Axel Lindén is a shepherd-philosopher with James Herriot’s knack for mishap and an almost Chekhovian deadpan humour. On Sheep: Diary of a Swedish Shepherd chronicles his Sisyphean struggle to move from “newbie” sheep farmer in search of a sustainable good life to “real farmer” – “a grump who keeps to himself.”
In 2010 he ditched his day job as a literary studies lecturer in Stockholm, rejected the ills of consumerism, pulled his three children out of kindergarten and, with his somewhat reluctant lawyer-wife in tow, embarked on a sheep-rearing “project”, possibly long term, possibly not. Either way, Lindén, then 46, “wanted out” of the city and unethical consumerism and into nature.
“I wanted to be out there, feeling the cold in my fingers,” he writes, “hitting myself on the thumb and wearing my trousers out at the knees.”
So far, so Seamus Heaney gritty and elemental. But during the move to his parents’ old farm, Lindén was reading a lot of Proust, “a writer,” he concedes, “who is the opposite of being grounded in practical, hands-on reality”. Still an ideas man at this stage, Lindén didn’t see himself as part of the natural world, in the manner of the American transcendentalist nature poet Henry David Thoreau, one of his literary pin-ups. He had no plans to be a sheep either, in the manner of British nature writer Charles Foster, who lived as a badger, even eating worms.
Lindén’s wife was “not so keen on animals”. He went off and bought 12 ewes and 16 lambs. She preferred cats. Rearing a flock on five rented hectares of the former family farm (his father was a dairy farmer) was part of a non-mechanical means to a non-profit end: small-scale sustainable living.
Eight years in, his wife is happily growing their vegetables and flowers, the freezer is stocked with lamb and Lindén has come to know “that seductive sensation of being in direct contact with the natural world”. He now lives in a state of profound empathy with his ovine charges. “You become part of them, and they of you,” he says. “It sounds silly, but it has given me an inner peace.”
The transformation was incremental. At first Lindén spent a lot of time putting up fences that promptly fell down, fixing escape holes and reflecting on the psychology of his lost sheep. The manual labour and round-the-clock responsibility for his flock absorbed him: he thought less and less about himself, improving his mental health by weaning himself off the need for praise, and coming to live in the present – that holy grail of 21st-century states of being. But then, even a sense of responsibility and of doing a job slipped away, a feeling “best captured in the notion that I’m not the one who has the sheep; it’s the sheep who have me.” His co-habitants dictate the way of things.
“You learn about sheep, how they function; it’s more than pure knowledge. It’s like a feeling in a deeper sense – what it would feel like to eat grass and have it ruminate inside you. You see the way they form their group – sometimes spread out, sometimes packed together. When you think why they do that, there isn’t a straight answer. It’s a complex world that comes to you – and so you have to change to another thought and then to another and not necessarily come to an answer.”
Trust becomes mutual, he says. Sometimes, after counting the sheep or checking up on a weaker lamb, “You lose track of time and just sit down, waiting for them to gather around you and, without really thinking about it, you become part of the flock.” They are “unpretentious and stoical,” rather like Lindén, so it’s no surprise when he adds: “Sheep are special. They really allow you to contemplate. Cows,” by contrast, “are quite hectic. With sheep, you can lie down among them.”
“I am not the person I was when I first came here,” he says, and part of the reason for that is how he bonds with the land, as well as the sheep. He became rerooted in it, writing that “my childish tender feet trod on the ancestors of these very nettles” and that during the first half of his life his development was almost “a copy of industrialism itself: rational, progressive, urban. The sheep are making me barefoot again, so to speak. A return to simple things. Only what is simple turns out to be extremely complex, with many different facets.”
“Existential insights” come with the organic territory, though he couldn’t be less pompous or more self-deprecating. He was an “urban vegetarian” when he took up his shepherd’s crook, and he still looks the part in checked shirt, rimmed glasses and long hair. Anti-intensive farming literature he read 15 years earlier compared the meat industry to the treatment of Jews in Auschwitz, he says. “I used to think so too. Now I think that is not the case.” Animal husbandry, he says, “is not violence or humans taking power over the lives of animals; it is a complex relationship, and a good one. Sheep are individuals, and you take care of them.”
The fact that you will eventually kill them, he says, is part of the relationship. “It sounds very strange, and it was very hard for me to grasp in the first year. I couldn’t take part in the slaughter. I instinctively walked away. But over the years, I have learned to integrate this into the relationship. You learn that life and death go hand in hand.”
There is a push-pull tension in the book between Lindén’s determination neither to anthropomorphise nor to sentimentalise his ewes, who are numbered, rather than named, and tomorrow’s lamb chop.
Lindén, who eats his own lamb, but is otherwise vegetarian, believes that meat-eaters shouldn’t eat any meat whose slaughter they have not been involved in. “But I don’t want to be too…” He hesitates, not prone to proselytising. “I am not saying everyone should do what I do – I am not that extreme any more – but I do think everyone should ask, ‘What is really possible?’ I had, and still have, a strong belief that we can all change the way we live.
“I realised that, living in the city, I couldn’t walk one metre without being an oil consumer. That was the basis for the move.” The farm is divided up now. The Lindéns have a café, where they sell sheepskins. They turn neighbours’ apples into juice for a tiny fee, chop their own wood and generate some of their own electricity. “During my first year on the farm, I hoped that more and more people would come and live here, that it would be a kind of movement,” says Lindén. But visitors come to visit out of curiosity. “They are not interested in living like this all year round.”
“Baah!” is a typical Lindén response to disappointment. The sheep, he says, have seen off his anger. Besides, he and his wife “are not authoritarian – we live the way we do, and our children learn from that.” They have one daughter, aged 15, and three sons, aged 15, 13 and eight. Their 15-year-old is an Afghan refugee whom the family fostered two and a half years ago. “They help me catch the lambs and every spring, they spend two or three days taking care of them. My daughter even fostered a lamb once. They have taken part. And they have seen the slaughter.”
Generation Z eco-activists they are not. “They are very normal teenagers. We have tried to let them develop their own interests, but then you see your children grow up and become exactly like everyone else. You can’t be disappointed; it is a good example of how strong society’s norms are, and how much pressure is exerted to make us all the same.
“I think people run after the wrong things,” he continues. “It would be much better if people had some sheep of their own rather than trying to be a good employee or getting likes on Facebook.”
Lindén still sees his friends back in Stockholm. “When they ask me, ‘Don’t you miss university and discussing literature?’ I say, ‘I’ve got the sheep.’ It doesn’t mean I sit in a corner of the café like a crazy person. It just means that sitting in a café listening to other people is not the full meaning of my life. It sounds like a moronic answer,” he says, “but it is true, because having a relationship with sheep can be as complex as reading Proust, I think. I don’t think, I know it.”
On Sheep: Diary of a Swedish Shepherd by Axel Lindén is published by Quercus at £9.99. To order a copy for £8.59, go to guardianbookshop.com
