Ottilie A. Liljencrantz was born in Chicago in 1876, the daughter of
Gustave A. M. and Adeline C. Liljencrantz. On her mother’s side, she was
a descendant of the Puritans; on her father’s she could trace her
lineage from Laurentius Petrie, an Archbishop in Upsala, a disciple of
Martin Luther, and a translator of the Bible in the sixteenth century.
The first ancestor to bear the family name was Count Johan Liljencrantz,
Councillor of State and Minister of Finance, who was ennobled for his
valuable services to the Kingdom during the reign of Gustavus III.
She received her education at Dearborn Seminary in Chicago, graduating
in 1903. While her health did not admit of a college course, she took a
post-graduate course in literature and was always a persistent student
in that line. She showed a marked literary taste at an early age. “I was
brought up,” she said, “on Longfellow and Bret Harte, as well as on the
myths and sagas of the North, and wrote my first story at the age of
seven, a tragic love story, which was a great deal funnier than anything
I have ever written since.”
While yet a school-girl, she wrote a number of plays for amateur
theatricals, and some short stories. Her first book, “The Scrape that
Jack Built,” was published in 1896, but the tales of the North, with the
daring exploits of its Heroes, were alluring, and she made a thorough
and exhaustive study of Northern literature—Paul Du Chaillu’s “The
Viking Age,” “Frithiof’s Saga,” Rasmus B. Anderson’s introduction to
Norse Mythology, and nearly forty other works of the same character.
Among these should be specially mentioned “Havamal,” which comprises the
sayings of Odin and is regarded as the laws of the Vikings, and from
which quotations appear at every chapter in her two great historical
novels, “The Thrall of Leif the Lucky” and “The Ward of King Canute.”
Her writings are all morally wholesome, for both the virtues and the
vices of her Viking heroes are those of their own times. In the eyes of
a Viking, the slaughter of an enemy was not a crime, but a noble and
righteous deed; and on the other hand, he would cheerfully lay down his
life for a friend.
Ottilie A. Liljencrantz had a most charming personality, and she was an
honored member of “The Little Room,” “The Chicago Woman’s Club,” and of
the “Lyceum Club” of London.
She died in Chicago on the seventh of October, 1910.