Torngarsuk

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North of Saglek Fiord the Labrador coast lifts into a wall of bare rock and standing ice, a range of granite peaks and drowned valleys cut by fjords that run inland for tens of kilometers between sheer stone. The maps now mark it Torngat Mountains National Park — 9,700 square kilometers established in 2008, co-managed by Parks Canada and the Nunatsiavut government of the Labrador Inuit, who reach it by boat and small plane in the few weeks a year the ice permits. The name is older than the park by a long measure. Torngat is the Inuktitut Tongait, the place of spirits: the ground an angakkuq — a shaman — climbed to meet the helping-spirits that gave a person power, and the ground that carries, folded into its own syllables, the name of the greatest of those spirits. To name the range at all is to name him.

Saglek Fiord, Torngat Mountains National Park Reserve, Labrador — the southern edge of “the place of spirits.” Paul Gierszewski, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The great tuurngaq

His name comes to the record in a scatter of spellings — Torngarsuk, Tornarsuk, Tornaarsuk, Torngarsoak, Torngasak — because it comes through the ears of Danish, Moravian, and Labrador missionaries writing down a language they were still learning, and because the language itself varies from Nuuk to Nunavik to the Labrador coast. Underneath the spellings the word is transparent. It is built on the root tuurngaq — in the older Greenlandic orthography torngak or tornaq — the ordinary word for a shaman’s helping-spirit, and it takes an augmentative-pejorative suffix, the ending that makes a thing great and formidable at once. Most ethnographers read the whole as the great tuurngaq: the chief, the master, the outsized one among the tuurngait, the host of spirits (older Greenlandic tornait) that an angakkuq calls and commands.

This is the first thing to fix, because the missionary reception worked hard to lose it. Torngarsuk is not a creator, not a sky-father, not a maker of the world. He is the paramount member of a class. The tuurngait are many; he is the one who stands over them. The relation is grammatical before it is theological — the augmentative on a common noun — and it places him inside the same order of beings an ordinary shaman dealt with, only at the top of it. The range in Labrador makes the same word in the plural and in the landscape: the place of the tornait, the peaks where the spirits are.

What he looks like the sources cannot agree on, and the disagreement is not a gap to be closed but the honest shape of the evidence. He kept no image that a whole people shared; he was invisible to everyone except the angakkuit, and each angakkuq met the spirit-world alone. So the descriptions collected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries pull in different directions. He appears as a great white bear. He appears as a one-armed man. He appears, in one much-repeated Greenlandic account, as an enormous human being — grand, but shaped, the ethnographer noted, like one of the fingers of a hand. In the Labrador material gathered by the Moravians and later set down by Hinrich Rink in his Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo (1875), he is paired with a consort, Superguksoak, mistress of the land-animals, while he holds the sea. A handful of early missionary reports add a phallic form; this last is thinly and unevenly attested, surfaces mostly at the hostile edge of the mission record, and should be carried as what it is — a fragment, not a consensus. To ask which of these is the true Torngarsuk is to ask a question the tradition never posed. He is the spirit an angakkuq’s vision delivered, and visions differ.

One thing the sources do agree on. He is master of the sea-animals — of the whales and the seals, the meat and oil and skin on which coastal life depended — and it is in that office that he touches the human world most directly. When the game failed, when the seals would not come to the breathing-holes, a person in trouble needed a being who governed the animals. Torngarsuk governed them, and he governed them through the tuurngait and through the angakkuq who had made an ally of them.

Here he stands beside, and must be told apart from, the other great power of the sea. The mistress of the game — Sedna in the best-known tellings, Sanna in modern Inuktitut, and Nuliajuk, Nerrivik, Arnakuagsak, or Takannaaluk elsewhere — is the woman on the floor of the ocean who holds the seals and walruses and withholds them when the people break faith. Both she and Torngarsuk hold the animals that feed the people; both can shut the game away. But they are not one being, and they are not reached the same way. Sedna is propitiated by the shaman’s descent to the sea-bottom, the journey down to comb out the filth from her tangled hair. Torngarsuk is reached through the tuurngait — the alliance of spirits the angakkuq keeps and directs. They are two figures in a single animal-master cosmology, complementary and distinct: the sea-mother in her house below the water, and the great tuurngaq above the whole company of helping-spirits.

