A story of lust and unspeakable sin

The Snow Hen of Jostedal

A story of lust and unspeakable sin

Part 1: GENESIS

Once there was a little legend walking about, that we will name Jostedalsrypa.

Why such a long handle, you may ask? when it would be a lot easier to name him (her!) Junie or Jolie or some such other two-syllable name?

Because Jostedalsrypa is a myth.

Jostedal, as we will now call her (given that the other name is just too long to remember) is sometimes called the Snow Hen of Jostedal. I first encountered her yesterday, though her myth (reality?) goes back to the 1300s, when the Black Plague was harvesting Europe with a scythe as lethal as the Reaper’s.

When all was said and done, when all the ploughing up to make graves and the burning down to make sanitary lodgings had passed, when the few people left on the earth were breathing little sighs of relief here and there,  Nordrik walked the sylvan glades and frosted peaks of Scandinavia. He looked up with tears of gratitude at Scandy’s burning skies and thanked the Norse gods that he had been –

But enough of this, it's getting in the way of the story.

Back to Jostedalsrypa. While this Nordrik (or Norhan, or Norvasken, depending on which scholar you quote) was beating the bushes for edible mushrooms, he heard a stirring sound.

Not like you’d stir your coffee, but more of a feather-on-leaf stir, very frail, a shaking of the bushes so minute that it might just be the stirrings of a bug.

With his ailegaard (walking pole), he gently parted the bushes. Nothing.

Then he kicked the quivering bush with his foot.

This provoked a whooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhoosh

sound, akin to the whirring of doves spiralling upwards, of partridges flushed from the bush.

But the wings of this creature (if creature it was!) did not carry it far, as just a few feet off the ground it fell with a dismal thud.

He looked at the strange thing.

It was shaped like a hen. It looked like a hen. It flapped like a hen. It was partially camouflaged by snow, dirty snow that was half-melting and had formed around the hen as a sort of protective covering, an ice nest.

“I will call her Jostedal, after Lake Jostedal and the City of Jostedal and Jostedal Canyon," said Norrdka, lifting the terrified bird from the snow and marvelling at how heavy she seemed in his arms.

Her head jerked this way and that. A snow hen!  Imagine that. So those silly legends must've been true after all. She seemed to have the intelligence of a – well, of a hen. Her feet paddled the air. Still Norrdka trudged, wondering how she would taste stewed up with a side dish of mushrooms.

The Black Plague had left its survivors with a keen appetite.

Nothing that moved was ever wasted,  but because the Snow Hen was displaying nesting behaviour, the family  held back on eating her.  Everyone clucked with joy when  Jostedal produced her first egg. “But do not eat it yet!” cried Gromkin, the snow-crowned patriarch of the family and the one who had suspiciously survived the Plague by hoarding quail eggs in his pockets.

“Why, old man? Why not eat the egg as a side dish with the chicken and mushrooms?” cried Norrdka.

“I have a recipe for Chicken Eggskongg,” Mama chimed in.

“Hatch this egg. Nurture it. It will be extraordinary.”

Even those who did not agree with Gromkin decided they had better listen to him (he would whack them on the side of the head if they didn't), and keep the Snow Hen around as a renewable resource for food.  Meantime, they had this egg, which seemed somehow magical in their sight.

They could not sit on the egg, so after a meagre dinner of wood fungi they coaxed the chicken to sit down and incubate it. It took a lot of shoelaces to tie her down.

But something very strange happened in the night. 

PART 2: PARTHENOGENESIS

Norrdka wasn’t the first to discover what had happened to her.  It was the old man, Gromkin. He saw the two of them over in the corner. The old man had a stick in his hand and was poking at her.

Squatting in the corner with not a stitch of clothing on her comely body was a beautiful young maiden!

Could this be the Snow Hen of  ancient  tales and stories? How was that possible?  Were they all seeing the same apparition?

The beautiful naked maiden whom they soon dubbed Shnowen had grown a sort of covering of white feathers over its body. And to think they had nearly eaten her the night before!

“ARE YOU HERE TO GRANT US THREE WISHES?” shouted the old man to the perplexed-looking chicken-lady.

She turned her head this way and that and made low, barely-perceptible clucking noises.

“ARE YOU HERE TO LAY THE GOLDEN EGG?” he shouted.

“Do be quiet, Father,” Mother cautioned him. “She is perplexed. Besides, she has already laid an egg which may be of inestimable value to us.”

And lo, it was.

As Shnownen walked around the bare cottage pecking the floor and flapping her arms. a crack began to form in the egg. The whole family, all seventeen of them, gathered around it in anxiety and hope.

