Fridtjof Nansen’s Accounts of Inuit Cosmology and Sedna

Record summary

Nineteenth-century Arctic ethnographies recorded Inuit traditions concerning Sedna, the powerful marine woman associated with sea animals, weather and the moral order of hunting. Franz Boas’s work in the 1880s and 1890s is especially important for documenting variants from Baffin Island and nearby regions. The material matters for comparing named marine beings with subsistence practices and ritual authority. Names, spellings and narrative details vary by community, and published accounts reflect translation, collector framing and the conditions of colonial fieldwork rather than a single pan-Inuit mythology.