When someone mentions a witch hunt, you think Salem, right? At least, I do, thanks to the innumerable references in popular culture to the events of 1692 and 1693. One is bound to ask: does Salem owe its notoriety to being the largest-scale witch hunt in history—or to being set in colonised America, which will eventually become a global power and influence the world?
Long before the trials in Salem, witch hunts were held in Aalborg, Denmark, between 1597 and 1621. Many popular travel websites offer a witch-hunt tour of the city through which tourists can explore the past, yet there’s hardly any information (in English) about the actual trials and executions. Here enters Olga Ravn with a chilling imagining of the events, primarily in Aalborg, preceding the execution of the only noble woman executed for witchcraft.
Translated from Danish by the prolific Martin Aitken, the story follows the life of Christenze Kruckow, an unmarried noblewoman without means living in Nakkebølle, south of Funen. In 1615, she lives with Eiler Brokkenhuus, the master of Nakkebølle Manor, along with his wife Anne Bille. When Anne keeps losing her newborn children to death, she accuses her housemaid, Ousse Lauridsdatter, and Christenze of witchcraft. Kruckow flees to Aalborg, “city of hate” (p. 29), the following year, where she meets Maren Knepsis—a well-liked woman in the society—who shows her around and introduces her to a community of working-class women who gather together to work, gossip, and engage in merry-making. However, the rumour of witchcraft follows Christenze and takes all the women associated with her to the trial. This persecution is fuelled by Elisabeth, the wife of the local Pastor, Klyne. Despite being a part of their group, Elisabeth is often left out and becomes the first to testify against them.
Structurally, the novella is divided into two parts: “A Rumour of Witchcraft” and “A Witch Trial.” Both parts are narrated by the wax child created by Christenze Kruckow, “secreted from the scaly glands of the honeybee’s abdomen, of rose hip, propolis, pollen, dread, quince, longing, yeast dough, age, and ever young, with infinity’s secret in my folds” (p. 85). It is a curious choice for a narrator, given the wax child has no mouth with which to speak, and yet it transcends time and space to haunt the readers with a hypnotising voice expressing disconcerting speculations and commentary on humans. It says, “Do not ask for whom I speak. Do not ask on whose behalf. I speak for you,” and also:
Deep under Aalborg is a red and terrible altar, dark as a womb’s interior. No one can escape it. Hatred comes to the one who trembles. I pity them, I pity my mistress, I pity Maren, and Maren’s servant girl, I pity the humans, reckless, quickly absorbed and used up like nylon stockings that run the same evening they are worn. (pp. 72-3)
Despite being written in Ravn’s signature short episodes (as in The Employees [2020]), this sole voice of the wax child creates a lasting lull in the atmosphere, an eerie feeling of its presence, thanks to Ravn’s visceral recreation of these times. In part this is achieved by the fact that, on many occasions, the wax child repeats itself as it brings new information to the surface. The story is interspersed with spells taken from various grimoires, and yet the narration itself seems like spell work. The omniscient wax child circumscribes the convicted women as it observes them. There’s an initiation: “I saw the rising of realms, the founding of states, the centralizations of power” (p. 5). There’s the aforementioned comment on humanity, and then there’s a conclusion: “To the dead I mean nothing. I meant little to them when they were alive. To my mistress I was only an instrument. Made for strength, made for harm. Every evening I tell the same story, and I speak to the soil” (p. 170).
The wax child transcends time and mentions how it gathers its information: It speaks to fingernails, teeth, drops of ink, threads, people, and even a dead fly. Despite this, the act of storytelling eludes definite understanding. In all these ways, Ravn’s writing, in Aitkin’s translation, becomes something akin to witchcraft: intriguing and elusive, eerie and real, chilling and scattered. Tonally, it seems like a nighttime story to lure readers to sleep but then turns into a story of horrifying violence, taking sleep far away, freezing the audience in their places, fearful to move.
We fear that which we don’t understand. This holds historically true for the patriarchal world’s treatment of women who do not fit its prescribed image of femininity. In charting a literary history of witches, Jess Bergman writes, “Witches are women whose embodiment of femininity in some way transgresses society’s accepted boundaries—they are too old, too powerful, too sexually aggressive, too vain, too undesirable.” Now add to this a woman’s denial to bow down to authorities (be they the state, church, or just men) and engaging with fellow women intimately, and she is a threat to the moral and ethical values on which the society is flimsily set. So are Christenze and her companions Maren Knepsis, Apelone Ibsdatter, and Dorte Kjærulf—characters based on the real-life women convicted for witchcraft in Aalborg.
The author thus brings forth the intersection of gender, class, and power in her imagining. It is here the resentment of women by women, be it Anne or Elisabeth, that leads to the arrest of women. This resentment comes from not being able to fit into the set role of a woman, for Anne, and from being left out in the neighbourhood, for Elisabeth. Both women are in positions of power: Anne is a noblewoman, and Elisabeth related to the clergy. In setting these two characters in such ways, Ravn brings home the very real issue of women being patriarchal pawns—especially when, by patriarchal standards, they seem to be “lacking” something, and blame free and happy women for their loss. It’s a historically proven way for the patriarchy to pit women against one another.
The free woman, of course, tries her best to rid the rest of its grip. For here too, Kruckow tells Elisabeth, “Magic is possible. Laughter is possible. There is a way out” (p. 169).
Ironically, in this reimagination of social horror, Ravn creatively makes space for (slapstick) comedy set in the court, the king an active participant. But there is no happy ending: Yet another instance of patriarchy being ultimately supreme is that Christenze’s nobility can save neither her nor her friends. It is interesting to note that the law punished working-class women in Aalborg by burning them, a punishment that maximizes pain for the victim and pleasure for the watchers. As for the nobility, the king makes an exception for them to be executed by a sword, meaning a more instant death. Yet Ravn interestingly makes the reader wonder: Is a witch, or a free woman’s voice, ever dead? This is a question likely to ring in the heads of those who watched the executions, and more so for those who stood against them, even if they were ignorant of the punishment to be meted out.
The Wax Child is ingenious for its storytelling that brings forth the horrors of the witch hunt in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Denmark by mirroring the horror in its visceral and eerie narration that evokes disbelief in the familiar. Witch hunt is not new, but going beyond Salem in popular culture and literature might just be. Ravn’s work and Aitkin’s translation here are a remembrance of a history that’s been wiped out, if recorded at all in the first place, and challenges all forms of power.