I just finished The Wax Child by Olga Ravn and wow, what a strange, haunting little book. I’ll be honest, at first I found the writing a bit hard to follow, but once I settled into the style, the story really started to come together. I could see it all playing out in my head like a dream (or maybe a nightmare). I loved the inclusion of spells and poems taken from real historical grimoires, it made the whole thing feel even more eerie and real. The historical aspect absolutely gripped me. It’s chilling to think that witch trials actually happened, in the same world we live in today. Wild, eerie, and fascinating all at once. Definitely one that lingers. 3.5 rounded up!

A brilliantly vivid and scattered book about misogyny and witch trials told through the eyes of a wax bound doll.

The doll sees all babies born dead, fleeing home, finding a new home, witch hunts and cruel punishments.

The narrative is intriguing and stilted in a way to force the reader to make inferences about the story. A clear testament to the authors skill as a storyteller.

Set in the seventeenth century, The Wax Child grew out of HEX, Olga Ravn’s play which premiered at the Royal Danish Theatre in 2023. It’s narrated by the titular wax child moulded by an impoverished noblewoman charged with witchcraft.
Christenze lives in the household of her friend Anne. She helps with the birthing of Anne’s many children, none of whom survive more than a few days. Anne’s hope eventually turns to a bitterness which needs an outlet, conveniently provided by Christenze who flees before accusations are voiced, finding a home in Aalborg where Maren welcomes her into her circle of friends. When one of their husbands witnesses the women’s celebration of St Lucia’s eve, his suspicions lead him to the local King’s Lieutenant, little realising the horrors he’s about to unleash. Evidence is gathered and paid for, torture administered, confessions extracted, convictions declared and the cruellest of punishments handed down.
Ravn’s narrative is delivered in short episodic paragraphs interspersed with spells drawn from sources she used when researching this brief, powerful novella based upon the trials of Christenze Kruckow, her friends and many other women. With her proud independence and refusal to marry, Christenze is an easy target. The figure she’s moulded from beeswax, incorporating hair and nail parings, gives her motives an interesting ambivalence. Using it as a narrator is a risky device, but it works well, a testament to Ravn’s skill. In less able hands, her subject might have become sensationalist, but she does her readers the courtesy of allowing them to infer, and, as you might expect from a poet, her writing is arrestingly vivid. Kudos to Martin Aitken for his expert translation.

An arresting act of remembrance, Olga Ravn’s demanding novel builds on a lifelong fascination with witches; and developed out of a collaborative, theatrical work Hex. Ravn’s idiosyncratic piece highlights too her background as a poet. The setting’s Denmark in the early 1600s during the transition to a more austere Lutheran, Protestant society. A place in which the ‘old ways’ of the ‘cunning folk’ centred on folk magic and popular superstition are being systematically eradicated. A process concretised through the legislation and policies of Christian IV then king of Denmark and Norway. Seen from this perspective, the Danish witch hunts of the era were a particularly brutal method of modernisation through social and cultural cleansing. Although her central characters are actual women who were executed for the crime of witchcraft, Ravn jettisons the frameworks of standard historical fiction. Her story-telling is closer to a resurrection, a reclamation of lost traditions: systems of thought that represented particular ways of connecting to the world, to the very earth itself. In keeping with this approach, extracts from spells taken from grimoires and Nordic folklore - tracked down over five years of background research - are scattered throughout.

Ravn’s narrative draws on concepts of image magic, specifically the creation of waxen effigies sometimes known as voodoo dolls – or in England poppets. Her narrator is one of these figures, a child moulded from wax by Danish noblewoman Christenze Krukow. Krukow is now long dead but the wax child has endured, buried in the soil, somehow all-seeing, related to everything around it. The child’s mannered, near-archaic voice reflects its origins; its curious view of events its existence as part object, part organism. This hybrid status has enabled it to commune both with objects and with living things from birds to flowers and trees, its recreation of the past blends the archaeological with the organic. It’s a breathless, driven creature, sometimes restrained, sometimes feverishly spewing out words. All of which are intended to bear witness to Christenze’s fate.

Ravn’s sinuous sentences, her rhythmic prose sometimes border on abstraction, projecting a kind of mythic quality, as if stemming from sacred texts. Yet there are stretches of relative lucidity, in which the wax child recounts the known facts of Christenze’s everyday life. A life which tied her to a community of women in Aalborg, labouring women who wove, baked and sewed. Women who also performed ‘white magic’ rituals as a means of celebration and of control. The women explore their sexuality; they confront their dissatisfactions with their gendered roles. Issues particularly pertinent for Christenze who finds femininity constricting to the point of suffocation. She’s refused to marry, and loves only women. All of which makes her, and her companions, a threat to heteronormative conventions, notions of the centrality of church and the nuclear family.

Ravn’s hypnotic narrative’s grounded in Nordic history – she made extensive use of historical consultants. But she’s also intent on addressing various lacunae. Tellingly, there’s no archive of known witch burnings, details of the women involved are scant and scattered: though there are extensive lists of expenses from the carpenters employed to make the ladders to which women were tied before being dropped into bonfires to the wages paid to the men who fanned the flames. But the historical is intermingled with dense, intensely-lyrical passages featuring visceral images of nature. References to poems from writers like Gillian Clarke and Anne Carson underline Ravn’s interest in divisions being carved out between nature and culture. Admittedly that’s a tried-and-tested binary but Ravn makes effective use of it to comment not just on Christenze’s time but our own. In detailing Christenze’s experiences and the wax child’s entangled embodiment, Ravn goes beyond the history of the witch hunts, the role of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism, to mount a critique of the present. The scapegoating, the damaging cultural expectations that, albeit mutated, have persisted. She’s also clearly invested in highlighting how these divides, certain institutions and ideologies, have contributed to the ecological devastation that’s taken place in the centuries since the wax child was first sculpted. Translated by Martin Aitken.