Walruses

Walruses are consequential Arctic animals in Smilla’s account of Greenland: powerful and difficult to predict, they figure both in the explanation offered for her mother’s disappearance and in the practical knowledge passed through hunting life. Their appearances resist reducing animals to scenery, even as people interpret them through the dangers and needs of survival.

Behavior and Physical Power

Smilla describes walruses as variable in temperament. They may be hypersensitive and shy, but farther south in autumn, when fish are scarce, they can become swift and methodical predators. Their tusks are strong enough to damage the side of a ferrocement ship, making them a physical danger even to substantial human constructions.

A captured walrus demonstrates another aspect of that power. Hunters offer it a cod; it draws the fish’s meat from the bones. The observation is practical rather than sentimental: the animal’s feeding behavior is presented as evidence of its distinctive capacities, not merely as a symbol for human feeling.

Hunting Knowledge and the Sea

The account of Smilla’s mother places walruses within the material uncertainties of Arctic life. After the remains of her kayak are found, people conclude that a walrus must have been responsible for her disappearance. The explanation is plausible against the animal’s known strength and unpredictability, but the text does not establish that the conclusion is certain.

That uncertainty sits beside detailed knowledge of the sea and its hazards. Smilla notes that anyone who falls into Greenland’s cold water does not return to the surface: the water is below 39 degrees Fahrenheit, and decomposition processes stop. The contrast between a concrete account of cold-water conditions and the unresolved role of the walrus keeps the animal from becoming a definitive answer to what happened to her mother.

Narrative Significance

Walruses belong to a wider portrayal of Greenlandic knowledge grounded in lived practices rather than external classification. The novel also recalls Inuit accounts of the world’s beginnings, describes Smilla’s mother as combining women’s and men’s work in hunting life, and presents subsistence hunting as a learned response to local conditions. These details frame animals as part of a working environment in which survival depends on attention to their behavior.

The walrus therefore carries narrative weight without being reduced to either a monster or a metaphor. It is a living force with capacities of its own, while its possible involvement in the mother’s disappearance remains an inference. That distinction—between what people know about an animal and what they can prove about a particular event—preserves the novel’s uncertainty at the center of Smilla’s family history.