The Waves of Destiny: The Tales of the North Seas by Jonas Lie

Thanks to the Dagon Press, the disturbing stories "Weird Tales from the Northern Seas" (1893) by the Norwegian writer Jonas Lie are finally available in Italian, entirely inspired by Nordic folklore: stories focused on meeting "other" entities such as the draug and the supernatural bride, as well as on the sea as a symbol of the mystery and invincible forces of nature.


di Marco Maculotti
cover: Theodor Kittelsen, β€œNΓΈkken”, 1904

Β« ... when I ring the gates under the high mountains they open wide and through them is the way to the unspeakable powers of nature Β» [1]

In a 2004 interview Thomas Ligotti he related, referring to the theories of the German historian of religions Rudolph Otto, the sacred experience and the horror narrative, underlining the way in which the literary uncanny can sometimes result in a real spiritual experience for the reader who knows how to immerse it [2]:

β€œIn your book "The sacred", Rudolf Otto asserts that horror stories offer a kind of low-intensity spiritual experience, the pale, primitive trace of a full-blown encounter with the divine as a terrifying and immaterial force. Β»

It is no coincidence, therefore, that religious beliefs are so often handed down from generation to generation by means of terrifying stories, told on winter nights around the hearth, contemplating the existence of creatures other from the human being, who experiences that precisely in the encounter with them mysterium tremendous of which Otto spoke in his famous essay mentioned by Ligotti: fate e fairies, hybrid and partially zoomorphic entities e return.

Always the Folklore of cultures all over the world abounds in entities of such frankness, lurking in the dark corners of the world and of human consciousness, always ready to drag their victims into those additional and "thin" dimensions in which the laws of physics do not apply, nor, more often than not, the values ​​that humanity considers its own.

Cover Lie x web

With regard to what has been said, very few corporate folkloric comparisons with the Scandinavian one, which literally swarms with uncanny creatures, as the collection of Macabre tales of the North Seas by Jonas Lie, recently fished out of the Dagon Press by Pietro Guarriello - to whom our heartfelt applause goes - and published for the first time in Italian translation (by Bernardo Cicchetti) with the original illustrations by Laurence Housman.

Originally released in 1893, Weird Tales from the Northern Seas is the second work published in Italy by the Norwegian writer - one of the great exponents of his country's fiction together with Hamsun, Ibsen, Bjornson and Vinje - after the novel The SeerΒ (Den Fremsynte), published by Serra and Riva in 1981. Also in this case the master is, as Cicchetti writes in the short afterword [3], "The" natural "presence of ghosts and evil creatures", which "refer directly to the small people of Do and the Nordic legends ”, as well Β«The sea as a symbol of mystery and of invincible forces of natureΒ», a theme that later will also be dear to William H. Hodgson and HP Lovecraft.

Being tales inspired by the Norwegian folk tradition, you will notice how the Weird (i.e. the uncanny) in which the protagonists run into is most of the times tied hand in glove - even semantically - to the wyrd [4], which in the Nordic tradition is equivalent towarp of life, fate or destiny which is up to everyone according to an inscrutable design that can only rarely be "untied" to return to a condition of normality: often the suspension of natural laws and the encounter with terrifying entities occur as a result of some "flaw" of which the protagonist of the moment is stained, deliberately and culpably ignoring the prescriptions of popular tradition.

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HP Hansen, portrait of Jonas Lie

This is the case, for example, of the story that opens this collection, The fisherman and the draug, in which the unfortunate Elias stabs a seal with a long hooked point, realizing only later that it was only the most classic "disguise" for a drag, ie the "undead" of the Norse mythology, that in Lie's "black" tales, similar to the tritons of the Hellenic tradition, dwells with his fellow creatures in the depths of the sea and sometimes wanders on the white waves on a ghost boat, showing himself to his victims until he manages to obtain the desired revenge.

This is a mythical figure who has a perfect counterpart in his counterpart of the South Seas, that is, of the Pacific: as he pointed out, among others, Robert L. Stevenson in his travel outlets [5], in the same way as the drag Scandinavian, it is believed that this entity always navigates with its back to the fishermen it encounters, to prevent the latter, seeing its face, from realizing its nature other and detached from the world of the living. The drag indeed presents himself as the real protagonist of this collection of Lie's tales, appearing in various episodes, such as Tug of war o Isak and the parish priest of BrΓΆnΓΆ, where it is implied that to become drag they are invariably the dead at sea, deprived of pious burial in their homeland - a detail later confirmed also in Finnish blood.