Master of the helping-spirits

To describe what Torngarsuk does is to describe the office of the angakkuq, because in this world a spirit is known by the human being who deals with it. This is a description of what the record reports the Inuit and Kalaallit held, and, in Christianized and syncretic form, still hold — the tradition, its offices, its cosmology — given at the distance of the public record, not as a working manual.

The tuurngait were spirits that had never been embodied. They belonged to no living animal and no dead person; they were of the spirit-world outright, and their whole character depended on the angakkuq who summoned them. This is the pivot of the system, and it is why the sources cannot decide whether Torngarsuk is good or terrible. The same spirit could bless or curse. A shaman of good intent turned the tuurngait to healing the sick, finding the game, and guarding the camp; a hostile shaman could turn the very same spirits to sickness and death. There is no contradiction in the record when one witness calls Torngarsuk a protector and another calls him a horror. As master of a class of beings whose morality was borrowed from the human who called them, he was, precisely, ambivalent — powerful, and pointed wherever the angakkuq pointed him. The tradition did not sort its powers into a good camp and an evil one; it sorted the people who wielded them.

The angakkuq was the specialist who could deal with such powers at all. The office was reached through hardship, isolation, and instruction, and it turned on knowing things the uninitiated did not: the words, the songs, the spirit-language, the spells by which a spirit is called and held and sent. A shaman kept helping-spirits the way another person kept tools — some accounts speak of spirits residing in small carved figures or in a bottle of skin — and controlled them by voice. The Torngat range in Labrador was one of the places a person went to seek them, which is why the mountains carry the plural of the word: a landscape of spirit-encounter, not a temple to a single god.

The signature feat was the spirit-journey. Its most famous form is the descent to the sea-mother — the angakkuq travels in trance to the floor of the ocean, past her guardians, to reach the offended woman and comb the tangled, greasy hair she cannot comb herself, because the broken taboos of the people have clotted it, and only when her hair is clean does she loose the seals again. That journey belongs to Sedna’s story and is given here only as the public record gives it — that the office existed, what it was understood to accomplish, and no more. The point for Torngarsuk is the neighboring one: the angakkuq who could make that descent was the same specialist who commanded the tuurngait over which Torngarsuk presided, and the Torngat peaks were where the alliance with those spirits was sought.

The ethic underneath is not superstition and did not read, to the people who held it, as fear of the dark. It is an ethic of the ensouled world. Knud Rasmussen’s Fifth Thule Expedition (1921–24) recorded the Iglulik angakkuq Aua putting it in words that have been quoted ever since. Pressed by the outsider for the reasons behind the taboos, Aua answered that the old people did not explain, they only feared — we do not believe, we fear — and named the ground of the fear — that human food is made entirely of souls. The animals a hunter kills are not things but persons, ensouled, who must be treated with respect and the right ritual or they will not return, and their kin — the powers who hold the game — will shut the rest away. In such a world a master of the sea-animals and a company of spirits who can heal or kill are not fantasy figures but the working structure of survival, and the angakkuq who mediates between the human and the spirit worlds is doing the most necessary work there is. This is a living inheritance, not an extinct one: the angakkuq tradition, the sea-mother, the animal-masters, the masks, and the Inuit languages are carried today across Nunavut, established in 1999, self-ruling Greenland, and Nunatsiavut, revitalized alongside Christianity rather than replaced by it.

