The Wax Child

Novel · 144 pages · Hardcover · 2025 · New Directions · Translated by Martin Aitken

The paper keeps its composure

The prosecution is right about the magic. Olga Ravn grants it that much before the arrests and spends the rest of The Wax Child showing why the fact settles nothing. In Martin Aitken’s translation, magic in Aalborg is neither metaphor nor delusion.

A beeswax doll narrates the novel. It sees through a cat, slips into royal letters, tastes blood and seeks a mistress of its own. On St Lucia’s night four Aalborg women, friends whom the court will later try as a coven, draw it from beneath the skirts of Maren as if she were giving birth. They dance around it. They spit into its face. Hair and nail parings from Elisabeth, who will testify against them, have been pressed into the wax foot, and the women name the doll after her. Someone is meant to suffer. A cat carrying the doll bit Elisabeth earlier in the novel, so the rite confirms a pattern of harm and does not start one. An event lies beneath the charge.

That concession cannot justify what the court builds from it. Two officials torture Apelone, held with the others in the castle cells, until she asks which name they want. After they reject Elisabeth and increase the pain, Apelone names Maren. Months later the confession reaches the courtroom in fair copy, furnished with a black book and a burned bullock heart. No leg screw appears in the document. Apelone is asked to confirm it after her speech has broken into a herring swimming in her head and a flight to the sun. The paper keeps its composure after the woman has lost hers. Maren is convicted of failing to repudiate the accusations, a sentence for losing a case constructed through another woman’s torture. Magical practice runs well beyond the accused. Anders Guldsmed wears names written backwards in a pouch sewn into his uniform, then stands in court to challenge a confession obtained by force. Three women burn. Christenze is noble. She is beheaded, her rank surviving the process as a difference in blade.

Ravn’s sentences hold the domestic and the atrocious at one temperature. A courtroom fills with the taste of iron. On the road to Viborg, Maren looks through the carriage window and names nettles, garlic mustard, cranesbills and spurge. Officials have named her a witch, and she goes on naming the visible world.

The doll outlives them. It carries no moral innocence, and wishes were driven into it with pins. Obedience followed. It enjoys the heat of the courtroom when Maren is sentenced, and later it wants human blood and proposes the person holding the book as its next mistress. Ravn lodges the women’s counter-record in an object made to carry harm. Ravn gave objects their own testimony in The Employees. The doll takes its bond with Christenze for something immense, and the final page puts that attachment closer to nothing.

The doll’s range costs Ravn her selection. After Maren burns, the preacher Klyne’s visit to the cells deepens the case, and so does Anders’s pouch. The tour through Christian IV’s reign runs past its point. A tooth rehearses the doll’s unreturned longing, and the swallow-stone restates its moral opacity. Then the end explains itself twice. Christenze’s head and torso are burned to stop her coming back. The head rolls out of the fire and speaks anyway, an image sufficient to wreck the worldview that sentenced her, and then it states the book’s argument about single truths and possible exits. Next the doll names itself an instrument made for strength and harm, long after its conduct has established the point. Ravn has the narrator finish the interpretation.

Conceding the facts is the harder route to proving a trial an atrocity. Ravn takes it. The court comes apart anyway. Elisabeth lifts Christenze’s hot head in her skirt and kicks it into the gutter. The last person shown carrying the Wax Child is Elisabeth.