Heritaging and the Use of History in Margit Sandemo’s The Legend of the Ice People

Abstract

This chapter explores the use of heritage and history in the popular romance series The Legend of the Ice People (1982–1989) by Norwegian-Swedish author Margit Sandemo. The epos is the 47-volume multigenerational saga of a family. The series is here defined as a story world in which Sandemo is the creator, but fans are actively involved in collective negotiations. The use of the past within the series offers interpretations to readers, who are putting the old-fashion modes into up-to-date, concurrent, and contemporary understandings of morality by emerging from the historical past within the series.

The Legend of the Ice People: An Introduction

“A mixture of myth and legend interwoven with historical events, this is imaginative creation that involves the reader from the first page to the last.”

—Historical Novels Review (Oughton 2008)

This chapter explores the use of heritage and history in the popular romance series The Legend of the Ice People (1982–1989) by Norwegian-Swedish author Margit Sandemo. The epos is the 47-volume multigenerational saga of a family and one of the best-selling series of novels in Scandinavia. My study of this series is motivated not only by its scope and popularity, with some six million readers (Nilson 2015), but by the fact that the series’ specific features are an outstanding example of how popular romance, with its core component based on the love story and erotic desire, makes use of both fantastic elements and references to the past in a variety of ways to create a multifaceted story world. The chapter is arranged in the following way: after a presentation of the series, I will introduce the recognizable in terms of mimesis, the uses of history (historiebruk) referred to as the remediation of heritage (“heritaging”) and concurrences as a methodological approach. Thereafter, the chapter explores the series’ use of historical points of view to investigate how history is integrated into the love story and its roles in the narrative formula. The closing section presents a glimpse of the comprehensive involvement of the readers in online fora and the ways they negotiate, confirm, and refurnish the world of the Ice People.

The Legend of the Ice People: The Plot

The full series consists of three parts: (1) The Legend of the Ice People, 47 books, set in the years 1581–1960; (2) The Witch Master, 15 books, set in 1699 and 1715–1746; and (3) The Legend of the Realm of Light, 20 books, set in 1746 and 1995–2080. This chapter will focus on the core part of the story world of the Ice People. The series, originally written in Swedish, has been translated into nine languages, including English from 2008. This chapter quotes the Swedish version of the novels, with my own translations. For the sake of convenience, references to individual novels in the following discussion use both the English and Swedish titles, and a complete list of the series’ titles in both languages, along with the year of publication for the Swedish original, is included at the end.

The story in the first part revolves around a Norwegian family and mountain clan, called the Ice People, who also form their own race in an isolated valley in the Scandinavian Mountains (which is why they are known as the Ice People), sprung from the ancestor Tengel the Evil who, according to legend, sold his soul to the Devil to gain eternal life. The price was a curse; in each generation of his future relatives, there will be a person born with supernatural gifts to be used to perform deeds in the service of evil. The story starts in 1581, when a cursed outlaw, the outcast and marginalized Tengel of the Ice People who has inherited the name of the evil ancestor as well as his monstrous physique, strives to turn the evilness into goodness using the gifts that come with the curse, such as magical skills and healing powers, to help other people. The saga is about his descendants, especially the women, whose lives take place at the intersection of magical powers, passions, and the fight between good and evil. The stories take place during a 700-year period and recount a fantasy-driven narrative centering on the tension between the family’s paranormal power and universal human everyday life in changing historical settings. The family tree grows wide and creates a complexity of unique fates in each generation, united by the crime and curse of the evil ancestor and the common traits of the family. Some members of the family have supernatural powers, while others have only inherited family traits such as love of animals and children. Each part in the series constitutes a complete adventure that is either directly related to the fight against the family curse or constitutes a side story with a separate adventure, often a horror story or mystery.

To desire and to let the desire form, even tame, the protagonist and the object of the protagonist’s love defines the overall narrative in the series of the Ice People. The process of desire includes the awakening of the (hetero)sexuality of the female characters and their masculine counterparts, which is redeemed in their union. Whereas pornography focuses on the voyeuristic relation between the reader and the text, popular romance embodies closeness and identification in the sensations of lust, as well as fear from experiences of sexual violence that are also present within popular romance (McCann and Roach 2021). In Sandemo’s saga, desire is often dramatized in the narrative trope of beauty and the beast. Maria Nilson (2015) discusses this trope of how the unspoiled but newly sexually awakened female saves, by means of arousal, the man who is physically wild and characterized by beastlike traits. The development and awakening shape the individual and the couple into a complete, human whole. Being, and becoming, human is quite central in Sandemo’s epos. The journey to become fully human could be described as a coming-of-age story or as a subgenre of the classical bildungsroman which describes the moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood, in which a change of character is central. As in Barbara Cartland’s historical novels, the baser sexuality of the hero and the virginity of the heroine is a frequent plot point in Sandemo’s epos (Ficke 2021; Nilson 2015). Virginity is much easier to dramatize in the past than in the present, as Cartland once put it (Ficke 2021, 120).

