MERAB’S BEAUTY And Other Stories <i> by Torgny Lindgren translated by Mary Sandbach and Tom Geddes (Harper & Row: $18.95; 243 pp.) </i>

Torgny Lindgren’s quintessentially peasant tales practically exude the smell of the earth. Every moment in the life of Lindgren’s villagers comes down to the basics: food, sex, death, God’s grace or wrath.

The Swedish novelist, poet and short-story writer has constructed in “Merab’s Beauty” a set of stories in a classic cycle form. He begins with the tale of Molin, an incompetent tailor whose services are abandoned after he sews the minister a coat so ill-made “it was impossible to preach in it.” But the tailor’s ineptitude is not the point; Molin discovers that people would rather buy his wall hangings adorned with biblical sayings than his clothing.

Like a storyteller whose function is to pass the time on long winter evenings, Lindgren appears to keep changing direction in his narrative. “It was like this with the wall hangings,” Lindgren announces, apparently beginning another story in the middle of the current one. In the end, of course, he draws all his strands together. When we reach the end of Molin’s tale, it appears that the tailor’s true calling is storytelling, and that people buy his wall hangings just to hear him tell stories about the folk in the neighborhood--and these are the stories that make up the collection.

Words--whether the word of God, an evil word or a good one--are as tangible to Lindgren’s characters as bread or stone, and the power and magic of words are the recurrent theme in these resonant tales. The words Molin sews into his wall hangings are simple, but when he protests that “I only took these words out of the Psalms,” his first customer tells him: “But you have made them great, and sewn them so that they can be hung up on a wall. Words can always be found, but they first come alive when you say them or spell them or hang them up on a wall.” In another story, a strong young peasant tries to protect himself from consumption by never allowing anyone to name the disease in his presence; he sacrifices his entire youth, and the love of his life, by shutting himself up in an attic and communicating only with a few people through an iron tube.

In the title story, the farmer Gabriel manages to exorcise the ghost of his cruel father, who is menacing Gabriel’s beloved cows, by argumentation--though he is not confident of his wordsmithing. With words praising the divine beauty of cows, Gabriel triumphs over the jealous spirit: “He who knows how to behold a cow . . . need never have thirsty eyes again.” That power of transformation through words stands clearly at the center of Lindgren’s cycle: The beauty of words keeps evil at bay.