A Novel about a Medieval Danish Eavesdropper

By : Susanne Bjertrup

Anne Marie Ejrnæs´ latest novel brings fresh evidence of her great style, this time with her pen deep in the religious power struggles of the Middle Ages.

Each time Anne Marie Ejrnæs writes a novel, the reader is sent out to explore an unknown area in the atlas of the soul. But common to her very different books, portraying an 18th-century French marquise´s sojourn in an Arabian harem, Kvindernes nat (1988) (The Women´s Night), a south-east Jutlandic peasant family, Sneglehuset (1991) (The Snail´s Shell) and a female writer in the bourgeois Copenhagen of the 19th century, Som svalen (1986) (As the Swallow), is the wealth of colour and abundance of sense impression that always captivate her readers. Her new book Thomas Ripenseren (Thomas of Ribe) provides fresh evidence of her virtuosos style, this time with her pen deep in the religious power struggles and the burning of heretics in the Middle Ages.

The novel is about a merchant´s son, Thomas, who is born in 13th-century Ribe and later goes out into the world to become scribe to the Beguine Marguerite Poréte. An alien world arises before the reader´s eyes: first a busy merchant´s house with its pantry, business accounts and erotic complications, later a crane loading ships in Bruges, student taverns in Paris, a dark dungeon, and a pilgrimage to a France overrun with heretics. There are monks of every kind, Beguines, ordinary people and heretics - and in the midst of it all the eternal eavesdropper Thomas, the man who gains access to knowledge he ought not to have.
   The forbidden knowledge to which Thomas gains access comes from the somewhat controversial figure of Marguerite Poréte. She has written a book on the soul´s relationship to God that has already once been condemned by the Inquisition. Nevertheless, it still continues to circulate, now in a copy made by Thomas, and although Thomas does all he can to save her from the stake, his attempts are in vain. This is partly because Marguerite simply will not be saved, believing that you must sometimes lose the outer battle in order to win the inner one, but in fact also because Thomas is not on quite the terms with the great that he would like to be.

With this insufficiency we are at the heart of the psychological portrait of Thomas. A core image throughout the whole of his career is the proverb "A mouse can´t fart like a horse without splitting its rump". Each time Thomas puffs himself up, the balloon is burst, and he is left standing there like a complete fool, both in his own and other people´s eyes. However, although he has many faults, Thomas is also a good person, and his mistakes can to some extent be forgiven on the ground that the religious life in the 14th century is an impenetrable political and personal power game. One of the fascinating elements in the novel is that Anne Marie Ejrnæs manages to reveal this game through someone who is not himself a great personality.

In addition to religion, love naturally also plays its part in Thomas Ripenseren, and here Anne Marie Ejrnæs creates moments so beautiful that you could wish it were you standing at the gate to the Beguine House in Bruges and seeing a young girl in a green tunic with azure sleeves come running towards you. Everything is here: the bubbling in your throat, the words cascading from your lips, the taste of salt and flower juices in the palm of a hand that is stretched out through the railings. The emotional intensity also spreads to the portrayal of the downside of love: the scornful rejection, the jealousy and bitterness that appear when you discover that you have only been an agent in someone else´s plans. So reading Anne Marie Ejrnæs is like embarking on a roller-coaster ride through the landscape of the emotions; up and down it goes - but slowly, for linguistically the novel is of a quality seldom seen. Her prose is so rich that the images virtually queue up on your retina, and readers not giving themselves time to enjoy both the characters and the settings will be cheating themselves. With Thomas Ripenseren, Anne Marie Ejrnæs has simply achieved a recreation of the Middle Ages like a diamond, cunningly cut so as to glitter in every direction.

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine nr. 10 1996