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Theodor Kittelsen, β€œDraugen”, 1895

The boundary between the drag and other mythical creatures of Norse oceanic folklore, on the other hand, is often very labile: ne The hulder-fish, the protagonist Nona is dragged, while she is sailing on a lake which was said to have a "double bottom" - a classic theme also of Celtic folk tradition -, in a maelstrom hellish, until he slips "in a kind of twilight along an underground river", where he spots gigantic sea ​​snakes such as lindorm and ligorm, "Hideous shapeless monsters, with burning mane" and swarms of "humanoid creatures" similar to those that "land dwellers see in front of elf mounds" [6], to then miraculously return, once the disturbing charade underneath, on the surface, is over, to see the stars again.

Or, again, in the already mentioned Finnish blood a boy named Eilert, for rubbing fishing nets with the dust of the dead and for shooting an eider (a kind of seabird), is dragged into the underwater world from a Finnish peer with whom he used to play as a child, and whom he then offended and dismissed after growing up, giving credit to rumors about the "cursed blood" of the Finns and their alleged relations with witchcraft:

"Oh, a thousand times we have played on the shore,
And caught small fish - no longer do you remember?
We ran with the surf that rolled at our feet,
And the old merfolk lurking we have always cheated.

Yes, you will think a lot about my lullaby
While the waves sway and sigh the breezes.
Who sits now and crying on your cheeks? And she
That his soul gave you and that he lived in you.

But once, as an eider, I came here
Under a rock you lay, and with the rifle you aimed;
You hit me in the chest; and now the blood you see
It's your brand that I carry, oh! my love. "Β [7]

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Ilya Repin, "Sadko", 1876

In this tale the underwater entities belonging to the "world below" are none other than the ancient Finnish inhabitants of the region, moved on to lead a subtle existence beneath the sea after having left dominion over their ancient territory to the Scandinavians of Indo-European lineage. Above all, the archaic sovereigns stand out, in perfect coherence with the ancient mythologists that pass on the passage of the ancient kings, having lost his lordship over his kingdom, to occult dimension, underground (or, in this case, underwater) and "subtle", whence in the future they will return to take possession again of the lands that belong to them. Think for example of Arthur, who are "Rex QuondamΒ rexqueΒ futurus", To Federico Barbarossa, or again, with regard to the underwater world and moving to the bed of the fantastic narrative, to the Cthulhu Lovecraftian:

β€œEilert now sensed he was under water, but there was no trace of humidity in spite of everything. It was on a white sand bottom, covered with white, red, blue and silver shells. He saw seaweed meadows, bushy seaweed-covered mountains and shipwrecks, and fish darted about just like birds circling the seabird-infested reefs. [...]
Human forms roamed near the wrecks that appeared to consist of nothing but blue smoke. His guide explained to him that these were the spirits of drowned men who had not had a Christian burial […].
Then they continued further along a deep and dark valley. In the rocky walls above him he saw a row of quadrangular white doors, from which a sort of glow, like the northern lights, spread into the darkness […] and behind the white doors lived the old Finnish kings who had died at sea. Then he went to open the closest of these doors: here, at the bottom of the salty ocean, was the last of the kings, who had been shipwrecked in the storm that he himself had summoned, but then had not been able to quell. "Β [8]

Returning to the superstition concerning the "slander" of the Finns, it should be noted that even historically they have always been considered by subsequent Norse settlers as a damned lineage, trading with demons and otherworldly creatures by virtue of shamanic practices never abandoned by them, not even in the Christian era. This theme also returns in other stories by Jonas Lie, such as the longest of this collection, Jo of SjΓΆholm and the gan, where gan is the name given in the Norwegian tradition to sorcerers and evil magicians:

β€œThen he took a sleep potion and began to dance and twist and turn until he almost lost his breath, and collapsed to the floor with a groan. All that remained of him were his furs. His spirit was gone… straight to Jokmok.
The wizards sat all together in the thick sea fog under the shelter of the high mountain, whispering all sorts of secret and occult things., and instilled enthusiasm in novices of the dark arts. "Β [9]