The crack was very slow to form, and Grandfather Gromkin wanted to whack at it with his splinggboln, but the rest of them held him back.

And just as they were all about to give up and serve up this egg with a side dish of roasted fowl, lo!

Out popped, not a genie or a monster or an apparition or a dybbuk or a djinn. It was a child.

It was as child so tiny and radiant that no one could believe it. “That’s achick,” declared Seventeenth Brother.

“It’s never a chick. It’s a homunculus.”

“An automaton, I’ve seen one of those, it was an old monk that could walk around.”

“Silence!” cried the magical child, who seemed to be made of purest gold.

“State your business,” bellowed the old man, who was very direct.

“I have come here not by accident, but by design. I am here to refine human nature. I see cruelty everywhere, I see grabbing at food that belongs to others, I even see people eating each other’s flesh.”

“NO! It never happened”

“How can you even think such a thing!”

“You must be evil. How can you abuse us like this?”

But the family felt a deep and secret shame.  The Black Plague had certainly brought out the worst in everybody.

“Here is the test,” the magic child replied. “For forty-seven days, you shall have no food. The doors of your humble cabin will all be locked. This is a test of your character and of your ability to be selfless, and will redeem you for the black sins you committed during the Time of Pestilence.”

“Forty-seven days? Whover heard of THAT? Why not forty days and forty nights?”

“Shhhh, Grandpa Gromkin, maybe he’s joking.”

“No. It’s not like that,” broke in one of the many anonymous brothers.  “It means forty days, like Noah's rain in the Scriptures, PLUS the seven days it took for God to create the Universe.”

“Ohhhhhhhh.” They all relaxed a little.

The first few days were rather exciting, as the tiny golden child talked non-stop about many amazing things while Shnowen, now called Shwenon, picked and plucked and made hen noises. A few times Eldest Brother pursued her around the cabin, and no one could tell if it was for food, or some other purpose too dark to mention.

After a while, that bird began to look better and better.

Grandfather nagged the magic child day and night. “Are you sure you really meant FORTY-SEVEN days?” he asked him. “Maybe you only meant seven.” There was a faint clinking sound in the background as the family tightened their belts.

On the thirteenth day, they decided to kill the chicken.

Why not kill the chicken? They would not survive unless they did. But the axe and the knife and the other implements of cold-blooded murder were all outside, so they would have to corner and strangle her. This was a nearly-impossible task with a human-sized bird.

So they began to tame her. Here, chicken, chicken, chicken! Nice chicken. Because she was starving to death, she would do just about anything they asked of her, including the unspeakable act I mentioned before.

But I shall draw a veil over such evil.

One day, however, in spite of the brain fog of famine, one of them had an idea.

“Wait!” Sixteenth Brother cried. “If we can last out this wretched forty-seven days, imagine what this bird will be worth for us.”

“We can put her on display.”

“Make her do tricks!”

"All sorts of tricks." 

”And she’s beautiful, and naked. So you know how people will respond.”

“But forty-seven days. . . “

“Listen,” said Grandfather. “I’m close to a deal.”

For along with greed and pride and lust, and anger and envy, and all those other things we’re not supposed to do, Grandfather excelled at crooked wheeling and dealing. Soon he had bargained the child down to twenty-four days. With his mother held hostage, about to be roasted on a spit, he was in no position to argue.

The force-field around the cabin began to waver.

The family wondered if they could hold out much longer, as the chicken was getting skinnier and skinnier and sat listlessly in the corner pulling her feathers out. She looked bad and would not enchant or even scare anyone.

“Goddamn you, Snow Hen,” cried Norrdka, cursing the day he had ever found her. “You started this. You’ll finish it.” He rushed at her with every intention of strangling her.  But she was too feeble to resist, and collapsed with a drawn-out cry.

“NOW have we passed the test?” asked Fourth Brother hopefully. They had, after all, not KILLED the chicken. They had resisted killing the chicken, who had obviously died of natural causes.

“You failed it a long time ago,” the child answered. “What is more, there isno spell. You could have left the cabin any time you wanted to. So you committed yet another sin."

"What could that be?"

"Stupidity."

”Mountebank!” cried Grandfather.

“Look at your Snow Hen, once so beautiful and so full of promise. She has died of hunger and despair. Not only that, there is no meat on her bones to sustain you.”

“I could make a good stock,” Mother suggested.

“I could stuff her, you know, put her on display.. . . “

“Silence!  You people do not deserve to be in the presence of magic, because your souls are dark and selfish and full of corruption. You abuse the thing you claim to love the most and keep her captive in terror.”

“No one will know.”

