![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() To Absalom, the lethal storm seems suspiciously supernatural and the customs of the local Laplanders-Sámi people-an abomination. She forms a fast, unlikely bond with Maren. He brings a bewildered new wife, Ursa, a young city woman, ignorant of her husband’s history. News reaches the authorities, who send first a preacher, then someone more sinister, Scotsman Absalom Cornet, who has already executed a woman for witchery. They butcher reindeer and, after much dissention, split over the radical step of going to sea to fish for themselves. The women winch the men’s corpses off the rocks, up the cliffs, and store them in a boathouse the ground is far too frozen to breach. ![]() “All about her, other mothers, sisters, daughters are throwing themselves at the weather: dark, rain-slick shapes, clumsy as seals.” Forty men drown in the Christmas Eve storm, leaving their Norwegian womenfolk in a treeless village, sunk in winter darkness. Maren, 20, has run to the harbor as her father, brother, and fiance founder in boats at sea. The story opens in 1617 in the Arctic Circle, with a historic, strangely sudden storm off the island of Vardø. On an icy, dark island, men hunt witches and women fight back.īritish poet and playwright Hargrave plucks a piece of 400-year-old legal history-a European king’s prosecution of 91 people for witchcraft-and gives it a feminist spin. ![]()
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