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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how the supernatural figure of the sea king, in Swedish author Helena Nyblom’s 1910 fairy tale, “Agneta and the Sea King,” complicates traditional gender dynamics and offers an ecocritical critique of human dominance of the natural world. [Please consider this paper for FNLM]

Paper long abstract

Helena Nyblom’s 1910 Swedish literary fairy tale, “Agneta and the Sea King,” is a retelling of a well-known Scandinavian ballad (A47), which tells the story of a mortal woman who is kidnapped by a supernatural sea king and lives with him at the bottom of the sea, bearing him seven children, until the day she hears the sound of church bells and returns to her life on land, refusing to return to the sea king and her underwater children.

While there are several notable literary rewritings of this ballad, Nyblom’s is of particular interest for the way her tale complicates the gender dynamics we tend to associate with mermaid tales, and for how she uses the hybrid figure of the merman to depict the troubled relationship between humans and the natural world. Nyblom represents the sea king as an erotic yet sympathetic figure, which is made all the more apparent in John Bauer’s evocative illustrations which accompanied the original publication of the tale. Bauer and Nyblom’s depiction of the sea king as highly eroticized yet deserving of sympathy exists in tension with Agneta’s character, whose ultimate escape from the sea king and abandonment of her maternal role, also present her as a compelling counterexample to dominant narratives of womanhood, for which maternal self-sacrifice was a defining characteristic. Ultimately, this paper will examine how Nyblom’s rewriting of the traditional ballad challenges conventional gender roles, while simultaneously posing an eco-critical critique of human dominance over the natural world.