Read Christuslegenden in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Christuslegenden by Selma Lagerlöf was first published in 1904. In Passage you read the full text in the Dutch translation by Margaretha Meijboom, marked beginner and filed under children and fantasy. It runs to about 53,900 words.

A shepherd's fire on the holy night. A little grey bird waiting for its colour. A flame carried home from Jerusalem.

The book opens with a memory of a grandmother who told stories from morning till night, always ending with “and all of it really happened”. These legends grow from that voice: simple, wondering tales about the life of Christ and the ordinary people it touches.

In “The Holy Night” a stranger walks through the dark asking for fire for a newborn child, and the shepherd's fierce dogs cannot bite him. In “Robin Redbreast” a small grey bird, made in Paradise, must wait generations to earn the red breast of its name. And in “The Sacred Flame” Raniero di Ranieri, the strongest and most quarrelsome man in Florence, vows to carry a candle lit in Jerusalem all the way home without letting it go out.

Christ Legends (1904), by Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a gentle classic in clear, simple language.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Dutch. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of Dutch and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.