ACCIDENTAL SHEPHERD

A real-life adventure story set in the wilds of Norway.

“A California girl,” as she calls herself in her memoir, Greensfelder came of age in the counterculture and rubbed shoulders with Beat poets. Her adventures didn’t begin until she settled on a remote farm in Norway, not knowing any Norwegian and knowing little about farming. When the owner of the farm was hospitalized and unable to work, the young Californian took over the operation and learned about raising sheep for meat, not wool, and learned about the customs of a traditional agricultural community. She also learned to speak Norwegian; her narrative is peppered with Norwegian words. Strong on ethnography, it’s a reliable guide to the kind of rural life that no longer exists—tractors replaced horses—and the kind of insular farmers who have largely vanished along with an ancient culture rooted in the land and its spirits. This gritty memoir is a testament to the resilience of an outsider who not only made her way in a patriarchal society but also became a Norwegian celebrity: Years ago, she wrote and published an account of her experiences that became a bestseller in Norway. In this book, she returns to her days as a shepherd and describes her loneliness, her longing for companionship and romance, and her remarkable ability to labor in a hardscrabble environment.

A sobering and insightful account of one woman’s time in a place that time forgot.