Smilla Jaspersen

Smilla Jaspersen’s investigation into Isaiah’s death is inseparable from her struggle to define where she belongs and how freely she can move. A Greenland-born woman living in Copenhagen, she reads snow and ice through knowledge grounded in lived practice, not merely abstract classification. The inquiry draws her into the affairs of the Cryolite Corporation and the voyage of the Kronos, but its deepest force comes from the way Isaiah’s death breaks her sense of being fixed in place and gives her a purpose she had not known she needed.

Identity and Background

Smilla’s understanding of Greenland begins in family memory and material necessity. Her father was in his early thirties when he came to Greenland and met her mother. The novel places that encounter beside accounts of Inuit traditions and historical records that complicate fixed European ideas about gender: a story told to Knud Rasmussen describes two male sorcerers at the beginning of the world, one transforming his body to give birth, while nineteenth-century records describe women who hunted as men did. Such accounts provide a context for her mother’s life, but do not reduce it to a category. Her mother laughed, gave birth, gossiped, and cleaned skins, while also shooting, paddling a kayak, and hauling meat home.

A formative scene explains the practical knowledge behind that inheritance. When her mother was about twelve, she accompanied her father onto the ice in April. He missed a seal because his optic nerve was beginning to calcify; within a year he was blind. While he walked on to check a long line, she weighed the prospects facing her: inadequate welfare, dependence on kin who had little to spare, or starvation. When the seal surfaced again, she shot it. The scene presents hunting not as an emblem of identity but as an action with immediate stakes, one that makes survival possible.

Smilla’s own childhood memories give spatial freedom a similarly concrete meaning. She recalls a Greenland where children seemed never to be indoors and where her mother could not imagine remaining in one place for long. She describes her attachment to freedom of movement as something she cradles and worships. The locked room, rather than a European image of hell, is the Greenlandic hell in her account: Greenland has no prisons, and offenses that might lead to imprisonment in Denmark are more often punished by fines there. For Smilla, confinement is therefore not an abstract inconvenience but a threat to the conditions under which she understands herself.

Hunting, Knowledge, and Belonging

The novel’s hunting memories show how closely Smilla’s knowledge is joined to attention, appetite, and responsibility. One week after a hunt in which a pregnant narwhal’s perfectly formed pup slid from its mother, her group is near a bird mountain and has gone twenty-four hours without food. The hunters’ method is to wait until they seem to disappear into the landscape, then take the birds with a large net. On the second attempt, Smilla catches three females returning to their young, which nest noisily on ledges. The birds carry worms in pouches in their beaks; the hunters kill them by pressing their hearts.

She has killed many birds before, cooked them in clay, and eaten them. But as she looks at the three she has caught, their eyes become, in her imagination, tunnels leading to their young, whose eyes lead inward again toward the narwhal pup. She turns the net over and releases them. This is not a rejection of hunting knowledge: the scene begins with hunger and the skill needed to obtain food. It is a moment in which attention to the connected lives behind the catch interrupts the ordinary sequence of taking, preparing, and eating.

Smilla’s account of cultural understanding likewise resists turning lived experience into an easy explanation. She rejects the idea that a European scientific scale can rank cultures, arguing that the attempt only projects Western judgments. Understanding another culture, she says, requires living within it as a tolerated guest and learning its language; even then, understanding may remain wordless. When she starts explaining Qaanaaq, she feels that she begins to lose what was never wholly hers. The novel thus sets Smilla’s intimate, embodied knowledge against the habit of treating Greenland as an object to classify or administer.

Her sense of belonging does not remain constant. She often tells herself that her cultural identity is lost for good, yet one morning she wakes with a solid sense of being a pampered Greenlander. The change is brief and does not resolve her divided attachments; it makes identity appear as something that can return with force, even after repeated self-doubt. Later, crossing Copenhagen Harbor on the ice, she sees Denmark as a frozen formation and herself as a foreign body moving across it. Isaiah’s death has opened a fissure in what had held her fixed, allowing her, temporarily, to move.

Isaiah’s Death and the Investigation

Isaiah’s death changes the direction of Smilla’s life. She describes the boy as having given her a sense of meaning, like a wheel turning through both of them, and understands his body in the snow as a violation of what he had brought into the world. His importance becomes clearest to her after he is gone. Her purpose is then to understand why he died, and the investigation becomes a way of giving attention to the fact of his death rather than letting it disappear into an official account.

That inquiry grows out of a specific chain of evidence. A child has fallen from a roof; in his mother’s apartment, Smilla finds Ving’s address. The mother receives a pension from the Cryolite Corporation because her husband died, and that connection leads Smilla to the company archives and the information available about its expeditions to Gela Alta. She explains to an interrogator that the rest followed from this starting point. Her investigation therefore moves from the intimate circumstances of a child’s death into corporate records and the history of expeditions, without abandoning the original question that sent her there.

Smilla assembles a tentative history of those expeditions. She imagines Loyen and Ving meeting, perhaps in Berlin; Loyen knows of something in Greenland worth finding, while Ving can use the corporation as cover because he directs it and is its real leader. Andreas Licht, she reasons, knows Greenland’s conditions. Under the corporation’s guise, an expedition goes to Gela Alta in 1966 and fails after something goes wrong, possibly an explosives accident. Twenty-five years later, the group tries again, now with outside money paying for transport and apparent assistance from an ally. That expedition also ends in disaster: four men die, including Isaiah’s father. Smilla marks this account as reconstruction rather than certainty, and admits that she withholds from her listener what she knows about Berth 126.

