# The Snow Queen (Kernaghan novel)

The Snow Queen is a 2000 speculative fiction novel by Canadian writer Eileen Kernaghan. It follows Gerda, a young Danish woman who sets out to the north to rescue her childhood friend Kai from Madame Aurore, a magician known as the Snow Queen. She is joined on her journey by a young Sámi woman, Ritva, the daughter to a shamaness and a robber. Based on Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Snow Queen" (1844), the novel incorporates elements of Scandinavian shamanism and mythology, much of it derived from the epic poem the Kalevala (1835). It also explores feminist themes, reinterpreting several plot elements from Andersen's original with contemporary shifts. The Snow Queen was published by Thistledown Press and received mostly positive reviews. The novel received the Aurora Award for Best Novel and was nominated for an Endeavour Award in 2001.

## Plot summary

Gerda, a young woman living in Victorian-era Denmark, has a disagreement with her childhood friend Kai after he criticizes her poetry. Having become more interested in scientific pursuits, Kai becomes acquainted with Baroness Aurore, a visiting academic. Against Gerda's wishes, he eventually decides to accompany Aurore as her apprentice back to her estate in Sweden. After Kai fails to write back to his family for several months, Gerda sets out to find him. Under the pretense of joining her friend on a vacation in Copenhagen, she hires a carriage and travels to Aurore's estate. However, she discovers both Aurore and Kai have left for another residence further north to spend the summer. Having spent her money on traveling, she is housed by a local woman until she can acquire the funds to return home. Meanwhile, a young Sámi woman, Ritva, begins to have spiritual visions and nightmares. As the daughter to a shamaness and a robber, she begins to inherit her mother's powers of prophecy and clairvoyance. However, Ritva despises her mother's overbearing demeanor and how she behaves when possessed by spirits, and fears she will eventually have to take her mother's place in the clan.
Gerda, deceiving her parents by claiming she needs money for a new dress, receives funds to travel and takes a stagecoach to Uppsala to continue journeying north. Along the way, she meets retired adventurer Madame Eriksson and her friend, a princess from a southern kingdom, who outfit Gerda with winter supplies and arrange a carriage for her to travel through the wilderness in the north. However, she is kidnapped by a group of robbers led by Ritva, who also murder her attendants. Gerda is imprisoned in an abandoned castle controlled by Ritva's father's clan. Through the winter and the following summer, Gerda is held captive, growing increasingly depressed. After conversing with the natural spirits, Ritva eventually decides to escape from her clan and join Gerda in her pursuit of Kai, stealing her mother's shamanistic artifacts and going on a short spiritual journey to foresee their path. They set out in the fall with Ritva's reindeer, meeting a woman in a hut along the way who writes a message on a fish and directs them to an old woman in Finnmark. They learn from her that Aurore is the Snow Queen, a powerful magician who holds dominion over the magical northern lands. The two plan their journey to her palace at the edge of the world; the old woman also gives them a pouch of magically bound winds. The two women join the crew of a ship bound for Svalbard, but the vessel is struck by pack ice at sea and capsized. The crew reaches a small island with enough supplies to wait out the winter, but the women continue northward on foot over the frozen sea, passing the Cave of the North Wind to come to Aurore's palace at the North Pole.
Aurore has enchanted Kai to futilely labor in the pursuit of all knowledge on a magical artifact embedded in the palace floor, driving him nearly to madness. Aurore offers to release him if the two women perform three impossible tasks. They complete the assignments through trickery and magic, but Aurore then refuses to return Kai unless Ritva sacrifices her reindeer in exchange. The two are determined not to abide by her terms, and Ritva enchants the palace's inhabitants to sleep. The two escape with Kai by boat, taking with them a chest containing the key to Aurore's magic. Aurore pursues them by ship to reclaim it, and in an ensuing confrontation the chest's contents are spilled into the sea, revealing to Kai that he had labored in vain. The group escapes southward, propelled by the winds from the old woman's pouch, and is rescued by a vessel on its way to the mainland. Gerda discovers that Kai, who she had intended to marry, is no longer the same as she remembers, and remains more interested in scientific endeavors. Ritva convinces Gerda that she cannot return to domestic life after her experiences while traveling; the two embrace, and Ritva tells her to return to the north soon.