“YOU will know. The knowledge will suck the strength from your soul and blight all your days, and continue for seventeen generations."

“But this is why they made Jesus.! If we repent, he will take all our sins away."

“Not this one.” Disgusted, the child burst into a ball of flame that grew and grew and grew until it consumed the entire cabin.

There was but one person spared. As white smoke surged up from the chimney, a bird with dazzling white feathers emerged and grew larger and larger until she seemed to fill the whole sky. The Snow Hen of Jostedal had freed herself from the prison of human darkness, never to return.

POSTLUDE. The provenance of this piece is strange. Years and years ago, I saw a NOVA program on PBS about a girl named Genie, a "wild child" who had been tied up in a dark room for an incredible thirteen years by her sadistic brute of a father.

The girl couldn't speak, could barely walk, and was the size of a seven-year-old. While the public may have seen a horribly damaged child, the scientific community saw a blank slate - that is, blank except for a lot of dollar signs.

The documentary recounts the stampede of interest from scientist, linguists, neurologists, sociologists, and many other ologists who scrambled for research grants to "study" Genie. This was in 1972, and NOT ONE person believed that it would be preferable for Genie's welfare to be placed in loving foster care until she gained enough stability to work with the scientists. 

It did not even occur to them.

I can't recount all of this heartbreaking story because it's too complex, except to say that the girl was eventually abandoned by the scientists who had so greedily fallen on her when she was released from her thirteen-year prison. When she was finally de-institutionalized, she was taken home by two of the research scientists like some sort of shelter dog, then abandoned a few years later when the grant money ran out. 

At the end of this wretched story, Genie is "put away" in a nursing home, and that's the end of it. Since she's younger than me, she is probably still there, in another sort of prison. I did find a reference from some time in the '90s, when an observer insisted she was "happy and content" in the home she had never chosen. Certainly she has no power to object.

I recently watched the NOVA program again - I'll try to find a link to it, it's riveting - and then acquired a book called Genie: A Scientific Tragedy by Russ Rymer. I was sure this book would be spellbinding, but 50 pages in I began to wonder whose side he was on.

He spent pages and pages on the work of Noam Chomsky, a pop icon and pseudo-linguist who believes there is only one language in all of human experience. As far as I can see, this demented idea has nothing at all to do with Genie and her difficult, halting acquisition of language, but it helps the author distance himself from all that mess and align himself with someone trendy.

But there's something else here, and I have to admit when I first read it I groaned. "I've been diddled," I thought. He listed various "feral" children that had been found roaming the woods over the centuries, and the farther I got into the list the more sure I was that he was having us on, making the whole thing up as a way of disrespecting his readers and jerking the leash.

“Among the cases of wild children discovered over the last seven centuries, more than fifty have been documented. The list includes the Hesse wolf-child; the Irish sheep-child; Kasper Hauser; the first Lithuanian bear-child; Peter of Hanover; the second Lithuanian bear-child; the third; the Karpfen bear-girl; Tomko of Zips; the Salzburg sow-girl; Clemens, the Overdyke pig-child; Dina Sanichar of Sekandra; the Indian panther-child; the Justedal snow-hen; the Mauretanian gazelle-child; the Teheran ape-child; Lucas, the South African baboon-child; and Edith of Ohio.”

I think it was Edith of Ohio that did it. This HAD to be a mean form of satire designed to jerk the reader around. But like the diligent little Googlist that I am,  I did a search for each and every one of these names, and lo, they WERE mentioned somewhere, even if briefly, as part of a list of "wild" children. Most of them are considered myths, an extension of the ancient story of Romulus and Remus who were suckled by wolves.

I'm not sure quite how that led to the story of the Snow Hen, except that the name really grabbed me: it really seemed like something out of Hans Christian Andersen.

The arc of the story is pretty crazy, because there IS no arc: I literally took it word by word with no forethought at all, no sense of what might come next. At various moments you have to stop and try to shape the story a bit, and then of course edit it later for inconsistencies. But I did very little of this.

It occurred to me while making my lunch today that perhaps the Snow Hen is Mary, Mother of God, and the golden child is her son  Jesus Christ, holding those wicked people in the cabin accountable for their sins. He doesn't let them get away with anything, not even throwing the Bible back in his face.  I hope Jesus would approve.

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Naked as a doll

I've been enthralled with the doll art of Marina Bychkova for a number of years now. Every so often I get into a photo-collecting binge - I have whole files of them, and have even made some "fan art", having no visual talent whatsoever. Photos of her disturbingly beautiful Enchanted Doll creations are all over the internet now, along with lots of strong reaction.