Her reading of a photograph supplies another revealing turn. After putting the papers, a tooth, and coins back where she found them, she keeps only the final photograph. It shows Tørk Hviid under palm trees, in a shirt and tie beneath his laboratory coat, looking cool and comfortable in oppressive humidity. The photograph connects a man associated with the Arctic investigation to a distant tropical setting, and its singular presence among the returned objects makes it a clue Smilla chooses to carry forward.

From Copenhagen to the Kronos

Smilla’s pursuit carries her into places where social performance and restricted access sit side by side. At Casino Øresund, the newest and most prestigious casino in Denmark, she and the mechanic pass through a sequence of gates and payments: guards check their passes and names, admission costs 250 kroner apiece, parking costs 75, and the cloakroom takes another 50 per person. The elaborate entrance makes wealth and controlled access tangible before the investigation proceeds inside. Birgo Lander appears dressed for display, with white yachting clothes, a silk scarf embroidered with anchors, and a small cap; he carefully straightens Smilla’s white bow tie. The scene places her in a world of staged appearances without making her search disappear beneath them.

Aboard the Kronos, the ship’s arrangements make Smilla suspect that the voyage is not ordinary. A fellow sailor notes the prohibition on alcohol, the uniforms, the ban on the boat deck, and the captain’s claim not to know the destination. He reads the ship’s construction as evidence: it has a double hull, icebreaker cables along its length, reinforced plates at the bow, an ice cutter over the propeller, and an engine of at least 6,000 horsepower, capable of sixteen to eighteen knots. From these details he concludes that the ship is heading toward the ice and possibly Greenland. Smilla lets him continue, using his observations to clarify what the ship’s design and secrecy imply.

Later, Smilla explains the concealed cargo to the mechanic. Mayam is an intermediate stage between raw opium and heroin, rich in oil and therefore kept refrigerated. Tørk developed it; Ravn told her of it; and it forms part of an agreement between Tørk and Verlaine, with Verlaine receiving a share. Smilla suspects that the shipment is meant to reach a port such as Holsteinsborg or Nuuk, perhaps through contacts on the Greenland Star. She contrasts the operation with the earlier smuggling of liquor and cigarettes: that, she says, belongs to the good old days, while cocaine now has a market in Nuuk and a Greenlandic upper class living like Europeans.

Smilla also reconstructs why the smuggling arrangement turned violent. Jakkelsen, she believes, discovered the Mayam, gave himself away while high, and pressed his advantage beyond what he could manage. His actions forced the others to respond. Tørk handled the telegram for them, although Smilla sees Tørk and Verlaine as men from different worlds who cooperate because each can use the other. This explanation links the hidden cargo to the broader voyage while preserving the distinction between what Smilla knows from Ravn and what she is inferring from the people’s actions.

Conflict, Change, and Narrative Significance

Smilla’s physical resistance makes clear that her investigation is not simply intellectual. When she is lifted from the floor near a railing, she believes she is about to die, and recognizes the coldness of the plan that has brought her there. Still shaking, she uses a screwdriver whose cork remains on its end. As her opponent tries to lift her clear, she bites off the cork, finds the hollow between his collarbone and trapezius, and drives the screwdriver into it through the blanket. She braces her weight on the handle until it slides into place. He makes no sound; the movement between them stops, and he drops her onto the platform. The scene turns her attention to the body and its vulnerable points into immediate means of survival.

Her difficult relationship with her father also shapes what she can accept from other people. Moritz had brought her to Copenhagen while grieving for her mother, whose absence had left his love attached to memory; in Smilla, he could find fleeting traits that reminded him of her. After a childhood attempt to run away, Smilla injured him with a scalpel, then helped him reach the emergency room to have the wound bandaged. She says it was the last time she tried to run. She does not claim to have forgiven him, and maintains that adults should not take the pressure of their love out on children; but she says she came to understand him in some sense. Understanding here is not absolution: it allows an account of his grief without erasing the harm it caused her.

Smilla’s smaller confrontations with Moritz show how resistance can begin in the most ordinary customs. At one visit, she helps herself to Elsa Lübing’s cookies three more times without taking her eyes off him. He finally grabs the platter and places it out of reach. Smilla calls this a victory, the first of a long series against him and Danish manners. The act is modest, but its importance lies in her insistence on choosing for herself rather than obeying a social expectation designed to make her feel ashamed.

The novel’s movement between investigation and remembered life gives Smilla’s present actions their double meaning. The evidence about the Gela Alta expeditions and the refrigerated Mayam shipment drives the plot outward, toward the corporation, the ship, and Greenland. At the same time, her recollections of hunger, hunting, her parents, and the locked room show what that movement costs and what it protects. Isaiah’s death sets her in motion, but it does not make her a detached investigator: she seeks an explanation because the boy’s life gave her meaning, and because treating his death as a minor irregularity would repeat the violation she is trying to understand.

At a moment when a stack of papers seems to contain something vital about her future, Smilla remembers the religious lessons of her childhood: a catechist’s insistence on self-knowledge and on the idea that life has a divine arithmetic. On top of the papers lies the Cryolite Corporation’s report on the 1991 expedition to Gela Alta; its final six pages are original, blurry, technically flawed aerial photographs of the Barren Glacier. Their stark landscape—cold, white, worn, windblown, and abandoned even by birds—becomes both documentary evidence and the physical ground toward which the investigation has been drawing her. Smilla’s narrative joins such records to lived knowledge, refusing to let either the official archive or a simple identity label stand in for the whole truth.