Summary
The story begins with Lagerlöf describing the general circumstances of the vagabond. He is a man who wanders from farm to farm, through towns and along country roads, begging, stealing, and bartering to meet his basic needs. When he is able to scrounge the materials, he makes rat traps out of wire and attempts to sell them. He wears the rat traps that haven't been sold on a string around his neck, and they hang off of him like pendants.
In the course of his lonely travels, and after making many a rat trap, the vagabond has a realization about life: that life, itself, is like the rat traps he fashions. Little bits of hope and temptation here and there are like the bits of cheese that lure rats to their demise.
Lagerlöf explains that the vagabond espouses this pessimistic outlook because he's lived a difficult life. After introducing the vagabond and his grim outlook on life, Lagerlöf narrows the scope of the story to a specific winter night—right before Christmas, in fact—when the vagabond comes across a crofter's cottage and knocks on the door to see if the crofter will grant him shelter.
The crofter happily invites him in, and Lagerlöf explains his eagerness by telling the reader that the crofter is a widower and childless. For him, the vagabond is a chance at company and conversation, both of which he's been deprived of for a long time.
The crofter makes them both a hot plate of food and cuts off a healthy chunk of tobacco from his tobacco roll, enough for him and the vagabond to fill their pipes. While chatting, the crofter tells the vagabond about his cow. He used to work at the iron mill, but now he's retired and relies on his cow to make a living. He milks her every morning and sells her milk once a week at the market. He boasts about what a great cow she is and shows the vagabond the thirty kronor she earned him from the previous week, which he keeps in a leather purse by the front door.
They go to sleep, and early the next morning, as the crofter wakes to milk his cow, the vagabond leaves the premise. He doesn't go far though, and once he knows the crofter is occupied milking the cow, the vagabond returns to the house, breaks the front window, reaches in, and steals the bills.
At first, the vagabond feels quite good about his fortunes. The money will make sure his needs are met for the immediate future, and he's had a good night's rest. He walks through the woods and avoids the main road so that if the crofter alerts the neighbors, he won't be seen.
As the day wears on and the vagabond walks deeper and deeper into the woods, he grows concerned. He's clearly lost, the sun is setting, and it's shaping up to be a very cold winter night. The vagabond recognizes that he now finds himself in a rat trap-like scenario, where he was tempted by the cash, but it has ultimately led him to a more difficult and dangerous set of obstacles.
Just as his hope is totally running out, the vagabond hears the strike of a hammer at regular intervals. The sound grows louder, and the vagabond realizes with relief that he's approaching the iron mill.
He arrives at Ramsjö Ironworks, where a master smith and his apprentice are standing by the furnace. The vagabond edges closer to the furnace in his thin rags, warming up from the cold winter night. The smith doesn't object, but regards him with indifference.
Later that night, the owner of the mill passes through to check on his operation and spots the vagabond warming himself by the furnace. The man is referred to as the Ironmaster, and he mistakes the vagabond for an old friend from the army by the name of Captain von Ståhle. The vagabond, feeling trapped, does not correct him.
Ironmaster Willmansson invites the vagabond to spend Christmas with him and his daughter, Edla. His wife has died, and it's just the two of them at his house now. The vagabond humbly refuses, but Willmansson persists for a while until finally leaving the mill.
A few hours after he leaves, Edla Willmansson shows up to try to change the vagabond's mind. She's followed by a valet holding a large fur coat. Edla introduces herself and tells the vagabond that she has asked permission to come here and bring him back to the house. The vagabond is shocked and touched by the gesture, accepts the coat for trip to the house, and exits the mill, where he had been resting.
The Ironmaster confers with his daughter on Christmas Eve, while the vagabond is still sleeping. He tells her that he plans to host him until he's in better shape, and then he wants to find him steady work. But when the vagabond comes downstairs after having been shaved, washed, and clothed, the Ironmaster realizes that he is not, in fact, his old comrade, but a complete stranger.
The Ironmaster is angry at first. His first instinct is to call the sheriff, but the vagabond quickly comes to his own defense. He pounds on the table and explains his theory to the Ironmaster, about the whole world being a wire rat trap. The Ironmaster is amused by this bit of philosophizing and decides not to involve authorities, but still asks the vagabond to leave.
This is where Edla finally steps in and insists that her father let the vagabond stay, despite the initial deception. The Ironmaster is taken aback by his daughter's proposition, but she makes a sentimental argument about the spirit of Christmas and hospitality. Her father finally yields. The vagabond is, again, stunned by Edla's generosity.
So, the vagabond spends Christmas day feasting and resting, sleeping most of the day away. He is not accustomed to having access to warm, comfortable spaces, so he sleeps more soundly than he has in years. He is given one of Ironmaster Willmansson's suits as a Christmas gift.
Then, the next day, Edla and the Ironmaster go to a church service, leaving the vagabond to sleep in their home. At the service, the crofter tells everyone that a vagabond stole thirty kronor from his cottage, and the man wore rat traps around his neck.
Ironmaster Willmansson is furious and embarrassed to realize that he's hosted a thief. On the ride back to his house, he muses about what the vagabond might have stolen while they were at church. When they arrive home, the Ironmaster asks the valet if anything is missing, and the valet tells him no, but the vagabond left a gift wrapped for Edla.