The Recognizable, Heritaging, and Concurrences as a Methodological Approach

Images of the past are useful tools to arrange the main themes in the romantic story. The fictitious past is a popular trope within the romance genre, which frequently rejects realism by portraying fantastic elements such as time travel and extraordinary settings in exotic and/or historic contexts (Thurston 1987). Popular romance is reviled by historians for being shallow and riddled with errors, whether failing to properly reflect the historical period’s zeitgeist or through inaccurate depictions of historical facts. For such critics, historical romance is simply a display of anachronism and arbitrariness in the use of history, and its historical settings are randomly picked and interchangeable with any exotic environments (Queckfeldt 2000). The historical settings are of minor relevance and subjected to the love story; the fact is that the average reader doesn’t care about the details of the Battle of Hastings, as Leslie Weinger puts it in her handbook in historical romance (cited in Nilson 2015, 63).

Historical popular romance is not defined by historical accuracy, but instead generates a sense of authenticity through the expectations of the reader and genre conventions (Ehriander 2015; Nilson 2015). Historical settings in female-coded literature, such as popular romance and chick lit, actually aim to highlight current themes from the present. Or, as Helene Ehriander points out, the important themes the female confronts in the historical novel do not differ from those of Bridget Jones and her friends and are likewise recognizable for the female reader (Ehriander 2015).

The recognizable also lies in the references to cultural or historical expressions that Sandemo interleaves with the paranormal and fantastic. Although references to the past and an active use of history are central in Sandemo’s series, the books are not historical novels. Margit Sandemo has no ambition to write history in the sense of teaching about or conveying Nordic history to the audience, even though the series comprises a multigenerational family saga that stretches over 700 years. In a chat with readers in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, Sandemo describes her relationship with history-writing:

Reader: How do you think when you put your main characters in other times and cultures? Do you do a lot of research?

Margit Sandemo: No, I don’t. I do the research afterward and it always turns out right. (Svärdscrona 2001)

In spite of the critique of how history is used in popular romance and Sandemo’s categorical rejection of researching her historical milieux in advance, I argue that the relationship to the past is omnipresent and multidimensional through a mimetic use of the past. I use “mimetic” in relation to the aesthetic term for resembling or imitating nature with the aim of stimulating the viewer’s imagination in sensuous and concrete ways. Based on Vivian Sobchack’s term conceptual mimesis, I define mimetic elements as a general idea rather than likenesses of a historical person, event, or artifact (Sobchack 1990, 14). When Sandemo lets us meet historical persons, it is because they play a dramatic role in the romantic plot.

When the story’s framework is built up on established literary models, it is because these contribute to staging the romantic plot. Although Sandemo’s fictive stories are not intended to represent the past as a goal in itself, I argue that her use of history constitutes a cohesive narrative that is best described as a kind of mobilization of cultural heritage (“heritaging”). History and memory are selective. To create memory, it is not enough to refer to an isolated phenomenon or a historical fact. The phenomenon must be placed in a meaning-creating context in which both the contents (the historical references) and the form (style, genre, medium) transform the references to a memory. Literature has several similarities with memory processes. In research on collective memory and the use of cultural heritage and the past, emotions and imagination have been identified as driving forces in the active use of history. Awakening nostalgia, producing horror, and moving the reader through empathy or identification are recurring ways of emotionally relating to the past (see, for example, Smith et al. 2018). The focus of recent research has shifted from the cultural heritage itself to the performative use of cultural heritage, known as heritaging (Crouch 2010, 69). It is this form of “heritaging” that characterizes The Legend of the Ice People.

I argue that the historical settings are not interchangeable but play a crucial part in creating the family saga. Consistent with theories in memory studies that highlight remediation and dynamic heritage, I consider the use of history as a remediation of pre-existing, fully recognizable representations of the past. The use of the past is expressed in symbols, narratives, monuments, historical persons, commemoration days, symbolic actions, and geographic landscapes, and condensed into memory, shared by a collective, whether a local group, a nation, or in transnational communities (Erll and Rigney 2009). Astrid Erll and Anne Rigney argue that all historical representations are rearrangements of already existing heritage: from national monuments to historical representations in popular culture (2009). Fantasy fiction retells and reuses myths, folkloristic narratives, symbols, and heritage to create a credible universe (Höglund and Trenter 2021, 15).

