Literate Matters: Superstition and history combine in 'The Blue Maiden'

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Other times, fiction can outrun truth, but when the two blend, as in “The Blue Maiden” from Anna Noyes, the impact can be doubly resonant.

Based on events in the Sweden of the late 17th century, when 65 women and six men were executed after being declared witches, the book quickly narrows its focus to the two daughters of the stoic minister Silas Silasdotter: Beata and Ulrika, their mother dead in childbirth.

Living on a remote Swedish island, the girls are close to feral, raised by a father who spends most of his days praying or despairing. His worries often keep him from keeping after the girls.

But even before readers meet the Silasdotter family, we learn about the curse that shadows the region, as just offshore of Berggrund Island, where the family lives, is the Blue Maiden, the lair of the devil, known by locals as “Blockula.” Though Berggrunders do not visit the Blue Maiden except in extreme circumstances, the black magic is always in the mist. Or on the water.

So it is that in 1675, hexed by their proximity to the Blue Maiden, led by the priest, the towns’ people erect a pyre, and we learn about the witch trials and the math, as on that fateful day “thirty-two women had awoken on the island. Now, there are five.”

A century and a half later, with several ministers come and gone, Silas now leads the congregation, though he cannot lead them from their island neighbor, still possessed of the sorcery responsible for the earlier deaths.

Fatherhood however often escapes Silas. “Most days he locks himself in his study to read gospels, write sermons, and fast, only emerging for occasional bowls of Ulrika’s thin porridge, staring over their heads at some distant place.” This distance marks the connection — or disconnection — between father and daughters, allowing the girls to roam their small village night and day.

For their part, the girls draw sideways glances from neighbors, however. Ulrika, bright but odd, tall and muscular, irks her classmates because she’s stronger even than the boys. Beta, younger by four years, looks like their dead mother, is quiet, withdrawn, but no less an outcast. That their mother was not a native, means the girls are forever in limbo, not quite islanders, no longer mainlanders.

Beta, the more curious, steals her father’s key to see what he keeps hidden in their mother’s room, what her possessions might reveal about the past. Slipping inside, she discovers an old coat “and finds a tear in the smooth silk. Her hand slips through the hole” where “deep inside, her fingers close around a small circular shape that must have slipped through too.” A ring. With initials “N.H. and L.H…neither her mother’s nor her father’s.”

Later, at 15 years old, Beta succumbs to visions, then at 17, she is introduced to the hulking and handsome August Holmberg, nephew of recently deceased Liam Holmberg, who both sisters expect has been invited to dinner so he might marry Ulrika. But when the “tall man who fills the frame” appears at their door, Bea thinks, “There you are…finally.”

Here the story accelerates, aiming to link all those dead witches from more than a century ago to these sisters and the cloud over their mother’s life, a story they’ve heard either from their father or from Bruna, a neighbor woman the other children “whisper…gained healing power by eating a sacred white snake whole and alive, her red hair sapped of color overnight.” Bea and Ulrika, unswayed by the other childrens’ superstitions, go to her for memories of their mother Angelique.

Throughout, Noyes’s prose is lyrical, spare, carefully capturing the space between image and intention. Sometimes the action flags, the details unfolding in spirals that are too wide or tangential. In the end, though, the combination of what happened all those years ago, blended with what Noyes imagines, is bewitching.

Good reading.

This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Literate Matters: Superstition and history combine in 'The Blue Maiden'