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.
There is little attempt to understand the women their purpose is to control, conquer, and eradicate them.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. The title's significance seems ironic and laughable since the men who preach about God's mercies show little if any mercy to the women they are trying to convert. However, when Kurstsson implores God's mercies upon the survivors of the 1617 Christmas Eve hurricane, it is challenging to convince independent-thinking women that there is any value to believing in this modern God about whom Kurtsson and Cornet preach. Kirsten and Maren show mercy to Pastor Kurtsson, the local man of the cloth. Maren shows mercy to the birds whose eggs she snatches. Maren, the protagonist, shows mercy to Ursa, the naive city girl whose marriage to the sinister religious commissioner Absalom Cornet has been arranged.
The dictionary says that mercy is compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone to whom it is within one's power to punish or harm. The dictionary says that mercy is compassion or for …more The word "mercies" appears eleven times in this novel, a few more if you include other word forms. Linda Loretz The word "mercies" appears eleven times in this novel, a few more if you include other word forms.
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