Kathryn Hume states in her classic work (1984) that all literature consists of impulses of both fantasy and realism; the mimetic elements are crucial to embed the fantastic narratives. In other words, stories can be un-realistic but never incomprehensible. Sandemo highlighted the elements of The Legend of the Ice People that were based on real life. By her own account, she was herself psychic and the paranormal elements in her writing like spirits and demons in part reflect her own experiences (Sandemo 2011). The connection to reality also involved other experiences. Sandemo revealed near the end of her life that she was sexually abused in her childhood and that the descriptions of sexual violence in the series have a therapeutic function (Gilhus 2012). In the final books in the series, the elements of personal experience are further strengthened by Margit Sandemo herself appearing in the stories (The Calm before the Storm/ Lugnet före stormen; Is There Anybody Out There/ Är det någon därute?). Sandemo strengthens the authenticity of the fiction by interleaving realism (mimesis) and the supernatural (fantasy) with real-life events, which has contributed to the attention the series has received (Gilhus 2012).

Sandemo’s saga is defined as paranormal and fantasy, but several books in the series use typical gothic adaptions as a mode of literary expression. This includes a haunted house or castle and a dark secret that somehow drives the heroine or hero (Nilson 2015; Toscano 2021). The gothic hybridity in Sandemo’s series revolves around secrets of the past and the family curse. Nilson (2015) emphasizes the prevalence of hybrids between subgenres in contemporary romance literature, for instance steampunk, which blends sci-fi with the Victorian era. Sandemo’s epos contents of paranormal, fantasy, horror, and sci-fi elements, in particular the last of these in the closing parts of the series. I suggest that her universe could rightfully be called fantastic due to the hybridity of genres that characterizes so much fantastic fiction. The fantastic combines ideas and abstractions about the world into comprehensible yet unrealistic stories, and the mixture of familiar and unfamiliar elements produces a sense of wonder (Höglund and Trenter 2021).

A story world is a narrative that is constructed concurrently in several different media by multiple actors (Ryan and Thon 2014). In the case of Sandemo, this consists of the series of novels and fan fiction that takes place in and further develops the world of the Ice People. (The Legend of the Ice People has never had a film adaptation). In the following sections, I will first discuss the different dimensions of the uses of history before considering how the uses of history are negotiated by the readers. There is some existing research on fan cultures (see, for example, Duits et al. 2016), but in this chapter, fan cultures are approached from the perspective of the uses of history rather than focusing on them as cultural or social phenomenon in themselves. I argue for the importance of studying the story world of the Ice People from a methodologically holistic perspective. I take, as a point of departure, the necessity to interpret the complexity of the epos according to the concept of concurrences. Concurrences is an umbrella concept that in a variety of ways emanates from the statement that culture can only be understood by studying interlinkages as well as tensions and frictions between different approaches which are equally valuable (Brydon et al. 2017). I suggest that Sandemo’s epos is more than a narrative: it is a dynamic story world in which readers and fans co-create the universe by discussing, interpreting, rejecting, or embracing characters and plots in blogs, fan sites, and podcasts (Harvey 2015). Brydon et al. (2017) define concurrences as a multifaceted tool to explore for instance the complexity and transcultural communication in which knowledge is produced. They argue that cultural communities and transcultural communications consist of epistemic communities and knowledge-producing groups, whereas I define the story world of Sandemo as a space for an epistemic community populated by readers and fans. In the rest of this chapter, I will take a closer look at the cultural heritage and the canon of historical knowledge that are used to make the stories of lust and love visible.

How the Frame Stories Are Created by Historical Settings

Consistent with the traditions of the dangerous lover in Western literature (Lutz 2006), Sandemo’s stories about the doomed family contain mysteries of desire, death, and eroticism. The world of Sandemo is a dangerous place due to the structurally violent societies that inhabit it. People in Sandemo’s saga live under constant threat in a dystopian world in which oppression by authorities, mostly the church, wealthy elites, or the representatives of the legal system, is omnipresent, often concretized in sexual abuse and rape. Different kinds of detentions are recurrent; the theme of imprisonment is performed according to the historical circumstances. This pervasive theme plays out in a variety of settings: a hidden underground storehouse (Winter Storm/ Vinterstorm), children in undergrounds mines (Evil Legacy/ Det onda arvet), abandoned barns (Blood Feud/ Blodshämnd), mental hospitals (The Scandal/ Synden har lång svans), and in POW and concentration camps (Hidden Traces/ Små män kastar långa skuggor). Being caught in social traps or physical captivity is often combined with sexual violence or abuse: the prurient church warden who hunts witches among young, beautiful women; soldiers who commit gang rape (The Stepdaughter/ Avgrunden); the priest who chastises and lusts after supposedly sinful women (Devil’s Ravine/ Vargtimmen) and pedophiles who traumatize children (The Knight/ Den siste riddaren).

The background framing of this dystopian world is created through historical catastrophes. For example, epidemics are often featured, such as the plague in Trøndelag in Norway 1581, which causes chaos that forces the main character Silje to leave her previous life and become part of a new one, that of the Ice People (Spellbound/ Trollbunden). The historical context of social dissolution creates the framework for individuals’ strong feelings and desires, both positive and negative, as when cholera affects Oslo in 1937 (The City of Horror/ Stad i skräck). In Hunger, the protagonist Marit is left behind when her siblings emigrate to America, leaving the ten-year-old girl to watch over her sick and evil father. She almost succumbs to sickness and hunger but is saved by a man of the Ice People, who also is physician.

