storytelling, the Aristotelian unities of character, setting, and temporal span, and explores the way in which violence both breaks and reforges character.

Although dismissed by some of her contemporaries as an archaist who manipulated devices of eighteenth-century storytelling in a manner irrelevant to the modern condition, Dinesen has since come to be valued as an incisive commentator on modernity. While ‘‘The Ring’’ deals with a group of people, rural Danes of a past century, quite alien to the American reader of the 1990s, the tale addresses a universal human condition: Like Lovisa, the young bride, readers can find themselves caught up in a world which they did not make but with which they must come to terms.

The Ring Summary

Dinesen, writing in the 1950s, sets the action of ‘‘The Ring’’ in rural Denmark ‘‘on a summer morning one hundred and fifty years ago,’’ which would correspond approximately to the year 1800. Sigismund and Lovisa, two newlyweds (twenty-four and nineteen years of age) whose love, after much tribulation, has prevailed over the reluctance of the bride’s family, are out walking to observe the pasturage of Sigismund’s farm and to inspect the Cotswold rams by which the farmer hopes to ‘‘improve his Danish stock.’’ Dinesen’s narrator divulges Lovisa’s reminiscences of their struggle against her parents’ wishes (she is of higher station in life than he, and her family is wealthier than his) and her present sense of having been liberated into ‘‘freedom’’ by her marriage. Lovisa delights in the ‘‘rustic atmosphere’’ of the locale and experiences joy in the notion that she has no secret from her husband.

At the sheepfold, sheepmaster Mathias tells Sigismund that two of his English lambs are dead and two more sick. While two helpers go off to fetch the sick lambs for examination, Sigismund and Mathias converse about the sheep thief who has been plaguing the district. The thief drags off his prey ‘‘like a wolf’’ and three nights earlier killed a man and injured the man’s son in order to escape capture after having been caught by them... » Complete The Ring Summary