Linguist No. 10: Val Chesterfield, in the novel Girl in Ice by Erica Ferencik (2022)
There’s something about Greenland. It’s now figured twice in this series. Other locations only appeared once: Morocco, another planet, a fantasy kingdom, and such mundane places as London and New York City. For a mystery novelist, perhaps Greenland is the most mysterious place on earth, and therefore an intrinsically worthy subject.
Val Chesterfield is an academic linguist who specializes in “Northern languages”: Danish, Old Norse, varieties of Greenlandic. I say Northern rather than Nordic, because while these languages share a geographical space, they belong to different language families. All languages deriving from Norse are Germanic, hence Indo-European. Greenlandic is classified as part of the Eskimo-Aleut family, and is therefore completely separate.
Girl in Ice is a new novel that tackles a double mystery. The first mystery is: What really happened to Val’s twin brother Andy, dead (possibly by suicide) in an incredibly remote Arctic research station in the far north of Greenland? The second is: What’s the deal with the Greenlandic girl (named Sigrid) who was thawed out alive from the ice, and who gives the book its title?
Val Chesterfield’s official job in this story is to communicate with the thawed-out girl. This proves to be difficult. Sigrid does not speak any comprehensible language, whether it be West Greenlandic, Danish, or Old Norse. As a result, the pair have to resort to visual clues (mostly drawings) and an improvised form of total immersion instruction. This makes the learning process slow and frustrating. Val is repeatedly berated for her slow progress with Sigrid by the sinister boss of the research station, a coarse and snippy fellow named Wyatt Speeks.
Along the way we learn some things about Greenlandic and its numerous sub-dialects. While there really are many words for snow, there are over 170 for ice. Val introduces us to concepts like numa unganartoq (“an overwhelming affection and spiritual attachment to the land and nature”) and tukisilitainnaqtuq (“the sensation of seeing or understanding a thing for the very first time”). Greenlandic is a polysynthetic language where words can be composed of many morphemes, resulting in “sentence-words” that can stretch to great lengths.
In terms of her linguistic knowledge, Val is for the most part a refreshingly realistic character. Unlike some other linguists in this series, she is not a computer-brained prodigy with a bottomless knowledge of multiple languages. She relies on Danish and West Greenlandic in her initial attempts to communicate with Sigrid, while admitting that her knowledge of those languages is not very deep. She says of herself: “I can get by in German and most Romance tongues, and I’ve got a soft spot for dead languages: Latin, Sanskrit, ancient Greek. But it’s the extinct tongues – Old Norse and Old Danish – that enrapture me.”
A minor false note is struck by “the thick notebook of Aramaic poetry I’d committed to translating over the next six months.” So Val is an expert in ancient Semitic as well? This detail actually does nothing to further the story, since it is mentioned in an early chapter and then never again. There’s another odd thing about Val: she has a strong aversion to travel. “You’ve never been outside of Massachusetts,” says her father when she mentions her Greenlandic travel plans. For a linguist, this is strange; it’s an article of faith among linguists that you only learn the spoken language properly by spending significant time in a place where it is spoken, so this kind of hodophobia would be a crippling condition for a person who wants to work with living languages.
Yet Val shows herself to be creative and adaptable in this hostile but beautiful new environment, where she refers to the overpowering sense of raw nature as “the Enormity.” At one point, she does a bit of Henry Higgins on Wyatt’s handywoman collaborator, correctly deducing that she comes from Duluth (“It’s those long o’s. The flat a’s. Bit of a lilt. It’s charming, actually”). Early on, she uses “Marie Kondo” as a verb.
Girl in Ice is a book with a lot of tension, some shaky science, and a focus on the terrors of climate change. While Ferencik creates interesting characters, where she really excels is in her evocation of Arctic nature, and its effect on the few denizens of this remote outpost. Reading this book may make you shiver.