Torngarsuk

A man walks inland until the last house is out of sight, finds a boulder taller than himself, and sits down in the cold beside it to call something up. That was the instruction taken down in Cumberland Sound over the winter of 1877, and the rest of it does not improve. When the thing arrives he will be so frightened that the pain doubles him over. He will fall. He will be dead for three days. Then he will stand up and walk home a wise man.

The being he called is Torngarsuk, and his name is the plainest thing about him. Greenlandic has a word, tôrnaq, for the spirit that attaches itself to a person and works on their behalf. Add the ending that means great or large and you get the one at the top of the pile. Not a father of the sky, not a maker of the world, not a judge. The big spirit. Everything difficult about him follows from the fact that his name is a job description.

The system he sat at the head of was tidy and strange. Greenlanders held that almost anything with an outline had an inua, an owner or inhabitant, and that the world was therefore thick with minor rulers, each with authority over one lake or one mountain or one human appetite. A man who wanted power over any of them could not simply take it. He had to apply higher. Calling on Torngarsuk was the application, and if it was accepted the lesser powers were compelled into service as his tornat, his helping spirits, which is why an angakkoq could see spirits nobody else could. They had been assigned to him. Rink put it about as bluntly as a nineteenth-century Dane could: in being able to dispose at will of all the minor powers, and to force them to serve, some idea of the godhead must be connected with him.

Where he lived is better attested than what he looked like. The Greenlandic dead did not go up if they could help it. The under world was warm and thick with food, and the people there were called the arsissut, those who live in abundance. The upper world was the bad one, cold and hungry, and its inhabitants passed the time playing ball with a walrus skull, which is what the northern lights are. Torngarsuk was down below with the arsissut, in the warm dark, which is a reasonable address for the source of everything an angakkoq wanted.

His appearance is where the record falls apart. The missionaries who came to Greenland from 1721 onward asked what he looked like and got answers that would not reconcile: sometimes no bigger than a finger, sometimes a bear, sometimes something else again. Rink, going back over all of it in 1875, concluded that the spread came from the questioners rather than the questioned, and noted a detail that is easy to skate past. In the traditional tales themselves the name barely appears. Down the coast in Labrador the picture is sharper and quite different. There Torngarsoak held the lives of the sea animals and moved as a polar bear of impossible size, and the mountain range that runs north from Hebron Fjord to Cape Chidley is named after him. Shamans went up into those peaks to meet their spirit helpers. The English-speaking world later called them the Devil Mountains.

That Labrador job, master of the seals and whales, gets copied into reference books as though it were true everywhere. In Greenland it was not his. The animals came from a woman at the bottom of the sea, the one later readers know as Sedna, and reaching her was a separate ordeal involving an abyss with a wheel in it turning slick as ice, a kettle of boiling seals, guard animals in the passage, and a bridge no wider than a knife blade. Torngarsuk had no part in that errand. Two enormous powers, two entirely different pieces of business.

The ordinary working day looked like this. The lamps go out. The people crowd into the dark of the house and the angakkoq begins, muttering over a sick body, then asking after the hunt, then asking the question nobody wants answered about who will not see the spring. If the answer turns out wrong, nothing is lost. The measure simply failed to please Torngarsuk, and the man’s reputation survives intact, which is a durable arrangement for everyone involved.

His powers were exactly as wide as that arrangement needed and no wider. He conferred the angakkoq’s gift. He supplied helping spirits. He was consulted on sickness, weather, and the movements of game, and he was held to know in advance who was going to die. Nobody credited him with making anything.

The limits are more interesting. He was invisible to everyone but the angakkut, which meant his existence rested entirely on their testimony. No source gives him a birth, a death, or a family. Witchcraft ran completely outside his authority, practised in secret by people the angakkut hunted, so the greatest spirit in the world did not have a monopoly on supernatural power even in his own country. And then there is the thing that actually finished him. When Christianity arrived, the missionaries did not argue him out of existence. They took his name. By Rink’s day tornarsuk was simply the Greenlandic word for the devil, and on Baffin Island Ludwig Kumlien heard the same thing, recording in the same breath that the word had once meant the greatest spirit of good as well as of evil and that the people now used it for Satan. The word survived the conversion. The being did not. A century later an anthropologist studying him gave her paper the title “Toornaarsuk, an historical Proteus”, which is about right for someone who changed shape every time a stranger asked him a question.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Torngarsuk in Inuit mythology?

Torngarsuk is the most powerful spirit in Inuit tradition, the master of all lesser spirits and the being a person had to call on in order to become an angakkoq, or shaman. His name comes from the Greenlandic word for a helping spirit combined with an ending meaning great, so it means something close to “the great helping spirit”. He was not regarded as a creator.

What does Torngarsuk look like?

The sources contradict each other. Early missionary accounts from Greenland described him as anything from the size of a finger to the size of a bear, and Henry Rink, who collected Greenlandic tradition in the nineteenth century, believed those descriptions came from leading questions rather than from Greenlandic belief. In Labrador the picture is more consistent: there Torngarsoak was said to take the form of an enormous polar bear.

How did someone become an angakkoq through Torngarsuk?

According to an account recorded in Cumberland Sound in 1877, the candidate went far away from anyone else, found a large stone, sat beside it and called on Torngarsuk. When the spirit appeared the fear was so violent that the man collapsed and died, remained dead for three days, and then returned to life and walked home with his powers. Afterwards he could see the lesser spirits, the tornat, that Torngarsuk assigned to him.

Is Torngarsuk the master of seals and whales?

In Labrador tradition Torngarsoak was held to control the lives of the sea animals, and the Torngat Mountains are named after him. In Greenland that role belonged to a different being entirely, the woman who lives at the bottom of the sea and releases the game animals, so the description is accurate for one region and borrowed for the other.

Why is Torngarsuk sometimes called a devil?

Christian missionaries in Greenland and Labrador took his name and applied it to Satan, so that within a few generations the word tornarsuk meant the devil in ordinary speech. Both Henry Rink in Greenland and Ludwig Kumlien on Baffin Island recorded the change as it was happening. The Labrador range named after him picked up the nickname the Devil Mountains from the same process.

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Sedna, Nanook, Tupilaq, Sila, Amarok, Aningaat and Siqiniq, Adlet, Qalupalik, Qiqirn, Ijiraq, Keelut, Kigatilik, Akhlut, Tunghak