Juliane Christiansen

Juliane Christiansen, Isaiah’s mother, is presented through the tenderness and contradictions of a life lived under pressure: she is inhibited when sober and exuberant when drunk, a bereaved parent whose home preserves traces of her son, and a hunter whose childhood skills unsettled conventional divisions between women’s and men’s work. Her portrait also links private grief to the paperwork of Danish administration and to Smilla’s reflections on Greenlandic life, cultural understanding, and freedom of movement.

Temperament and Alcohol

Smilla describes Juliane as an endorsement of alcohol’s apparent curative powers. Sober, she is stiff, silent, and inhibited; drunk, she becomes lively and happy. That transformation is not presented as uncomplicated well-being: after returning from the hospital, Juliane has taken disulfiram and continued drinking, leaving her markedly better in mood while her body remains affected by poisoning. In that state she tells Smilla that she loves her.

Juliane’s drinking belongs to a broader context that shapes Smilla’s own attitude toward alcohol. Smilla rejects as an absurd understatement the claim that people in Greenland drink a lot, insisting that they drink a colossal amount. Whenever she feels drawn to stronger drink than herbal tea, she remembers what happened before the voluntary liquor rationing in Thule. The account makes alcohol more than a personal trait: it is part of the social conditions against which Smilla measures both Juliane’s brief animation and the damage accompanying it.

Motherhood and Isaiah’s Death

After Isaiah’s death, Juliane’s grief is concentrated in the ordinary things left behind. His rain pants, sneakers, sweatshirt, underwear, and socks remain in a clear plastic hospital bag; in his pocket is the soft white stone he used as chalk. Searching among his clothes, Smilla finds no trace of the missing knife. Juliane stands in the doorway crying and explains that the diapers were the only things she threw away.

The diapers are linked to Isaiah’s worsening fear of heights: once a month, he would wear them for a couple of days, and Smilla had once bought them for him herself. This small, private detail gives the fear a concrete place in his domestic life and shows that Juliane had kept most of his belongings rather than erasing the evidence of his habits. The loss is also stated plainly in a conversation between Smilla and an older woman: Smilla says that the boy died after falling from a roof four days earlier. The woman recalls meeting him and hopes that his mother will find her way to Jesus.

Work, Gender, and Survival

Juliane’s capacities are rooted in a childhood shaped by necessity. When she was about twelve, she went onto the ice with her father, who was losing his sight. After he missed a seal, he understood that his optic nerve was calcifying and that blindness was approaching. Juliane was left to consider the limited choices available to her family: inadequate welfare assistance, starvation, or dependence on relatives who had little to spare. When the seal surfaced again, she shot it.

That moment stands behind Smilla’s description of her mother as someone who could move between roles without abandoning either. Juliane laughed, gave birth, gossiped, and cleaned skins like a woman; she also shot, paddled a kayak, and hauled meat home like a man. Smilla sets this life beside accounts of Greenlandic people who crossed customary gender roles, including a tradition in which a person might become the opposite sex. Such changes could be tolerated by the community, she observes, but not a fluid transitional state. Juliane’s own life is described not as a formal change of identity but as a practical combination of work conventionally divided by gender, made necessary by the circumstances of survival.

Documents and Institutional Life

Juliane keeps the record of her existence in seven greasy envelopes. Their contents range from appointment slips from the alcoholism clinic on Sundholm and her birth certificate to bakery coupons, tax cards, bank statements, health-insurance certificates, a passport, electricity receipts, and correspondence from a credit bureau. The papers also show that her monthly pension is 9,400 kroner. Smilla contrasts this accumulation with the drawer, notebook, or file folder that other people use to organize their lives, and notes the particular difficulty that Danish paperwork presents to many Greenlanders.

Among the official letters, Smilla finds notice that the directors of the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark have granted Juliane a widow’s pension of 9,000 kroner a month after the death of Norsaq Christiansen, adjusted to the cost-of-living index. The letter bears the signature of E. Lübing, Chief Accountant. Its unusual feature lies in the margin: someone has turned the typed letter sideways and written, “I am so sorry. Elsa Lübing.” For Smilla, the handwritten apology makes the margin a place where a person’s character can become visible, outside the formal language of official correspondence.

Freedom, Culture, and Smilla’s Perspective

Smilla’s reflections on her upbringing help explain the distance between Juliane’s life and the institutional world around it. She recalls that her mother could not imagine living in one place for long, and describes her own need for spatial freedom as something she cradles and worships. She also notes that Greenland has no prisons and that offenses punished by imprisonment in Denmark more often bring a fine there; in her account, the locked room—not a European landscape of sulfurous punishment—is the Greenlandic hell. The contrast gives confinement a cultural and personal force, while connecting Smilla’s attachment to movement with the life she saw her mother lead.

Smilla resists treating Greenlandic life as something that can be understood through external systems of comparison. She argues that understanding another culture requires living within it, asking to be tolerated as a guest, and learning its language; explanation, she says, can itself create distance. Her thoughts of Qaanaaq bring her back to a way of holding contradictions without forcing them into a simplified answer. Juliane’s portrait supplies the lived particularity behind that reflection: a woman whose domestic tenderness, drinking, hunting skill, grief, and paperwork cannot be reduced to a single institutional label.