Today I got partway through a comments section that seemed to go on forever. It dismayed me how little understanding there was of what - I think - Bychkova is trying to do here. Certain people seem to be shocked that she's making these vulnerable-looking pubescent dolls, often posing nude or semi-nude. Porn! they assume. Exploitation of little girls: shocking!

But could it be that the dolls are deliberately provocative - not in the usual sense (though they can be that, too) - but in the manner of "provoking" us, provoking the viewer into uneasiness and disquiet? And don't these hair-prickling, sometimes unsettling sensations lie pretty close to a sense of awe?





I could barely scratch the surface here in trying to sum up the flavour of the comments. A few seem to get it and are deeply affected, if a bit disoriented, as if lost in the enchanted tangle. But the rest are squabbling over whether or not the artist should be portraying vulnerable, "sexualized" young girls, either pre- or post-pubescent, and whether the whole thing is just "creepy" and "weird".

I think they're missing the point. Just skimming the top off the meaning of "enchanted", you come up with words like this:

bewitched, magic, possessed, charmed, fascinated, absorbed, entranced, captivated, enthralled, beguiled, smitten, engrossed, spellbound, infatuated, hypnotized, under a spell

Here be faeries, not to mention the dragons of deception. Along with threads of captivity, a state that's eroticized by a disturbing number of people, there are definite echoes of sexual thrall. Beguiled (guile meaning cunning). Smitten (ouch!). Infatuated. These mysterious juju-girls express all these haunted, hunted layers, and more. Bychkova's figures are like three-dimensional illustrations of very ancient, primal stories, what we innocently call "fairy tales". Some of them seem to have stepped directly out of the dream state. Others have heroic, aggressive or even macabre aspects which I believe are entirely intentional. These dolls practically scream story to me, and I can't look at them without dark tales multiplying wildly in my head.

But don't forget that these are enchanted dolls (not enchanting), with an alarming habit of doing what they wish. This means that they refuse to stay glued to the pedestal of myth. What grabs people's guts is the immediacy, the living-breathing quality in the waxen, porcelain beauty: we don't want to see the haunted faces of real little girls reflected here, enclosed in glass cases, mutilated and shamed, their value and and passion stunted by a culture that doesn't care about them, except perhaps to commodify them. Nor do we want to see little girls with antlers and spikes and gigantic fly wings sprouting from their heads. It bespeaks a spooky power which might actually be there, perhaps only visible to those with a peculiar kind of night vision.

The purpose of art is not just to please or entertain, but to unsettle, even disturb. I am reminded of Frida Kahlo and her skulls and dead babies and knives through the flesh. These dolls say all sorts of things to all sorts of people, and on many different levels. They command tens of thousands of dollars each, are internationally celebrated, and appear in lavish magazine spreads for expensive perfumes. In some cases, stores have insisted their "anatomical correctness" (realistic genitals complete with pubic hair) be covered up in window displays.

All these so-called conflicting dynamics are happening at once. Wealth, display, prestige, exposure (more than one kind of exposure), nakedness, tears, vulnerability, creepiness, pain, damage, mythology, bravery, exploits, exploitation, total mystery. It's all here. I think if I ever got to touch one of these dolls, my hair would stand on end.

Are they fetish objects? Depends on what you mean by fetish. In some cases, people are undoubtedly buying them as one more ridiculously expensive item to add to their doll collection. The average person has to make do with photos on the internet and can't even attend  an exhibit in places like Moscow and Paris and Rome.

The comments I've reproduced here are examples of the endless argument over whether Bychkova "should" be creating emotionally-laden objects like this. Dolls have always had a spooky power, and the idea of a doll coming to life and talking is a tired old saw worn out completely by too many bad books and movies. But these creatures don't even need to speak. Seeing a picture of one is enough to get you upset, or make you marvel, or even make you want one. I will admit I have thought of it, and Bychkova's new resin line (only a few thousand dollars rather than $10,000.00 or more) makes me realize the Enchanted Doll is beginning to go into mass-production.

These are absolutely slaying me. They look so real that it is triggering my stupid empathy and my brain just can't handle it. I just start tearing up. Damn she's good.

I don't even like dolls, but I would proudly display these in my home. That's insane.

Utterly stunning - the beauty of design and the soul of each doll is beyond amazing. I'm not a doll collector, but these would add magic to my home.

The fact that these dolls made all these people feel all these things prove that it is actual art.

Hideous. A selection of abused little girls. Maybe I'm a weirdo but I don't think a child (or adult for that matter) naked and crying is beautiful.





i wouldnt call yourself a weirdo. but id say you do have a problem with knowing a difference between fantasy and reality. probably one of those bland people with no imagination whos mind is too small to understand the reason behind art. when people like you see art that depicts the truth of your very own society you get offended. mostly because you choose to ignore the sadness of the world and pretend that everything is ok.

