1908. In the autumn of the same year he was taken into a lunatic asylum in Stockholm, and in February 1909 he was moved to the asylum of St. Lars in Lund, where he spent the rest of his life. He never married. Writing works There is no concrete evidence of any literary production from his years of travel, but he turned to reading and writing when he was confined to the asylum in Lund. He began as a conservative and patriotic writer of verses, commentaries, and translations in local daily newspapers; but through his reading of, among others, the English socialist Robert Blatchford, he gradually adopted a more liberal and even radical attitude. Soon he was attracted by mysticism, first of all by Emanuel Swedenborg, whose works he started to translate. Then he turned to the Christian quietism and mysticism of Jakob Böhme, who remained one of his main inspirations. In this context he resumed his Persian studies and also started to learn Hebrew. Against all odds, with repeated lapses into alcoholism and deep depressions, he began a new career as an author and translator. His first publication (Uppsala, 1913) was a Swedish translation of an English work by Alexander Whyte on Jakob Böhme. In 1918 two volumes of translations from works by Böhme appeared in print, and the same year saw his first publication of a Swedish translation from Persian, the Bustan of Sa'di, possibly first encountered by him when he was preparing for his Persian examination in India some thirty years earlier. It was the first in a long series of Persian translations of classical Persian literature by his hand. In the period 1918-43 he published no less than 23 volumes, altogether more than 8000 pages, of such translations. After the Golestan came an anthology of robaiyyat and mathnawiyyat, then Shabestari's Golshan-e raz, the Robaiyyyat of Khayyam, an abridged version of Sana'i's Hadiqat al Haqiqa and the Anwar-e sohayli of Wa'ez Kashefi. However, the greatest achievement of Hermelin was his translation of works by Farid al-din 'Attar and Jalal-al-Din Rumi. Both Farid al-din 'Attar's Pand-nama and his Manteq al-tayr appeared in print in 1929, his Tazkerat al-awlia in four volumes in 1931-43, and the Masnawi of Jalal al-Din Rumi in six volumes in 1933-39. In between he also published translations of excerpts from the Shah-nama and the full texts of the Kalila o Demna and Nizami's Eskandar-nama.