The story chronicles the titular character's renunciation of his faith, his various bereavements and, ultimately, it depicts his disillusionment and his death.
This disillusionment is part and parcel of the work's naturalism—focusing on his failures as a lover and as an artist, Niels Lyhne demonstrates the individual's helplessness and serves as a critique of atheism as well as faith.
[2] Rainer Maria Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet, cites the Bible and Jacobsen's work as the two books most worth reading.
Since a focus of Niels Lyhne is how the nonbeliever deals with death, in pairing this novel with the Bible, Rilke sets the unwary young poet upon the dialectic.
The novel was translated as Siren Voices (1896) by Ethel F. L. Robertson (otherwise known by her nom de plume, Henry Handel Richardson).