My gut instinct was not 'wow these are beautiful' but 'wow these look so realistically scared and how amazingly detailed is that girl's pubic region.' Are they more attractive to you because they're crying? I have enough imagination to know how these characters would feel and can see the sadness of the world reflected in it. I get it. Beautiful is not the adjective I'd use to describe it though. I'd like to see the artist make a strong woman. But I bet that wouldn't sell as well.

You're projecting the age, since the intended age of the dolls is not actually listed in the article....I assumed them to be in their 20's, some look perhaps in their 30's, and yea...a few look to be teenagers, but they all look like older teens in my eyes at that.

There's nothing wrong with nudity...so being naked while crying isn't inherently a problem. A person depicting a beautiful human being in a vulnerable state shouldn't be offensive or disturbing, but apparently it is to you and while that isn't "wrong"...you really do seem to be projecting your personal angst onto others.

The artist probably does not suffer from the same mental anguishes you do, they have their own, so calling this hideous for the reasons you are is not only callous....it also shows you don't really understand the intention behind art in general.

Also, some of these show nothing other than emotion. Some of them are simply still poses that are unsmiling. Not nearly all of them are "sad", not nearly all of them are crying, being naked is not weakness because vulnerability does not equate to weakness (which you don't seem to understand, hence your reaction), being made out of porcelain does not inherently make something weak either...the way you personally interpret symbols is not necessarily the way the artist intended for them to be interpreted. It's not that you're "wrong", but you are definitely projecting and making it seem as though your personal judgment of these dolls is finite.





You're making it sound like everyone is literally crazy for thinking these are beautiful because of your personal issues....without stopping to realize just how those issues make YOU sound to others who don't have them.

I honestly don't think the implied age is a projection. The whole concept of a doll is capturing a youthful appearance. The large eyes, slim frame, and barley developed 'bodies' all appeal to the vulnerability of youth. Let's not pretend that wasn't the intent. And let's not pretend that something can't be beautiful and disturbing at the same time. These dolls are beautiful, but it's also okay to not be comfortable with the tearful sexualization of young bodies. And that's not to say what the artist did was wrong-- it's just an acknowledgment.

I don't find them all too appealing to be honest. The dolls could be pretty without sexualizing little girls. You may not find what the artist did "wrong" per say, but I definatly don't think anyone is incorrect to find "the tearful sexualization of young bodies" totally creepy. Especially the girl put on the bed.





Understanding what a human body looks like at different ages does not mean that you're projecting, it means you understand what you're looking at. These dolls are indeed modeled after very young girls. No one that looks at a baby doll is being accused of "projecting ages" onto a doll modeled to look like an infant. Humans have very distinct growth phases, and the phase they are modeling here is very much adolescence, from breast position, pelvic structure, and face shape. It's adolescence. Just because you never took basic anatomy and physiology, or any human reproductive biology classes and don't understand how that works, doesn't mean it's wrong.

I agree that it's creepy. All of those features together are identifying traits of a 11-15 year old girl, and if you don't find that creepy, then that's your issue. You can say that it's fine that they're naked and crying, but I find it less so being that they chose to make dolls that look like girls going through puberty, then make them look like they're crying, and then photograph them nude. On top of that, pose them on a bed while crying. It's creepy. It's creepy to sexualize the form of young girls, it's even creepier to sexualize the image of young girls crying. But hey, that's just me. Maybe you're a ok with people making virtual child porn too, because you think it's "just a projection of age".

I guess the big question to ask yourself, here, is this: Why do you find depictions of female nudity to be inherently sexual? These aren't sexualized poses or situations.





So you don't think that the doll made to look like a girl between 11-15 laying on the bed crying in a very reveling outfit is sexual at all? You don't find it sexualized one bit? Remember, that doll doesn't have any agency what so ever. An adult person made the choice to construct dolls to resemble all traits characteristic with adolescent girls going through puberty into one doll. Spend hours painting their genitals, and then photograph them nude. This adult chose to then make it so that they were crying. Chose to put these dolls that they intentionally modeled to look like little girls physically, who they chose to depict crying, and looking afraid, onto a bed.

Yeah... I don't think they're projecting. I think that's pretty straight forward in creepiness. This reminds me of all those creepy 3D renditions of virtual child porn that people always get busted for. Except this isn't 3D renderings of naked kids, they're dolls. But hey, "art".