Edla opens the gift, and inside finds a rat trap with the thirty kronor the vagabond stole from the crofter in the trap. In a note, he thanks the Willmanssons for hosting him and treating him with dignity fit for a captain. He asks that they return the money to the crofter, and signs the note as Captain von Ståhle.
Analysis
With "The Rat Trap," Selma Lagerlöf gives her reader a traditional, didactic tale. Unlike in fairy tales, nursery rhymes, or fables, there is no magic or talking animals. There is, however, a warm, feel-good message, a holiday theme, and a few formal elements that align this tale with those aforementioned genres. The first and most recognizable of these formal conventions is the first line of the story, which begins with the words "Once upon a time" (66). By beginning this way, Lagerlöf earnestly telegraphs to her reader that this is a story that likely adheres to a familiar, widely recognized structure.
By repeating the phrase "even so" in the opening paragraph, Lagerlöf emphasizes the desperate nature of the vagabond's situation. Even in his most ideal of circumstances, where he is able to scrounge materials and make and sell his traps, "his clothes were in rags, his cheeks were sunken, and hunger gleamed in his eyes" (66).
Lagerlöf establishes the theme of loneliness and alienation early on in the narrative. In the second paragraph of the story, she writes, "No one can imagine how sad and monotonous life can appear to such a vagabond, who plods along the road, left to his own meditations." His only respite is hating the world and thinking of it in miserable terms, which is how he comes up with the central allegory of the tale: that all of life's hopes and opportunities are merely bait to lure people to their downfalls. Lagerlöf writes, "The world had, of course, never been very kind to him, so it gave him unwonted joy to think ill of it in this way" (66).
Lagerlöf recognizes that the exceptionally grim circumstances of the vagabond's life have directly led to his need to steal. In fact, unlike many didactic tales before her, Lagerlöf abstains from making direct moral judgments about the vagabond's actions. Her moral judgments are instead focused on the more typically positive moral actions of the tale, like the hospitality and generosity exhibited by Edla. Lagerlöf's abstention from commenting on the moral value of the vagabond's thievery combined with her portrayal of the vagabond's desperate circumstances allows readers to draw their own conclusions about whether or not he was justified in stealing from the crofter.
Once the vagabond steals from the crofter, he shows no immediate remorse about it, even though he has previously spent a pleasant evening playing cards and conversing with the crofter. Lagerlöf writes, "As he walked along with the money in his pocket he felt quite pleased with his smartness" (67). When the vagabond finds himself lost in the woods, it is a clear example of situational irony. The vagabond comes up with a pessimistic theory in the introduction that predicts his very predicament. This point in the plot also completes the foreshadowing set up by the introduction.
At the iron mill, Lagerlöf gestures to a larger framework of class disparity by describing the aloof manner with which the smith regards the vagabond. The smith consents to the vagabond warming himself by the furnace "without honoring him with a single word." The smith doesn't bother talking to the vagabond because, "He looked the way people of his type usually did, with a long beard, dirty, ragged, and with a bunch of rat traps dangling on his chest" (68). Lagerlöf gestures to her themes of prejudice and expectations by assigning the vagabond to a "type" from the perspective of the smith, and making this pre-judgment the basis for the smith's "haughty" attitude toward the vagabond.
On the other hand, since the Ironmaster is under the impression that the vagabond is his old friend who was once a comfortable member of the middle class, he assumes that the vagabond's reticence is due to embarrassment over the state of his clothes and the sunkenness of his cheeks. By including these subtle social cues in an otherwise fairly direct tale, Lagerlöf comments on the way people presume to treat one another because of their appearance or social standing.
By setting the story during Christmas, and by writing about a traveler seeking shelter, Lagerlöf directly engages with the Christian birth stories of the New Testament. The birth stories emphasize how Mary and Joseph could not find a room at any inn in Bethlehem, and so Mary is forced to give birth to Jesus outside in a barn. Thus, the Christian tradition is to extend extra hospitality around the Christmas holiday, which partially inspires Edla to insist that the vagabond stay at their home even after he is discovered to be a stranger.
Though the Ironmaster's plans for the vagabond greatly change after he realizes he is not his captain friend, he continues to treat him with dignity, at the urging of his daughter. “First of all," he says, "we must see to it that he gets a little flesh on his bones... And then we must see that he gets something else to do than to run around the country selling rat traps" (70)—this is before he realizes the vagabond is a stranger. By including this bit of dialogue, Lagerlöf demonstrates how much power the Ironmaster wields as a wealthy landowner to improve someone's situation—but only when he feels so inclined.
Nonetheless, the moral of the story remains, as demonstrated so plainly by the vagabond's gift and letter to Edla, that people will often rise or shrink to the expectations set for them by others. Since the Willmanssons treated him like a captain, the vagabond rectified his actions and leaves inspired to live a life befitting a captain. Of course, it's a simplistic and optimistic conclusion to apply to the extreme poverty Lagerlöf ascribes to the vagabond, but it is nonetheless the moral being proposed.
