In my November 1 post about Edgar Alan Poe’s story “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” I pointed out that the frightening whirlpool that Poe based his story on can be found in the Lofoten (LOH foh tn) Islands, an archipelago off the northwestern coast of Norway.
Poe had never visited the area, and based his detailed descriptions on reference books and his own vivid imagination. In fact, the islands are extraordinarily, even sublimely, beautiful. Lying north of the Arctic Circle between 68 and 69 degrees north latitude, they’re spectacularly mountainous. Thanks to the warm North Atlantic and Norwegian currents, however, they enjoy a relatively mild climate. These factors have led to the islands’ becoming an important tourist destination, and, until the recent COVID pandemic, they were attracting a million travelers a year.
Among earlier visitors were a number of talented artists, including Norwegian painter Adelsteen Normann (1848-1918). All the paintings you see in today’s post are his, and include, top to bottom, From Reine in Lofoten (1880), The “Trollfjord” in Lofoten and Vesterĺlen, and Midnight Sun at Lofoten, Norway.
Looking at these truly wonderful works, and despite my dislike of cold weather, I’m almost tempted to talk to our travel agent about arranging a trip there. Almost …
I’m devoting today’s entry in a series I call “Sea Fever” to one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most effective short stories, “A Descent into the Maelström” (Graham’s Magazine, May 1841).
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You’ve probably read “A Descent into the Maelström,” perhaps more than once. It’s a good example of a story by Poe that’s terrifying but not actually supernatural, and what’s more, there’s a solid factual basis to it.
The protagonist of Poe’s story is a seemingly old man who has led our narrator to the summit of a precipitous crag in order to show him the scene of an event that took place “about three years past”—an event that turned the man’s hair “from a jetty black to white” in less than a day.
They are, explains the protagonist, “close upon the Norwegian coast—in the sixty-eighth degree of latitude—in the great province of Nordland—and in the dreary district of Lofoden.” The scene itself, as the narrator describes it, is “deplorably desolate.” As far as he can see, “there lay outstretched, like ramparts of the world, lines of horridly black and beetling cliff, whose character of gloom was but the more forcibly illustrated by the surf which reared high up against its white and ghastly crest, howling and shrieking for ever.”
As they watch, a current acquires a “monstrous velocity” and the seas are “lashed into ungovernable fury.” They are beholding, the narrator realizes, the “great whirlpool of the Maelström.”
As we eventually learn, the protagonist and his two brothers routinely fished from a “schooner-rigged smack” in the violent eddies scattered among the offshore islands—a dangerous practice but one that allowed them to catch in a single day what would otherwise have taken a week. Given the story’s title, we aren’t surprised to learn as well that the brothers found their ship delayed one afternoon just as they were heading home and were caught in the deadly Maelström. However unlikely, the manner in which the protagonist escapes from the whirlpool is plausible, and the narrative allows Poe to indulge his seemingly contradictory interests in the dismayingly fantastic and the coldly rational.
The fact is that there really is a Maelström, exactly where Poe described it, although he didn’t have firsthand knowledge of it. He apparently drew his details from several sources, including an article in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The Lofoten Islands (as they are spelled today) are real, and there really is a maelstrom in their vicinity, although, as Poe’s protagonist explains, the Norwegians knew it then as the Moskoe-ström—today’s Moske-stroom or Moskstraumen. It’s one of the most powerful whirlpools in the world, and although it’s no match for Poe’s horrific version, its currents can nevertheless reach 20 mph due to the flow of the tides and the contours of the seabed.
The dramatic image at the top of today’s post is by Arthur Rackham. The map (by Lewis Armstrong) and the accompanying captions are reproduced from The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition, edited by Stuart Levine and Susan Levine. The more imaginative map is by Olaus Magnus from the 1539 Carta Marina, while the photograph of the real Moskstraumen is by Hopfenpflücker; both are reproduced courtesy of Wikipedia.
World Enough 