Post-blog thought. People blathering about the horrible sexual connotations of the little girl "laying on the bed" missed another point. That doll is meant to illustrate The Princess and the Pea. Laying on her bed. On top of all those mattresses, eh? Then again, "that doll doesn't have any agency what so ever". That, and "I'd like to see the artist make a strong woman. But I bet that wouldn't sell as well." But to say these creations aren't "strong" is to miss the point by a mile. Oh God, I'm going to bed now.

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http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

A story of lust and unspeakable sin

 

The Snow Hen of Jostedal

A story of lust and unspeakable sin

Part 1: GENESIS

Once there was a little legend walking about, that we will name Jostedalsrypa.

Why such a long handle, you may ask? when it would be a lot easier to name him (her!) Junie or Jolie or some such other two-syllable name?

Because Jostedalsrypa is a myth.

Jostedal, as we will now call her (given that the other name is just too long to remember) is sometimes called the Snow Hen of Jostedal. I first encountered her yesterday, though her myth (reality?) goes back to the 1300s, when the Black Plague was harvesting Europe with a scythe as lethal as the Reaper’s.

When all was said and done, when all the ploughing up to make graves and the burning down to make sanitary lodgings had passed, when the few people left on the earth were breathing little sighs of relief here and there,  Nordrik walked the sylvan glades and frosted peaks of Scandinavia. He looked up with tears of gratitude at Scandy’s burning skies and thanked the Norse gods that he had been –

But enough of this, it's getting in the way of the story.

Back to Jostedalsrypa. While this Nordrik (or Norhan, or Norvasken, depending on which scholar you quote) was beating the bushes for edible mushrooms, he heard a stirring sound.

Not like you’d stir your coffee, but more of a feather-on-leaf stir, very frail, a shaking of the bushes so minute that it might just be the stirrings of a bug.

With his ailegaard (walking pole), he gently parted the bushes. Nothing.

Then he kicked the quivering bush with his foot.

This provoked a whooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhoosh

sound, akin to the whirring of doves spiralling upwards, of partridges flushed from the bush.

But the wings of this creature (if creature it was!) did not carry it far, as just a few feet off the ground it fell with a dismal thud.

He looked at the strange thing.

It was shaped like a hen. It looked like a hen. It flapped like a hen. It was partially camouflaged by snow, dirty snow that was half-melting and had formed around the hen as a sort of protective covering, an ice nest.

“I will call her Jostedal, after Lake Jostedal and the City of Jostedal and Jostedal Canyon," said Norrdka, lifting the terrified bird from the snow and marvelling at how heavy she seemed in his arms.

Her head jerked this way and that. A snow hen!  Imagine that. So those silly legends must've been true after all. She seemed to have the intelligence of a – well, of a hen. Her feet paddled the air. Still Norrdka trudged, wondering how she would taste stewed up with a side dish of mushrooms.

The Black Plague had left its survivors with a keen appetite.

Nothing that moved was ever wasted,  but because the Snow Hen was displaying nesting behaviour, the family  held back on eating her.  Everyone clucked with joy when  Jostedal produced her first egg. “But do not eat it yet!” cried Gromkin, the snow-crowned patriarch of the family and the one who had suspiciously survived the Plague by hoarding quail eggs in his pockets.

“Why, old man? Why not eat the egg as a side dish with the chicken and mushrooms?” cried Norrdka.

“I have a recipe for Chicken Eggskongg,” Mama chimed in.

“Hatch this egg. Nurture it. It will be extraordinary.”

Even those who did not agree with Gromkin decided they had better listen to him (he would whack them on the side of the head if they didn't), and keep the Snow Hen around as a renewable resource for food.  Meantime, they had this egg, which seemed somehow magical in their sight.

 They could not sit on the egg, so after a meagre dinner of wood fungi they coaxed the chicken to sit down and incubate it. It took a lot of shoelaces to tie her down.

But something very strange happened in the night. 

PART 2: PARTHENOGENESIS

Norrdka wasn’t the first to discover what had happened to her.  It was the old man, Gromkin. He saw the two of them over in the corner. The old man had a stick in his hand and was poking at her.

Squatting in the corner with not a stitch of clothing on her comely body was a beautiful young maiden!

Could this be the Snow Hen of  ancient  tales and stories? How was that possible?  Were they all seeing the same apparition?

The beautiful naked maiden whom they soon dubbed Shnowen had grown a sort of covering of white feathers over its body. And to think they had nearly eaten her the night before!

“ARE YOU HERE TO GRANT US THREE WISHES?” shouted the old man to the perplexed-looking chicken-lady.

She turned her head this way and that and made low, barely-perceptible clucking noises.

“ARE YOU HERE TO LAY THE GOLDEN EGG?” he shouted.

