The Girl Who Married a Gnome

Author: Traditional Inuit

Time Period: 1001 CE–1500 CE

Country or Culture: North America

Genre: Folktale

PLOT SUMMARY

A young woman named Arouk lives with her parents in a sealskin tent near a beautiful fjord. Arouk desperately wants to marry, but her father has yet to meet a man who is good enough for her. One day an unfamiliar man appears in his kayak and calls out to Arouk by name. When she peeks through the tent flap, her father yells at the man to go away. Instead of leaving, the young man starts to walk right up to the tent, which angers the father and incites a shoving match. After the father is pushed to the ground by the stranger, he throws a rock at the young man’s head and knocks him unconscious.

Fearing for his life, Arouk’s father then orders his wife and daughter to pack their belongings. Just as the young man regains consciousness, they paddle safely away from the fjord, though they cannot ignore the man’s menacing voice threatening them, vowing that Arouk will never marry and her family will never be fed if they are starving. After paddling all day, the family reaches an island where there is an abandoned house. They live there happily for a long time and make the island their home.

One day, much to her parents’ surprise, Arouk announces that she is married, although when her father first sees his son-in-law he thinks he is hallucinating, for the man is a tiny atliarusek, or gnome. When Arouk confesses to the marriage, the father is quite happy, especially when the gnome hunts food for them.

One day the gnome says that he must leave Arouk temporarily to visit his family. Arouk and her parents insist upon following his kayak in their umiak. As they travel toward the fjord, other gnomes join them. At one point, the gnomes travel under the water so they cannot be seen, but they eventually resurface. Finally, the caravan reaches the Valley of the Caribou, where Arouk and her family stay all summer and fill their umiak with meat and furs.

Upon arriving home, Arouk’s father hears that the families in their old village are starving to death. After some consideration, he decides to bundle up some meat and hides and return to the village. When he arrives, rather than being greeted by grateful friends and neighbors, he is spoken to harshly, especially by the young man who had threatened him years earlier. He is ridiculed for lying about his hunting prowess and for claiming to have procured all that meat without a son-in-law.

The father leaves the food behind in anger and returns home furious about their lack of appreciation. When he expresses his feelings, his son-in-law suggests that he invite the villagers to their home for a feast. The father immediately warms to the idea. Soon the old neighbors appear in their kayaks, including all of the young men whom he had rejected for his daughter, and they begin to feast on dishes made from seal and caribou. Meanwhile, the father takes advantage of their presence and proceeds to speak to them about their insensitivity, especially regarding the treatment he received from his daughter’s belligerent suitor. Most of the guests express remorse and shame. When he is finished, he has made peace with the villagers, and they with him.

SIGNIFICANCE

Unlike Irish leprechauns or Norse elves, the venerated “little people” in European mythology and literature, gnomes do not feature as prominently in Inuit culture. The story of the girl who married a gnome was first collected by Dr. Hinrich Johannes Rink and published in Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo (1875). In Greenland, gnomes were called atliaruseks or ingnersuaks and were believed to live within rocks along the shores where they interacted with humans as they fished and hunted from their kayaks and umiaks. They were mostly benevolent creatures and were considered guardians of humans, although they were capable of inflicting harm or creating unwanted mischief.

This folktale conveys much about Inuit family life, marriage, and social values and the challenges to Inuit survival. In Inuit society, men were the hunters and were thus responsible for feeding their families. Hunting, then, was more than a desirable skill in a husband; it was crucial for survival.

When seal, whale, fish, and other sea life were plentiful, families would congregate together near the coastline. During the summers, hunters also chased reindeer inland to places such as the Valley of the Caribou. The sharing of meat and skins between villagers—many of whom were related—was commonplace, and community-wide feasts often marked successful hunts. During famines, the sharing of food between neighbors and relatives became especially crucial. Both the Inuit father and his gnome son-in-law in the tale, then, demonstrate a strong sense of conscience toward their fellow villagers when they share their food not just once but twice. The tale also serves to provide a means to teach societal and familial values from generation to generation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bierhorst, John. The Deetkatoo: Native American Stories about Little People. New York: Morrow, 1998. Print.

Campisi, Jack. “Legends from Greenland: Or, What Became of the Norse?” Pequot Museum. Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, 2002. Web. 31 May 2013.

“Canada’s First Peoples: The Inuit.” First Peoples of Canada. Goldi Productions, 2007. Web. 30 May 2013.

Rink, Henry. Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo: With a Sketch of Their Habits, Religion, Language, and Other Peculiarities. 1875. Mineola: Dover, 1997. Print.

Wolfson, Evelyn. Inuit Mythology. Berkeley Height: Enslow, 2001. Print.