However, war is by far the most important cause of structural violence that tears societies and individuals apart in the series. The brutality of war and the historical change that a war brings upon societies shape the characters and their moral status. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) forms an important part of the overarching plot to explain how the first two generations of the Ice People get separated. The war creates distance from the safe home of the Ice People back in Norway. The innate evil within the antagonist Trond develops during his experiences from the war, as does the innate goodness in his brother Tarjei, who is one of those chosen to fight evil. Rebellion in Norway against the Danish Kingdom makes up the backdrop in other books, like Winter Storm/ Vinterstorm. The Skåneland Wars (1675–1679) and the pro-Danish guerrilla “snapphanar” or “friskyttar” provide the background for the complicated relation between Villemo, who participates in the war cross-dressed, and Dominic, her beloved relative, who is captain over the soldiers that fight in the guerilla (Yearning/ Feber i blodet). The protagonist Vendel in The Eastwind/ Vinden från Öster develops from naïve boy to man during his imprisonment in Russia as a prisoner of war in the early 1800s. The Second World War is yet another backdrop to dramatic happenings, including the Norwegian resistance movement (Hidden Traces/ Små män kastar låga skuggor).

The human is a collective creature in Sandemo’s world. The individual, in Sandemo’s series either she or he (the gender is thus binary), is only intact and perfected when he or she finds affinity with the opposite sex. True love, in contrast to false love, mere desire or shallow ideas about love, is more than a feeling between a couple; true love confirms the individuals’ unity and “longing for association” (Reddy in Hsu-Ming 2021, 452). The worst a human can be exposed to is not war, poverty, or disease, but isolation. The theme of loneliness is a recurring one in The Legend of the Ice People, staged with the help of historical dramatization. It is, for instance, the family curse that keeps the witch Sol from feeling any earthly love for men. The beautiful, brave, and independent woman finds her own path in her search for the only lover who can satisfy her—the Devil himself, who appears in her fantasies—although always defending family members when they get in trouble. Sol responds to her loneliness by getting involved in the witch activities during the sixteenth century, hiding from the inquisition and joining the ecstatic orgies at “Blåkulla” with the Devil (The Stepdaughter/ Avgrunden; for similar themes about loneliness due to the curse, see The Devil’s Footprint/ Satans fotsteg; the Gardens of Death/ Dödens trädgård; The Dragon’s Teeth/ Drakens tänder and The Ferryman/ Färjkarlen). Sol, tired of running and hiding, finally surrenders to the authorities. The night before she is executed, she ingests deadly hallucinatory herbs:

In the final hallucination, Satan appears, enveloping Sol with warm and understanding eyes, overflowing with true love. For the first time Sol could feel love and for the first time Sol was completely happy. (The Stepdaughter/ Avgrunden, 253)

Another protagonist, Mikael, is separated from his kindred, the Ice People, and becomes a loyal soldier and captain in the army of Swedish king Karl X Gustaf. His loneliness and depression grow deeper during war experiences in Livonia. His loneliness gets even worse when he marries a Catholic and virtuous woman in an arranged marriage. The long journey from being strangers to close friends and lovers is illustrated by the letters he writes from the wars during the 1650s. He experiences the Swedish king’s march across the Öresund strait to capture Copenhagen and other campaigns that make up the background for his loneliness because of mental anguish and depression (Without Roots/ Den ensamme).

The loneliness of Sandemo’s characters is often caused by the judgment of society, as in the case of a hangman’s daughter who suffers from isolation and family stigma (Under Suspicion/ Bödelns dotter). The historical settings arrange the prerequisite for the loneliness; the hangman’s stigmatized position during premodern times creates a convincing and explicit reason for his daughter’s exclusion from society and illustrates the tolerance among the Ice People through the marriage and passion between one of the men of the Ice People and the hangman’s daughter.

The Use of Time Markers

Sandemo’s epos captures a wide span of historical epochs, from medieval times to after the Second World War, and the history of Scandinavia—which is the primarily geographic setting—is visible in different ways in the individual books. In the earlier part of the series, up until 1900, the historical canon in terms of named historical actors is displayed. The protagonist Cecilie in Friendship/ Dödssynden is governess for the children of Danish king Christian IV and his spouse Kristin Munk. Their real-life relatives Leonora Christina and Ellen Marsvin also appear in the stories of the Ice People. The protagonist of Ice and Fire/ Is och eld Viljar meets Marcus Thrane, a Norwegian activist who worked for the mobilization of the working class in Norway. Sandemo employs mimetic strategies in the form of temporal markers in order to create believability also in the story of the evil Tengel who contributes to the dystopian nature of the story world by working on the development of the atomic bomb and taking part in Nazi atrocities (Hidden Traces/ Små män kastar långa skuggor).