“Do be quiet, Father,” Mother cautioned him. “She is perplexed. Besides, she has already laid an egg which may be of inestimable value to us.”

And lo, it was.

As Shnownen walked around the bare cottage pecking the floor and flapping her arms. a crack began to form in the egg. The whole family, all seventeen of them, gathered around it in anxiety and hope.

The crack was very slow to form, and Grandfather Gromkin wanted to whack at it with his splinggboln, but the rest of them held him back.

And just as they were all about to give up and serve up this egg with a side dish of roasted fowl, lo!

Out popped, not a genie or a monster or an apparition or a dybbuk or a djinn. It was a child.

It was as child so tiny and radiant that no one could believe it. “That’s achick,” declared Seventeenth Brother.

“It’s never a chick. It’s a homunculus.”

“An automaton, I’ve seen one of those, it was an old monk that could walk around.”

“Silence!” cried the magical child, who seemed to be made of purest gold.

“State your business,” bellowed the old man, who was very direct.

“I have come here not by accident, but by design. I am here to refine human nature. I see cruelty everywhere, I see grabbing at food that belongs to others, I even see people eating each other’s flesh.”

“NO! It never happened”

“How can you even think such a thing!”

“You must be evil. How can you abuse us like this?”

But the family felt a deep and secret shame.  The Black Plague had certainly brought out the worst in everybody.

“Here is the test,” the magic child replied. “For forty-seven days, you shall have no food. The doors of your humble cabin will all be locked. This is a test of your character and of your ability to be selfless, and will redeem you for the black sins you committed during the Time of Pestilence.”

“Forty-seven days? Whover heard of THAT? Why not forty days and forty nights?”

“Shhhh, Grandpa Gromkin, maybe he’s joking.”

“No. It’s not like that,” broke in one of the many anonymous brothers.  “It means forty days, like Noah's rain in the Scriptures, PLUS the seven days it took for God to create the Universe.”

“Ohhhhhhhh.” They all relaxed a little.

The first few days were rather exciting, as the tiny golden child talked non-stop about many amazing things while Shnowen, now called Shwenon, picked and plucked and made hen noises. A few times Eldest Brother pursued her around the cabin, and no one could tell if it was for food, or some other purpose too dark to mention.

After a while, that bird began to look better and better.

Grandfather nagged the magic child day and night. “Are you sure you really meant FORTY-SEVEN days?” he asked him. “Maybe you only meant seven.” There was a faint clinking sound in the background as the family tightened their belts.

On the thirteenth day, they decided to kill the chicken.

Why not kill the chicken? They would not survive unless they did. But the axe and the knife and the other implements of cold-blooded murder were all outside, so they would have to corner and strangle her. This was a nearly-impossible task with a human-sized bird.

So they began to tame her. Here, chicken, chicken, chicken! Nice chicken. Because she was starving to death, she would do just about anything they asked of her, including the unspeakable act I mentioned before.

But I shall draw a veil over such evil.

One day, however, in spite of the brain fog of famine, one of them had an idea.

“Wait!” Sixteenth Brother cried. “If we can last out this wretched forty-seven days, imagine what this bird will be worth for us.”

“We can put her on display.”

“Make her do tricks!”

"All sorts of tricks." 

”And she’s beautiful, and naked. So you know how people will respond.”

“But forty-seven days. . . “

“Listen,” said Grandfather. “I’m close to a deal.”

For along with greed and pride and lust, and anger and envy, and all those other things we’re not supposed to do, Grandfather excelled at crooked wheeling and dealing. Soon he had bargained the child down to twenty-four days. With his mother held hostage, about to be roasted on a spit, he was in no position to argue.

The force-field around the cabin began to waver.

The family wondered if they could hold out much longer, as the chicken was getting skinnier and skinnier and sat listlessly in the corner pulling her feathers out. She looked bad and would not enchant or even scare anyone.

“Goddamn you, Snow Hen,” cried Norrdka, cursing the day he had ever found her. “You started this. You’ll finish it.” He rushed at her with every intention of strangling her.  But she was too feeble to resist, and collapsed with a drawn-out cry.

“NOW have we passed the test?” asked Fourth Brother hopefully. They had, after all, not KILLED the chicken. They had resisted killing the chicken, who had obviously died of natural causes.

“You failed it a long time ago,” the child answered. “What is more, there isno spell. You could have left the cabin any time you wanted to. So you committed yet another sin."

"What could that be?"

"Stupidity."

”Mountebank!” cried Grandfather.

“Look at your Snow Hen, once so beautiful and so full of promise. She has died of hunger and despair. Not only that, there is no meat on her bones to sustain you.”