The renaming

The heaviest thing that ever happened to Torngarsuk was a translation. In 1721 the Dano-Norwegian Lutheran Hans Egede sailed for Greenland aboard the Haabet — the Hope — looking for the lost Norse colonists and finding instead the Kalaallit. He founded the colony that in 1728 moved to Godthåb, today’s Nuuk, and earned the title the Apostle of Greenland. He and the Moravian and later Danish missionaries who followed set themselves against the angakkuit, whom they took for sorcerers, and against the spirits, whom they took for devils. They taught by pictures of hell and the fiend, confiscated the shamans’ drums, and preached the old cosmology as the work of Satan.

In that frame the greatest of the tornait had a ready slot. Torngarsuk — master of the sea-animals, chief of the invisible spirits, the one being the whole spirit-world answered to — was mapped onto the Christian Devil and handed down through the mission literature as the Inuit devil, the Greenlanders’ Satan. It is essential to see this for what it was: a move of translation and suppression, a way to name the old religion in order to break it, and never a description the Inuit themselves offered. Torngarsuk was not a devil in his own world. He was ambivalent, which is a different thing entirely; the demon was made by naming the ambivalence evil. The mission even left its mark on the ordinary language. The word tuurngaq, which had meant simply a helping-spirit or killing-spirit, took on — with Christianization — the sense of demon in the Christian sense, a documented drift driven by the mission and still audible in Christianized Inuktitut usage.

The statue of Hans Egede, the “Apostle of Greenland,” raised in 1922 above Nuuk — the colony he founded in 1728. In 2020 it was doused in red paint and marked “decolonize.” amanderson2, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The demonizing of the great tuurngaq was the leading edge of a longer machinery, and the rest of it has to be named plainly. The suppression of the angakkuit ran alongside forced Christianization and the residential and day schools that took children from their language and their families. It ran alongside the forced relocations — most notoriously the 1953 High Arctic exiles, Inuit families moved from Inukjuak on the eastern Hudson Bay coast to Grise Fiord and Resolute far to the north, into a harder country they had not chosen, in part to plant human flags on the map of Canadian sovereignty. It ran alongside the killing of Inuit sled dogs — the qimmiit, the animals a family needed to hunt and travel — shot in their hundreds by police and authorities through the middle of the century, and alongside the disc-number system that tagged Inuit with numbered identity discs in place of their names, and later alongside the anti-sealing and anti-whaling campaigns that gutted the hunting economy from the outside. None of this is background to Torngarsuk’s story; it is the same story, the concrete weight of what it meant to have one’s cosmos renamed as the devil’s work.

There is a second afterlife, lighter and more slippery, in which Inuit sacred and material things become other people’s decoration. The inuksuk, the stone figure that stood for a person on the land — a marker, a guide, a caribou-drive lure — was taken up as the emblem on the flag of Nunavut and then, in stylized human form, as the “Ilanaaq” logo of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, a use Inuit leaders criticized as not a true inuksuk at all. The tupilaq, once the secret carved instrument of a shaman’s revenge, sent through the sea to kill, is now a staple of the Greenlandic tourist trade, sold in bone and antler over the counter. And Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North, long received as a straight documentary of Arctic life, was in good part staged — its “Nanook” a hired man under another name, its igloo built oversized and open-roofed for the camera. Each of these is reception, and each is named here as reception: adopted by outsiders, not by the people from whom they were taken.

Against all of it, the oldest survival of Torngarsuk’s name is the plainest and the most public. It never went underground and it was never demonized: it is written across the map of northern Labrador in letters anyone can read. The Torngat Mountains keep the plural of the word for the spirits, and Torngat Mountains National Park — “the place of spirits,” co-managed by the Inuit of Nunatsiavut and Nunavik with Parks Canada — carries it now as a name of honor rather than of dread. The same root that one missionary took, in 1721, and pinned to the Devil still names, three centuries on, the range where the great tuurngaq was met. The demon-name was the imposition; the place-name is what the Inuit kept. Between the two lies the whole distance a people has traveled back toward its own words.

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