Sandemo also employs temporal markers through figurative language that evokes specific feelings connected to the historical references. For example, when Sol rides off into a stormy night: “A sonorous choir thundered in the crowns of the trees. It roared and mumbled in a deep tone like a choir of monks in a gigantic cathedral…” (The Stepdaughter/ Avgrunden, 4). Viljar, who lives in the nineteenth century, is described as “The great, dark stranger who mostly resembled one of the tragic knight figures of the Middle Ages, wavered in his self-imposed isolation” (Ice and Fire/ Is och eld, 62).

Historical markers are woven in as part of the novels’ plot, not infrequently in concrete ways that are central to the development of the story, such as when the rebellious Elisabeth refuses to wear the then-fashionable Rococo powdered wig both because she feels stifled by the strict hairstyles and because she is allergic to the powder, which becomes decisive for the resolution of the adventure (Behind the Façade/ Bakom fasaden). The vain Euphrosyne kills a young man with a candelabra that turns out to have been silver-plated iron after he calls her “pasty-faced” (The Mandrake/ Galgdockan).

The View of History in Sandemo’s Story World

Margit Sandemo’s view of history is characterized by a focus on ordinary people at the bottom of the social ladder and a critique of the elite’s abuse of power. Royal actors are not depicted in a positive light, and Sandemo consistently adheres to a view of the monarchy and other authorities as oppressors of the people. Protagonist Sol meets a boy on her journey who gives a detailed update about the latest conflict between Swedish royals and the nobility that results in the Linköping Bloodbath (1600). Sol recalls the death of Swedish king Gustav I Vasa, but is unaware of the following conflicts between his sons, a canonic part of Swedish history, well-known to the Swedish readers from schoolbooks. Upon hearing the news, Sol shrugs and answers “Well, power struggles there too. Like everywhere else” (The Stepdaughter/ Avgrunden, 73). By letting the reader take part in a rather detailed account of Swedish political history in the late sixteenth century, Sandemo gets the opportunity to underline the lack of importance that the internal fights of the nobility have for the people, both Sol and the readers. Sol doesn’t mince the words when she judges the late Danish king Christian IV: “The limp, fat carcass they carried out, dead drunk as he was...Christian IV is surpassed in drunkenness only by his late father, Frederick II” (The Stepdaughter/ Avgrunden, 196). Sandemo’s critique also extends to socialist elites. When Belinda is able to join a secret meeting for revolutionary workers, she listens but is unable to understand their speeches about universal suffrage and land for the rural proletariat. She certainly understands that she is a part of the propertyless class that the revolutionaries are talking about but she dislikes being seen as a victim and is unmoved by their political ideas (Ice and Fire/ Is och eld).

Sandemo has a normative approach to actors as well as social changes in history. On the cover of The East Wind/ Vinden från Öster (1984), Sandemo underlines the debt the royals have to the people as a result of their decisions: “When Karl XII decided to conquer Russia, he had no idea how much sorrow and misery he would cause.” People who migrated to America during the great emigration from Scandinavia are depicted as traitors, and this view is entangled with the narrative when the aforementioned protagonist Marit—a ten-year-old girl—is left alone with her abusive father while her siblings “flee” the country to seek a better life in America (Hunger).

Later, in modern times, new authorities are likewise depicted as oppressors. Protagonist Malin stands up to a bully at the local municipal authority who plans to modernize her town by digging up the churchyard in which the Ice People rest. Malin’s reactions to the imposing head of the office show how masculinity is connected to public political roles. Malin guesses that the bureaucratic man must have problems with his wife, and therefore acts “with desperate authority” at the office (The Brothers/ Människodjuret, 118). Malin criticizes the young clerk at the office, Per Volden, who oversees the building plan, and comments on his looks by diminishing of his masculinity: “That servile functionary grimace makes you look like a snotty miss” (The Brothers/ Människodjuret, 120). After visiting the graveyard and listening to the stories of the Ice People who are buried at the cemetery, Per changes his mind and argues for saving the graveyard as cultural history and memorials to people with unique destinies. Per and Malin fall in love and get married.

In Sandemo’s world, genuine leaders are produced by the people themselves, not the elites. Nevertheless, organized democratic movements like the women’s rights movement or unionization are not depicted in a favorable light. When the enlightened medical student and member of the Ice People André meets his love Mali, she is a feminist from the working class. She is described as moody and noisy, but her life path leads her to André, whose love causes her to tone down her political engagement and makes her a trusting and calmer wife and mother (The Woman on the Beach/ Kvinnan på stranden).