“I could make a good stock,” Mother suggested.

“I could stuff her, you know, put her on display.. . . “

“Silence!  You people do not deserve to be in the presence of magic, because your souls are dark and selfish and full of corruption. You abuse the thing you claim to love the most and keep her captive in terror.”

“No one will know.”

“YOU will know. The knowledge will suck the strength from your soul and blight all your days, and continue for seventeen generations."

“But this is why they made Jesus.! If we repent, he will take all our sins away."

“Not this one.” Disgusted, the child burst into a ball of flame that grew and grew and grew until it consumed the entire cabin.

There was but one person spared. As white smoke surged up from the chimney, a bird with dazzling white feathers emerged and grew larger and larger until she seemed to fill the whole sky. The Snow Hen of Jostedal had freed herself from the prison of human darkness, never to return.

POSTLUDE. The provenance of this piece is strange. Years and years ago, I saw a NOVA program on PBS about a girl named Genie, a "wild child" who had been tied up in a dark room for an incredible thirteen years by her sadistic brute of a father.

The girl couldn't speak, could barely walk, and was the size of a seven-year-old. While the public may have seen a horribly damaged child, the scientific community saw a blank slate - that is, blank except for a lot of dollar signs.

The documentary recounts the stampede of interest from scientist, linguists, neurologists, sociologists, and many other ologists who scrambled for research grants to "study" Genie. This was in 1972, and NOT ONE person believed that it would be preferable for Genie's welfare to be placed in loving foster care until she gained enough stability to work with the scientists. 

It did not even occur to them.

I can't recount all of this heartbreaking story because it's too complex, except to say that the girl was eventually abandoned by the scientists who had so greedily fallen on her when she was released from her thirteen-year prison. When she was finally de-institutionalized, she was taken home by two of the research scientists like some sort of shelter dog, then abandoned a few years later when the grant money ran out. 

At the end of this wretched story, Genie is "put away" in a nursing home, and that's the end of it. Since she's younger than me, she is probably still there, in another sort of prison. I did find a reference from some time in the '90s, when an observer insisted she was "happy and content" in the home she had never chosen. Certainly she has no power to object.

 I recently watched the NOVA program again - I'll try to find a link to it, it's riveting - and then acquired a book called Genie: A Scientific Tragedy by Russ Rymer. I was sure this book would be spellbinding, but 50 pages in I began to wonder whose side he was on.

He spent pages and pages on the work of Noam Chomsky, a pop icon and pseudo-linguist who believes there is only one language in all of human experience. As far as I can see, this demented idea has nothing at all to do with Genie and her difficult, halting acquisition of language, but it helps the author distance himself from all that mess and align himself with someone trendy.

But there's something else here, and I have to admit when I first read it I groaned. "I've been diddled," I thought. He listed various "feral" children that had been found roaming the woods over the centuries, and the farther I got into the list the more sure I was that he was having us on, making the whole thing up as a way of disrespecting his readers and jerking the leash.

“Among the cases of wild children discovered over the last seven centuries, more than fifty have been documented. The list includes the Hesse wolf-child; the Irish sheep-child; Kasper Hauser; the first Lithuanian bear-child; Peter of Hanover; the second Lithuanian bear-child; the third; the Karpfen bear-girl; Tomko of Zips; the Salzburg sow-girl; Clemens, the Overdyke pig-child; Dina Sanichar of Sekandra; the Indian panther-child; the Justedal snow-hen; the Mauretanian gazelle-child; the Teheran ape-child; Lucas, the South African baboon-child; and Edith of Ohio.”

I think it was Edith of Ohio that did it. This HAD to be a mean form of satire designed to jerk the reader around. But like the diligent little Googlist that I am,  I did a search for each and every one of these names, and lo, they WERE mentioned somewhere, even if briefly, as part of a list of "wild" children. Most of them are considered myths, an extension of the ancient story of Romulus and Remus who were suckled by wolves.

I'm not sure quite how that led to the story of the Snow Hen, except that the name really grabbed me: it really seemed like something out of Hans Christian Andersen.

The arc of the story is pretty crazy, because there IS no arc: I literally took it word by word with no forethought at all, no sense of what might come next. At various moments you have to stop and try to shape the story a bit, and then of course edit it later for inconsistencies. But I did very little of this.

It occurred to me while making my lunch today that perhaps the Snow Hen is Mary, Mother of God, and the golden child is her son  Jesus Christ, holding those wicked people in the cabin accountable for their sins. He doesn't let them get away with anything, not even throwing the Bible back in his face.  I hope Jesus would approve.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

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