## Development and themes

The Snow Queen is based on Hans Christian Andersen's 1844 fairy tale of the same name, which Kernaghan chose as the primary influence in her novel as it was her favorite work in the genre. Before writing her novel, Kernaghan also published a poem and a short story based on the tale. She considered her novel a "retelling" of Andersen's original story, and noted that The Snow Queen is the only work for which she adopted this compositional approach. However, Kernaghan felt that the plot of her novel significantly diverges from Andersen's towards the conclusion due to the influence drawn from the Kalevala (1835), a compilation of Finnish mythology and epic poetry. The novel also includes elements of northern Scandinavian shamanism; Kernaghan became interested in literature on the subject while conducting research for her previous work Dance of the Snow Dragon (1995). She felt that there was a contrast between her novel's "older, darker" elements and Andersen's fiction, which is based in Christianity. The characters are also markedly older in Kernaghan's rendition, as young adults, while Andersen's are children.
Kernaghan stated that the Little Robber Maiden was her favorite character from Andersen's original, and intended to build on her character, aiming to create "uniquely independent female characters". The Little Robber Maiden appears in the novel as Ritva, a young woman of a Sámi clan. Literary scholar Peter Bramwell finds aspects of the original story's Lapland woman and Finnmark woman – who respectively write a message on a fish and bind the winds – in Ritva's character. In contrast with the original character, Ritva takes an active role in the plot, accompanying Gerda on her journey, a choice shared among several renditions of Andersen's tale. Communications scholar Sanna Lehtonen viewed the matrilineal structure of the novel's shamanistic tradition as part of a broader trend in contemporary fiction, rooted in radical feminism, to replace the negative stereotypes associated with witchcraft, supplanting "wicked crones and evil enchantresses" with wise or sympathetic figures. She also noted that the women's "way of life offers an alternative" to the depiction of uncleanliness and debauchery that define the men of Ritva's clan. However, Ritva ultimately rejects her matriarchal heritage in an assertion of individualism as she also views her mother as an irritable "hag", which Lehtonen found to be a discouraging conclusion from the perspective of ethnic identity. She also wrote that the Finnish elements derived from the Kalevala are not clearly delineated from the details drawn from Sámi traditions, such as the presence of natural spirits and the shaman ritual of singing while beating a drum.
Literary scholar Joanne Findon analyzed The Snow Queen as a depiction of the "idea of north" as a concept, in reference to Glenn Gould's radio documentary The Idea of North (1967). She saw the "imaginative geography" of Arctic landscapes as an important aspect of Canadian culture. According to Lehtonen, the prospective audience of the novel would view the north of Europe as a "distant fairytale country", holding the potential for supernatural events to transpire. Findon writes that Madame Aurore – her name itself a reference to the northern lights – is "more than a moral force", representing the force of nature in the north in addition to being the antagonist of the narrative. Aurore's character also diverges from the Snow Queen of Andersen's tale, and Findon finds a closer similarity with the dangerous power of the Kalevala's Hag of the North. The three impossible tasks that Aurore sets Gerda and Ritva are rooted in the epic, and Bramwell wrote that Ritva "proudly [identifies] herself" with the legendary hero Väinö. Findon also examined the north as a metaphor for adolescent rebellion and metamorphosis. The landscapes that Gerda encounters grow increasingly supernatural as she approaches the Pole, and Findon wrote that her rising unfamiliarity with her surroundings "[mirrors] her emotional journey" and search for identity as a young adult. She also felt that the huts of the woman who writes on fish and the Finnmark woman who binds the winds highlight the growth of power in both Gerda and Ritva on their journey. Both huts are integrated into the surrounding landscapes, which Findon found reflective of Ritva's connection to the "primal power of the land", and both old women comment on Gerda's hidden inner strength and determination.
In a 2005 interview with Strange Horizons, Kernaghan commented that she had applied a feminist interpretation to her rendition. Findon felt that the novel "blurs the conventional boundaries between masculine and feminine" by portraying women as holders of several powerful positions, including those related to roles in the home. Gerda, for example, embroiders a cloth as part of a task to rescue Kai. Kernaghan acknowledged that Andersen himself overturns the convention of the fairy tale genre by having his story's heroine save the boy. Findon felt that a subversion of gender stereotypes is present in Gerda's initiative to pursue her love interest as well as her employment of deception to achieve her objectives, both roles typically occupied by male characters in traditional tales. Ritva also communes with the heroes of the Kalevala on her spiritual journey and assumes their responsibilities when setting out against the Snow Queen. Findon saw this moment as a crossing of traditional gender boundaries, as the legendary heroes are all male. She also wrote that although the tasks set out by Aurore have the trappings of a fairy tale confrontation, Kernaghan's version "violates gender expectations" by featuring women in all roles of the conflict. Kernaghan stated that she disliked the more "conventional mid-Victorian ending" of Andersen's original, in which Gerda and Kay end up together. By contrast, the novel calls their relationship into question when Kai reveals no emotional warmth towards her, continuing to pursue knowledge even at the end. Literary scholar Naomi Wood writes that the novel, like other adaptations of the fairy tale, renders Gerda's reunion with Kai "anticlimactic, even pointless"; Kernaghan's version instead focuses on the relationship between Gerda and Ritva, and it is implied that neither choose to settle into domesticity, opting instead to continue journeying together.

## Publication and reception

The novel was published by Thistledown Press in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in May 2000, and received mostly positive critical commentary in science fiction magazines. Writer and critic Russell Blackford, in an article for The New York Review of Science Fiction, thought the novel was an "engaging fantasy", particularly appreciating the character-focused conclusion, which he found "touching". Blackford wrote that the novel portrays the female protagonists supporting each other and having access to the same opportunities as men, presenting an appealing moral for an audience of teenage girls. However, he disliked the characterization of the novel's antagonist, Madame Aurore, as a woman of scientific accomplishment, a choice he found "completely gratuitous" and an unwarranted attempt by Kernaghan to cater to a potential anti-intellectual stance among her younger readers. Science fiction writer Paul Di Filippo praised Kernaghan's "quiet, economical, but carefully considered" writing style in a review published in Realms of Fantasy. Locus reviewer Carolyn Cushman called the story "intelligent [and] magical", and felt that it surpasses the merits of Andersen's original in several aspects, including the ending, which she found "bittersweet". She also appreciated the "strong foil" she felt Ritva created with the milder, city-dwelling Gerda, a view echoed by critic and writer Don D'Ammassa in a review for Science Fiction Chronicle, who felt that the relationship between the two women was the highlight of the novel. In a review for Cinescape, writer and critic Denise Dumars commended the portrayal of the Sámi peoples in contrast with the Victorian-era Danes, and felt the novel was a "wonderful retelling" of the original tale.

### Accolades

Accolades received by The Snow Queen :
| Award ceremony | Year | Category | Result | Ref. |
| Aurora Awards | 2001 | Best Novel | Won | |
| Endeavour Award | 2001 | Distinguished Novel or Collection | Nominated | |