In Ice and Fire/ Is och eld, the warm and simple girl Belinda meets the cold and socially isolated son of the estate-owner, Viljar of the Ice People. He disappears at night on unknown missions, but his nocturnal projects are slowly revealed as Belinda warms up his chilly personality: he is active in the workers’ revolutionary plans. Thanks to Belinda’s good sense, Viljar realizes that his involvement in the worker’s movement was unnecessary since the Ice People’s estate already takes care of its workers and crofters. Sandemo’s criticism of modern society’s political organization is crystal clear in Belinda and Viljar’s love story. The tyranny of elites over ordinary people is condemnable, but the solution is not through modern social engineering but through a conservative, traditional family ideal.

Remediation of Literary Genres

The different parts of the book series belong to different genres. By mimetically staging each romance narrative in a particular genre, the basic story of the bildungsroman can be dramatized from different perspectives. The storyline of Heike, who appears in five books, takes place in historical settings ranging from the late 1800s to mid-1900s and depicts social changes during the period. But the use of the past is also present in the remediation of literary genres that are represented in the story of Heike. The Wings of the Raven is a gothic novel, and the setting is a Bram Stoker-like Dracula milieu, which starts with two aristocrats who have fled from the French revolution and end up in a village located in the shadow of the “Castle of the Witch.” The following book, Devil’s Ravine, follows the Shakespearian structures of a comedy of mistaken identities. The historical setting emphasizes the subjugation of individuals by class structures and religion. In the following book, The Demon and the Virgin, Heike arrives at the estate of the Ice People in Norway, of which one of the farms is his rightful inheritance. The story is focused on lust and inhibitions and borrows themes from the classic story of beauty and the beast (Nilson 2015). The next novel is a ghost story in which Heike summons evil spirits and demons to protect his estate (Rituals/ Våroffer). The final part, in which Heike has a prominent role, features Dickensian depictions of destitute mine workers (Deep in the Ground/ Djupt i jorden).

The Fantastic and the Uses of History

The world in Sandemo’s series is dark and dangerous. The curse caused by the evil Tengel to get eternal life in exchange for his descendants performing service to evil has similarities both with the myth of Doctor Faustus, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for wisdom, and the idea of the original sin, inherited by humans over generations who are therefore in debt to God and subject to death. As in similar fantasy worlds, the criticism of established religions is prominent in favor of supernatural powers and alternative systems of belief (Feldt 2016). As Gilhus puts it, “Sandemo combines traditional Norwegian folk beliefs and New Age language” (Gilhus 2012, 63). Sandemo accentuates the authenticity of the existing paranormal phenomena such as ghosts and demons with superstitions in the historical settings. People’s fear of werewolves and ghosts is abused by the authorities (Under Suspicion/ Bödelns dotter), just as people’s longing for a faith is abused by practitioners of religion (The City of Horror/ Stad i skräck). However, magic skills and the supernatural do exist. Demons are real and play a central part as objects of attraction (for example, in The Flute/ Vandring i mörkret), and the fallen angel Lucifer has a crucial role in the overall narrative (Lucifer’s Love/ Lucifers kärlek). Ghosts appear both as evil creatures (Rituals/ Våroffer) and as lovers (Demon’s Mountains/ Demonernas berg).

The temporal aspects of Sandemo’s series are integrated by the fact that the dead ancestors become guardian angels and help the Ice People to fight evil and Tengel’s spirit, which grows stronger during the centuries. In this way, Sandemo maintains continuity as the good spirits guide and support their living relatives. The spirits move between the spiritual realm and the everyday life of the living, and thereby develop the timeline not only from 1581 when the series begins but even before, as spirits from the thirteenth century show up when the final battle is approaching.

Sandemo also makes use of time travel as a temporal device. The closer to present times the story goes, the more important flashbacks become to create connections to earlier generations of the Ice People. Tova, who starts as both physical beastly and evil, is born in 1936—rather late in series. During her character’s development, she travels in time by hypnosis and enters evil witches in the past. By experiencing her hosts’ loneliness in their marginalized positions during witch hunts and exclusion from their societies, she learns to act less selfishly and becomes more empathic when she returns to her own time (Imprisoned by Time/ Fångad av tiden; A Glimpse of Tenderness/ En glimt av ömhet).

Travel through time is activated by different heritages. Cursed artifacts and places that carry difficult memories (see, for example, The Garden of Death/ Dödens trädgård; The Secret/ Huset i Eldafjord) communicate with the living people. The heritage in terms of folklore, old stories and songs, plays a central role in a love affair. Christa’s mystic lover Linde-Lou turns out to be a ghost, who appears in a folk song about a brutal murder in a mythical past. By doing research about the origin of the folk song and the original song text, Christa not only solves the crime that inspired the lyrics but also finds out that Linde-Lou is a much older relative of hers (Troll Moon/ Trollmåne). When Christa, many years later, becomes a widow, she meets Linde-Lou, who has now joined the army of spirits of Ice People, which prepares for the final fight with the resurrected evil Tengel (Demon’s Mountain/ Demonernas berg). The erotic encounter between the now middle-aged woman and her dead uncle, who is still 18 years old, as he was when he died, creates a temporal and paranormal twist to the time travel theme and a taboo cross-generational attraction between a mature woman and a young man.