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Theodor Kittelsen, "Huldra", 1892

The figure of the Finnish girl in Lie's stories it is often ambiguous, since at the same time it frightens and seduces the protagonist of the moment with his own almost unearthly beauty, who moves away from classical canons to the point of instilling desire and terror at the same time with his only very deep gaze; and the same happens with other girls, who although initially they may appear human, ultimately reveal themselves to be entities from the other world. This is the case, for example, of de The cormorants of Andvaer, one of the most successful stories contained here:

Β«β€œ The day of Mid summer it's great, ”she said,β€œ and I'm young and you're my husband, and now we'll go to our wedding bed. ”
And she was so beautiful that he couldn't contain the love he felt. But when the night came and the sun began to dance in the sea, she kissed him and cried.
"Magnificent is the summer day," he said, "and even more beautiful is the summer evening, but now the sunset is coming."
And suddenly it seemed to him as if she was getting older and older, and beginning to fade.
When the sun went down below the edge of the sea, there was a pile of cloth in front of him and nothing else.
The sea was calm, and on the clear Midsummer night twelve cormorants flew over the sea. "Β [10]

And, again, in this respect we can mention The estate west of the blue mountains, where the son of a farmer, for the desire to conquer the girls of the hidden valleys by playing his drum, finds himself a prisoner of four young girls and their old father, in a secret world where everything "is just brilliance and seduction" [11]:

β€œ'In my house,' she said, 'you will hear a Langeljk like no one has ever heard. I will play for you and you will listen to things unknown to others. You will hear everything that sings, and laughs and screams in the roots of trees, in the mountains and in all the things that grow, so that nothing else in the world will torment you. " "Β [12]

But it is also the case with The earth attracts, another of the pearls of this collection, which sees the young shop assistant seduced and attracted, every eve of Yule, by an unearthly entity at the same time monstrous and attractive who dwells with his fellow men inside a rocky cliff overlooking the sea.

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Theodor Kittelsen, β€œSjotroll”, 1887

Finally, two more stories - The wind gnome e Am I - concern another sinister creature of Scandinavian folklore, the owl or the giantess, daughter or wife of one of the gnomes so well known by all the popular traditions of the whole of Europe, especially Nordic and Germanic.

Also in this case the entity's work is twofold, poised between good luck and abundance on the one hand and illusion and damnation on the other: the protagonist of the first of the two stories, after having accumulated an unparalleled wealth, leaves his life earthly turning with his ship "straight into the sun" [13], similar to the Jo of the previously quoted tale: after escaping with his beloved Finnish girl named Seimke, the narrator tells us that

Β« they continued to sail until nightfall; they continued to sail until they saw no more promontories, no islands, no sea birds, no rocks Β» [14]

letting the reader understand that, after leaving our world, they will mysteriously enter a dimension other, no longer definable according to the forms and concepts on which existence in our material world is based.

And yet, in this specific case, unlike most of the other episodes contained in the Weird Tales from the Northern Seas, the abandonment of earthly life and the world commonly called does not appear as a curse: access to the other world, on the contrary - similar to what happens in The hill of dreams di Arthur Machen -, in this case allows the protagonist to free himself once and for all from the material constraints of earthly existence and its narrowness, to finally take flight towards the dreamlike fairy kingdom that lies on the other side of the sky - or rather, in this case, across the ocean.

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Jonas Lie (1833 - 1908)

Note:

[1]Β J. Lie, Macabre tales of the North Seas, Dagon Press, Teramo 2020, p. 160

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[2] T. Ligotti, Born in fear, the Assayer, Milan 2019, p. 115

[3] B. Cicchetti, afterword to J. Lie, op. cit., pp. 185-186

[4] N. Pennick, Pagan Magic of the Northern Tradition, Destiny Books, Rochester 2015, pp. 11-12

[5] RL Stevenson,Β In the South Seas, Tarka, Mulazzo 2015, p. 198

[6] J. Lie, op. cit., pp. 119-122

[7] Ibid, pp. 143-144

[8] Ibid, pp. 136-137

[9] Ibid, p. 35

[10] Ibid, p. 89

[11] Ibid, p. 162

[12] Ibid, p. 154

[13] Ibid, p. 115

[14] Ibid, p. 58


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