“Your old men shall dream dreams”
Smilla's Sense of Snow“Your old men shall dream dreams” is the phrase Elsa Lübing uses to insist that age does not make her insight meaningless. In a conversation with Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen, the biblical allusion turns her recurring dream into a claim of authority just as she reveals a disloyal, dangerous conclusion about the Cryolite Corporation’s past.
The Phrase in Context
Elsa first tells Smilla that she has recently dreamed several times that Smilla was sent by Providence. Smilla answers that Elsa should hear what the police say about her, but Elsa disregards the warning and continues along her own train of thought. The allusion follows her acknowledgment that Smilla may consider her old or wonder whether she is senile: “But remember, `Your old men shall dream dreams.'”
The line is not offered as proof that the dream is literally prophetic. Instead, Elsa uses it to reject the assumption that age invalidates what she remembers or suspects. Her gaze seems to pass through the room and into the past, giving the phrase a double force: it invokes a scriptural promise while marking her return to a history she has kept in mind.
A Dream Becomes an Accusation
The phrase comes directly before Elsa advances a concrete theory. She believes that the 115,000 kroner recorded in 1966 must have paid to charter a ship, and that someone acting under the Cryolite Corporation’s name sent two expeditions to Greenland’s west coast. Her suspicion grows from the mismatch between the stated purpose—transporting eight men to collect a small quantity of sample gemstones—and the scale and secrecy of the arrangements. She recalls that the company had often chartered the Disko through the Greenland Trading Company to transport cryolite, but considers a ship for a small expedition unthinkable.
Thus the biblical allusion accompanies a move from private dream to specific historical allegation. Elsa does not present herself as an unquestionable seer; she gives Smilla a reasoned inference tied to a sum of money, a ship, and the company’s earlier practices. The force of the phrase lies in insisting that her age and the police’s judgment of her do not dispose of the evidence she is trying to disclose.
Narrative Function
The saying briefly joins the novel’s language of dreams and providence to an investigation grounded in records and corporate history. Elsa’s vision that Smilla was sent by Providence lends their encounter a prophetic coloring, while the kroner figure and the chartered ship pull the conversation back to material evidence. The juxtaposition leaves the dream’s status uncertain but makes Elsa’s accusation consequential.
Smilla recognizes that Elsa’s candor also marks a breach of lifelong loyalty. The phrase therefore stands at a threshold: Elsa claims the right to speak from age and memory, and the revelation that follows risks exposing the institution she had served. Its importance lies less in establishing supernatural foreknowledge than in framing an elderly woman’s belated disclosure as something that deserves to be heard.
