Custom and Tradition

From the opening paragraphs, in which the narrator reminds the reader that "a human race had lived on this land for a thousand years" to the closing sentence, in which the reader is told that the place was known as "Sorrow-Acre a long time after the story of the woman and her son had itself been forgotten," Dinesen keeps the power of custom and tradition in the forefront of her narrative. In this fictional world, custom and tradition work hand in hand, reinforcing each other-things are done in a certain way, a customary way, because there is a tradition of doing them that way; the tradition exists because of the adherence to custom. This is, in some sense, the crux of the story, for when Adam returns from England, awakened to the ideas of freedom and equality then sweeping America, France, and England, he finds it...