CATEGORIES OF “OWN” AND “ALIEN” IN PETER HøeG’S NOVEL MISS SMILLA'S FEELING FOR SNOW

The article examines the categories of “own” and “alien” using Peter Høeg’s bestselling novel Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1992), which addresses compelling issues of modern Scandinavian society. The main character Smilla, half Danish, half Greenlander, tries to find out who is responsible for the tragic death of her neighbors’ small boy. She was born in Greenland, spent her childhood there and grew up in Denmark, so the investigation helps Smilla to understand her place in the modern world. The categories of “own” and “alien” are closely intertwined both in Smilla’s mind and in the surrounding reality. The authors analyzed which components constituted the picture of the heroine’s world and determined the etymology of the categories of “own” and “alien”. Various methods of culturological and literary text analysis, the method of selective commenting, the descriptive method, and component analysis were chosen as the main research methods. The results showed that Smilla still calls herself a Greenlander, but does not deny the influence of life in Denmark on her personality.

Evidence for Thralls in Scandinavian Place Names

A very important source for reconstruction of pre-historic Scandinavian society is toponymy, place-names. There is a caveat here, similar to what we found regarding runic inscription, namely probably very little cause for including slaves in the naming of settlements (and in minor names). We have some probably certain names, and a larger proportion of potential place-names with terms denoting a slave. The most “secure” terms must be þræll, but we might also consider terms such as bryti, man n., and karli. The conclusion is that place-names can unfortunately shed very little light on slaves in early Scandinavian society.

The Rise and Fall of Scandinavian Thraldom

The beginning of slavery in Scandinavia is impossible to fathom. We have to settle with some hypotheses, one being that it was introduced after contacts with the Roman world, another that we had some kind of slavery already in the Bronze (perhaps even the Stone) Age, although it is difficult to comprehend how such kind of dependency could function in a hunter-gatherer society. As for the end of slavery, we are somewhat better equipped with sources. Thraldom seems to successively fade out in Scandinavian society in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and for Sweden the year 1335 has been considered a final date. Unfree thralls where turned into (half-free) rent-paying tenants.