Markings

Markings is the private journal of Dag Hammarskjöld, the Swedish diplomat who served as UN Secretary-General from 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961. Published posthumously in Swedish in 1963 and in English by Alfred A. Knopf in 1964, translated by Leif Sjöberg and W. H. Auden, the book collects entries spanning from 1925 to his final weeks.

The notes are not political memoirs — they record an interior dialogue about solitude, faith, duty, and self-surrender within a life of public responsibility. Hammarskjöld wrote in a condensed style: haiku-like poems, aphorisms, and brief prose passages, shaped by the medieval Christian mystical tradition, particularly Meister Eckhart, and by a strict demand for honesty with himself. The tension the book traces is between the via activa demanded by his office and the via contemplativa he considered equally essential.

The longest journey is the journey inwards.

p. 58 · 1950

Contents

Reception

Markings received immediate critical attention on publication in the US in 1964; the New York Times Book Review gave it a front-page notice. W. H. Auden's foreword framed it as a record of "the attempt by a professional man of action to unite in one life the via activa and the via contemplativa," a characterisation that has shaped most subsequent reading. The book has remained continuously in print for over sixty years. In religious studies and spirituality writing it is placed alongside Thomas Merton's journals and the notebooks of Simone Weil as a private devotional record from someone operating at the intersection of contemplative life and public action. Hammarskjöld's posthumous Nobel Peace Prize in 1961 contributed to sustained international interest. A small body of scholarship questions whether the journal was consciously shaped for posthumous publication and examines how far its religious vocabulary maps onto any single tradition.

Frequently asked

What is Markings about?

Markings is the private journal of Dag Hammarskjöld covering his inner life from 1925 to 1961. The entries record an ongoing dialogue about faith, solitude, duty, and self-surrender — not political memoirs but a spiritual diary written by the UN's second Secretary-General.

Who translated Markings into English?

The translation was done by Leif Sjöberg, a Swedish scholar, and W. H. Auden, who also wrote the foreword. The English edition was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1964, a year after the posthumous Swedish original.

Is Markings a religious book?

Hammarskjöld's language draws on Christian mysticism, particularly the medieval tradition associated with Meister Eckhart, but the book does not belong to a single confession. Auden described it as a record of the attempt to live the contemplative life within the active life.