Aulanerk

The swell comes in long and slow off the floe edge, lifting the skin boat and setting it down again, lifting and setting down, a rhythm older than anyone paddling it. Cold spray beads on sealskin. The water heaves with a muscle of its own, and the Inuit who read that water knew the difference between a sea that wished them well and a sea that did not. The one that wished them well had a name. It was Aulanerk, and he was somewhere underneath, naked in the dark green cold, the joy in the waves coming off him like heat off a body.

He is a strange figure to pin down, because he left no story. Most gods arrive with a tale attached, a fall or a theft or a quarrel that explains them. Aulanerk arrives with only a description and a temperament. He is the sea god of the tides and the waves, and he is glad. That gladness is the whole of him. Where other powers of the northern ocean are owed blood, ritual, and careful apology, this one simply moves the water and seems pleased to be doing it.

There is a harder thing to say about him, and it belongs in any honest account. Aulanerk is barely attested. He is not in Franz Boas and he is not in Knud Rasmussen, the two men who wrote down more Inuit belief than anyone else alive. He surfaces instead in twentieth-century dictionaries of gods, compilations that copied from one another, and those sources cannot agree on something as basic as whether he is a god or a goddess. The name may rest on a genuine Inuktitut root, aula-, carrying the sense of movement, exactly the sort of word a compiler might have found and hardened into a deity. What follows is what the tradition claims. It is worth knowing how thin the ground beneath it is.

The Arctic sea is not a forgiving place to set a god, which is part of what makes him remarkable. The water there can kill a hunter in minutes. It carries the ice that crushes boats and the storms that strand families on the wrong side of open leads. Into that world the tradition placed a benevolent presence, a being whose work is the ordinary heave and pull of the tide and whose mood is good. He causes the waves. When the surface rolls and breaks and the swell runs in toward the shingle, that is Aulanerk shifting in the deep, and the motion is not anger. It is something closer to delight.

He invites comparison with Sedna, and the comparison is the sharpest thing the sources offer. Sedna is the great mistress of the sea, the one who holds the seals and the whales in her drowned hands and withholds them when she is wronged. Hunters fear her. Shamans comb the tangles from her hair to win back the animals she has hidden. She is power that must be managed. Aulanerk is her opposite in temperament, friendly where she is unfriendly, giving where she is withholding. He does not own the animals and he does not bargain. He governs the water itself, the medium rather than the prey, and he governs it without menace.

What he looks like is mostly a blank, and the blank is honest. The accounts agree that he is unclothed and that he lives in the sea, a man in the water in the way a merman is a man in the water. Beyond that the descriptions thin out to nothing. No one set down the color of his skin or the length of his hair or whether his lower half was a fish or a leg. He is felt more than seen, which suits a god whose evidence is the surface of the ocean rather than any sighting of a face. A hunter would never have met his eyes. He would only have felt the boat lift under him and known the sea was in a good humor.

Picture the other moment, the one the people on the ice cared about most. The tide turns, the leads open, the water grows calm enough to launch into, and the seals come up to breathe in the lanes that the moving sea has cleared. None of this is Aulanerk’s gift in the way the seals are Sedna’s gift. But the rhythm that makes the hunt possible, the patient breathing of the tide that opens and closes the ice, runs to his pulse. The hunters lived inside his timing whether or not they thought of him by name.

His powers follow from that single role. He commands the tides and raises the waves, which is to say he commands the daily life of the entire ocean, its breathing, its reach up the beach and its retreat. He carries joy into a region that offers little of it, and the friendliness ascribed to him is itself a kind of power, the rare assurance that one face of the deep is not out to drown you.

His limits follow just as plainly. He does not hold the animals. The thing a hunter most needs, the seal under the ice, belongs to other hands, and Aulanerk cannot grant or deny it. His domain is motion and mood, not the harvest. And he is bound by his own thin record. A god who never starred in a myth is a god half kept, surviving as a name and a feeling while the figures around him kept their stories whole. He moves the entire northern sea and has almost nothing said about him. The water remembers him better than the words do.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Aulanerk in Inuit mythology?

Aulanerk is a friendly Inuit sea god who rules over the tides, the waves, and joy. He is described as a naked figure who lives in the sea, and he is notable as one of the few openly benevolent powers in the Inuit ocean.

What does Aulanerk do?

Aulanerk governs the motion of the sea, causing the waves and driving the tides. His influence is the ordinary heave and pull of the ocean rather than control over its animals, and his presence is associated with gladness rather than danger.

How is Aulanerk different from Sedna?

Sedna is the powerful and unfriendly Inuit sea goddess who holds the sea’s animals and withholds them when she is wronged, so hunters must appease her. Aulanerk is her opposite in temperament, a friendly god who governs the water itself rather than the prey and who asks nothing of people.

What does Aulanerk look like?

Aulanerk is described as a naked male figure who lives in the sea, much like a merman. Beyond this the traditional sources give almost no detail about his appearance, so he is a god known more by his effect on the water than by any clear image.

Why is Aulanerk important to Inuit hunters?

Aulanerk matters to Inuit hunters because the moving sea he governs is the same water their survival depends on. The tides he drives open and close the ice and set the rhythm of the hunt, and his good will marks the ocean as favorable rather than hostile.

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Sedna, Qalupalik, Akhlut, Atshen, Amarok, Aningaat and Siqiniq, Ishigaq, Wentshukumishiteu