Ravn’s latest novel proposes that a deep, haunting unknowability is essential to us as human beings
Olga Ravn’s second novel, My Work (2020; translated into English in 2023), part memoir, part essays and part fiction, was celebrated as a vivid, daring portrait of motherhood. In her next, The Wax Child (published in Danish in 2023), she once again skilfully weaves together different genres, merging historical documents, spells and grimoires to provide a masterful take on a true tale about an unmarried noblewoman accused of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Denmark. This new novel suggests that many of the themes surrounding the perception and treatment of women in My Work are nothing new as such. The result is a horror story exploring brutality, power and superstition in which Ravn creates a visceral atmosphere using rich, tactile details.
The tale is narrated by an omniscient wax doll made by the accused woman, Christenze Kruckow. It is 1615 and the mistress of the manor in which Kruckow lives has, by the age of thirty-two, given birth to and lost 15 babies. Soon Kruckow is accused of witchcraft, forcing her to flee to the city of Aalborg, where she meets Maren Kneppis. A kind of unintended kinship forms, and Kruckow gets invited to a series of all-night ‘carding fests’. Here women gather, spin wool and talk about their troubles. They soon make use of Kruckow’s doll to cast spells on others, until they’re caught by one of the husbands and Kruckow is again accused of witchcraft, along with her friends.
The novel is divided into two parts: Kruckow’s life before she was first accused and her life after. While evidently interested in the real Northern Jutland witchcraft trials of the early 1600s, Ravn never speculates as to the true nature of the practices of which the women were accused, nor does she suggest whether the women practised them out of concern for their health and overall wellbeing, or because they actually believed in their power. And it’s precisely because Ravn denies the reader any such insight that the story gains its haunting folkloric power.
Much of that also rests on the enigmatic nature of the narrator. Did the women through curses and spells bring the doll into existence? (In her afterword, Ravn states that the spells cited are drawn from ‘black books, grimoires and other such works’ dating from 1400 to 1900.) Or did it exist independently? And if so, should we accept it as a fictional conceit? Or something more? Indeed, The Wax Child proposes that a deep, haunting unknowability is also essential to us as human beings.
All this is told in a rhythmic language that sometimes reads like a prose poem (Ravn began her literary career as a poet), at others like an incantation. ‘The dead fly in the window-sill told me, the grass-pollen as it puffed into the air told me, a brass candlestick told me, a speck of grit. Everything remembers and speaks to those who will listen,’ she writes. Comprising fewer than 200 pages, The Wax Child (much like Ravn’s previous two novels) asks to be read in a single, rapturous sitting in which its dark, fast-paced and disturbing narrative pulls the reader immediately into otherworldly environs that challenge gender, social stereotypes and the very nature of what we think we know.
The Wax Child by Olga Ravn. Penguin, £14.99 (hardcover)
From the November 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
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