The Story World of the Ice People in Fan Media

There is not much research on Margit Sandemo’s authorship or production except from a couple of master’s theses and a chapter in Maria Nilson’s overview of romance literature (Nilson 2015). However, there are plenty of fan sites, blogs, and podcasts that discuss Sandemo’s story world in which readers name their favorite novels, clear up uncertainties, and exchange experiences from the universe of the Ice People. The negotiations and discussions have been ongoing in various media for several decades. The context, apart from the content of the various books, has changed over the years. When a blogger discussed the series in 2015, the epic saga was compared to Game of Thrones, True Blood and Twilight (Foliant 2015). When the books were recorded as audio books, someone commented how the high quality of the reader, Julia Duvenius, created better conditions for the experience of the Ice People compared to the experiences from the books, which are riddled with typographical errors (Jönsson 2020).

The historical milieux are discussed as well. One blogger expresses surprise that, despite university studies in history and archeology that should prompt scrutiny in her reading, she tends to uncritically accept Margit Sandemo’s historical settings about sixteenth-century Norway, demonstrating the author’s power to convincingly portray characters and milieux (Jönsson 2020). The blog presents the starting book in the series, and a commenter on the blog replies that she loves reading about the past “and some magic and witches just makes it more exciting” (Amanda 2020). The comments indicate that the readability and perceived authenticity doesn’t depend on representations of the past but rather on how the depictions correlate with the fantastic and romantic plots.

Another reader expresses happiness over the detailed descriptions of historical costumes within the stories. One reader’s preexisting interest in a certain period-typical style becomes actualized when the book series reaches the epoch: “Finally a lovely description of the fashion of the time, I like that. Hair rolls with bread crusts and hatpins and tight dresses” (Fröken Anna Maria 2016).

But there are critical voices as well. One blogger analyzes the changing character of the series:

As already said, in most of the books it is the women and their fate that fascinate me the most. Therefore, I wonder why their ways change so drastically with the passage of time? From the 16th century onwards, there are plenty of strong and headstrong women with a forward-thinking spirit, something I have really appreciated as I read—according to tradition, the women of that time should have been more restrained. But no, the subdued women only start to appear when the 18th century turns into the 19th and 20th centuries. Then every other woman is suddenly helpless, scared and depressed and has to meet a strong and sensible man who can instill in her confidence and make her understand that she is actually adorably beautiful. Gunilla Grip, Marit in Hunger, Agnete, Vinnie and Christa are all restrained by a parent or similar and are set in very sharp contrast to Sol, Villemo, Ingrid and Vinga who happily color the book pages in the earlier part of the series. One of the few strong women who appears in the modern part of the story is Mali, and then she instead gets the label “women’s libber” and if not hates, at least dislikes men—before she meets André Brink, who makes her rethink. Why does it feel like the women in Margit Sandemo’s story could be freer and stronger in the 17th century? Isn’t it just as entertaining to write and read about liberated women nowadays—when women can be liberated in a way they couldn’t then? (Eli 2010)

Sandemo’s focus on tolerance as a virtue among the Ice People does exploit groups and people that somehow are objects of intolerance in society: poor people, people suffering from mental illness, and homosexuals. The perhaps most explicit example of queerness, which is depicted in negative terms, is the protagonist Alexander who meets a daughter of the Ice People, Cecilie. He turns out to be homosexual, which forms his and Cecilie’s character development and their growing love relation. Alexander finally gets “cured” after finding out that he has been victim of abuse as a child by a homosexual servant. Alexander explains “There are good and bad people among us, just like with you. Our disposition gives us no excuse for evil actions. But most of us are ordinary, decent people” (Friendship/ Dödssynden, 167). The war provides a chance to restart, since he gets wounded and paralyzed from the waist down. In the care of Cecilie, Alexander’s physical and mental “damages” are fixed. Throughout the series, the normative pattern in the stories depicts a young woman (or man) who grows up and is confirmed as human in a heterosexual relationship. The very idea of “tolerating” homosexuality is a kind of objectivity that only deepens the stigma of being homosexual (Walters 2014). The double-edged notion of “tolerance” raises discussions on fan sites:

I reacted to the way the books dealt with homosexuality. Surely, she says there is nothing wrong with being gay, but the only good gay character ends up having a happy life with a woman, while those who are more genuinely gay are portrayed as less nice individuals. Could Margit Sandemo have squeezed even one gay love story into all those generations? But writers write to tell their stories, not to be politically correct, so if you want to read the story, you simply must ignore it. (Insidan IFokus 2007)

In the podcast Isfolket, an alternative story to the romance between Cecilie and Alexander is considered. Instead of making Alexander heterosexual, the story could have stayed at the first stage of their marriage when the couple decided to live in a sham marriage and live a non-monogamous relation (podcast Sagan om isfolket Dödssynden 2015). A comment on the podcast explains the problematic depictions of Alexander’s sexuality with “I guess it’s quite typical of the time, both when the action takes place and when the book is written.” The commentator draws the conclusion that Alexander might have been bisexual (Frågor till er inför Sagan om Isfolket-podden 5. Dödssynden! 2015).

Closing Words

This chapter has explored how the mimetic use of heritage in Margit Sandemo’s The Legend of the Ice People helps to fill in and create the dark world in which narratives centered on lust and desire play out. Heritage and the references to the past in the dystopian world of Sandemo is remediated by structural violence and by performing exclusion and oppression, which create the necessary conditions for romance and moral growth from childhood to adulthood. Sandemo’s view of history can be said to be that of a “people’s history” where the authentic people are pitted against the machinations of the ruling class in its different guises throughout history. The historical settings frame the narrative of being alone before becoming fully human by growing up and finding love. The historical settings are furthermore the starting point for highlighting how desire and love form and develop the protagonists. Time travel and various kinds of heritage connect the Ice People through generations to pinpoint the universal truth that individuals must fight the omnipresent evil despite where in the past or present she or he might be.

The complex epos of the Ice People is here defined as a story world in which Sandemo is the creator, but fans are actively involved in collective negotiations. Facilitated by the concept of concurrences that advocates a focus on parallel understandings, both as intertwining and tensions and frictions, this chapter shows that Sandemo’s popular romance highlights values about gender and society which are cemented by repetition in different historical settings, mimetic impulses, and by fantastic elements. But the use of the past within the series also offers explanations and interpretations to readers, who are putting the old-fashion and conservative modes into up-to-date, concurrent, and contemporary understandings of morality and lust by emerging from the historical past within the series.

The Legend of the Ice People/ Sagan om isfolket (Helsingborg: Boknöje AB)

• 1. Spellbound (Trollbunden 1982)

• 2. Witch-hunt (Häxjakten 1982)

• 3. The Stepdaughter (Avgrunden 1982)

• 4. The Successor (Längtan 1982)

• 5. Friendship (Dödssynden 1982)

• 6. Evil Legacy (Det onda arvet 1982)

• 7. Nemesis (Spökslottet 1982)

• 8. Under Suspicion (Bödelns dotter 1982)

• 9. Without Roots (Den ensamme 1982)

• 10. Winter Storm (Vinterstorm 1983)

• 11. Blood Feud (Blodshämnd 1983)

• 12. Yearning (Feber i blodet 1983)

• 13. The Devil’s Footprint (Satans fotsteg 1983)

• 14. The Knight (Den siste riddaren 1983)

• 15. The East Wind (Vinden från Öster 1984)

• 16. The Mandrake (Galgdockan 1984)

• 17. The Garden of Death (Dödens trädgård 1984)

• 18. Behind the Facade (Bakom fasaden 1984)

• 19. The Dragon’s Teeth (Drakens tänder 1984)

• 20. The Wings of the Raven (Korpens vingar 1985)

• 21. Devil’s Ravine (Vargtimmen1985)

• 22. The Demon and the Virgin (Demonen och jungfrun 1985)

• 23. Rituals (Våroffer 1985)

• 24. Deep in the Ground (Djupt i jorden 1985)

• 25. The Angel (Ängel med dolda horn 1985)

• 26. The Secret (Huset i Eldafjord 1986)

• 27. The Scandal (Synden har lång svans 1986)

• 28. Ice and Fire (Is och eld 1986)

• 29. Lucifer’s Love (Lucifers kärlek 1986)

• 30. The Brothers (Människodjuret 1986)

• 31. The Ferryman (Färjkarlen 1987)

• 32. Hunger (Hunger 1987)

• 33. Demon of the Night (Nattens demon 1987)

• 34. The Woman on the Beach (Kvinnan på stranden 1987)

• 35. The Flute (Vandring i mörkret 1987)

• 36. Troll Moon (Trollmåne 1987)

• 37. The City of Horror (Stad i skräck 1988)

• 38. Hidden Traces (Små män kastar långa skuggor 1988)

• 39. Silent Voices (Rop av stumma röster 1988)

• 40. Imprisoned by Time (Fångad av tiden 1988)

• 41. Demon’s Mountain (Demonernas fjäll 1988)

• 42. The Calm before the Storm (Lugnet före stormen 1989)

• 43. A Glimpse of Tenderness (En glimt av ömhet 1989)

• 44. An Evil Day (Den onda dagen 1989)

• 45. The Legend (Legenden om Marco 1989)

• 46. The Black Water (Det svarta vattnet 1989)

• 47. Is There Anybody Out There? (Är det någon därute? 1989)