Sedna, Snow Wisdom, and the Long Northern Memory

Every winter, I pull on the same pair of mukluks before stepping outside. They are old now – reindeer skin, hand-made in Greenland, lined with sheepswool that has softened to the shape of my feet over years of use. They keep my feet warm in a way no other boot ever has, but more than that, they carry memory. Each time I wear them, I am brought back to the North – to Greenland, to Iceland, to my time in the Arctic circle, to places where winter is not something endured until it passes, but something learned from, lived within, and respected. Cold of that kind teaches you quickly what matters and what does not.

This January, the Alps were caught in glaze ice. Trees stood encased in glass, branches bent under a weight that looked ornamental until you stood beneath it and felt how exacting it was. Frost flowers opened briefly across the ground and vanished again by midday. I stood there longer than necessary, letting that familiar northern quiet settle into the body. It brought me back immediately to Greenland, to the tundra and the long horizon, and to the particular closeness that forms between people who live with weather rather than against it.

Ireland, Iceland, and Greenland are different lands with different histories, but they share a temperament. Those who live at the edge of the world tend to recognise one another without needing to explain very much. Stories move easily between such places, and so does understanding. Sedna is one of those stories.

I have always been drawn to her myth because it is unsentimental and exact. In Greenlandic cosmology, Sedna is not a symbol or an allegory. She is a winter story, snow wisdom, an ice story, shaped by hunger, scarcity, and the long silence that follows rupture. Her world is one in which life withdraws completely when trust is broken, and in which nothing responds to insistence or demand.

Her descent is uncompromising. She is cast into the sea, her fingers severed in fear and desperation, trust destroyed at the moment it is most needed. Northern stories do not soften this, and they do not hurry past it. Winter does not allow for that kind of consolation. What matters just as much as the descent, however, is what comes after. For a long time, nothing happens. The sea closes, the animals do not return, and there is no negotiation, no explanation, no quick repair. There is simply a pause, long and exacting, a stretch of time in which nothing can be demanded into being.

This is the part of the story that feels most psychologically true. After rupture comes stillness, and after collapse comes recovery, but only if it is allowed to take the time it requires. Sedna does not rise from the depths to respond to outrage or pleading. She remains below, and authority shifts inward. The system reorganises itself slowly, without reference to human urgency.

Only then does life return. From Sedna’s severed fingers come the seals, the whales, and the narwhal. Nourishment returns in altered form. What was broken is not restored to how it was before; it becomes something else. The deep opens again only when the conditions that allow life have been rebuilt from within.

This pattern is deeply familiar in Ireland. Samhain marks the true descent, not simply the end of a year but the beginning of the dark night of the soul. Life is drawn down with An Cailleach Bhéarra into stone, bone, and winter ground. She governs that movement without apology, without explanation, and without responding to bargaining. Her work is stripping rather than soothing. When that work is complete, there is a pause, and it is here that Imbolc sits, often misunderstood as a beginning rather than what it truly is.

Imbolc is not the ascent. It is not the return of light, and it is not a promise that the ground will thaw because a date has been reached. It is the warming of the hearth within, the first internal softening after a long freeze. Nothing outside is obliged to change yet. This is Brigid in her below-ground state, her feminine aspect, introverted and receptive, entirely occupied with her own becoming. She is not listening for requests, and she is not responding to demands. To expect her to appear on cue at this point is to misunderstand the nature of the season entirely.

Only later, at the Spring Equinox, does Brigid rise fully into her fire aspect. Then come the forging and the outward movement, the shaping of new paths. But that fire depends entirely on the quiet, unglamorous work of Imbolc. Without that interior warming, nothing holds. Sedna’s story follows the same arc: descent, pause, and return, not because it is willed or asked for, but because the conditions that allow life have been restored.

Soon, it will be time for me to work again with the qilaut wind drum, the Greenlandic frame drum played by voice rather than sounder (which most people refer to as a 'beater'), shaped directly by breath and air. This is why it belongs to this season. It is not a commanding instrument and does not impose sound. It listens first. My work with land, food, craft, sound, and psyche has always been about attending to the same underlying order through different forms. When I step into the snow in those mukluks, when ice forms and loosens again, when breath meets drumskin, the same intelligence is at work.

Animism, in this sense, is not belief but attentiveness. It is knowing when to wait, when not to speak, and when not to ask. In Ireland, this knowledge is often spoken quietly now, folded into story rather than declared outright. In Greenland, it remains closer to the surface. But the understanding is shared across these northern islands.

Sedna is to Greenland what An Cailleach Bhéarra and Brigid are to Ireland, different faces of the same seasonal law shaped by different landscapes.

These stories endure because they continue to describe what actually happens. We descend, we pause, we recover, and only then do we rise. New beginnings do not arrive because a date has been reached, a festival observed, or a demand made. They arrive because winter has been allowed to finish its work, and neither Sedna, nor the Cailleach, nor Brigid can be hurried in that.

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© 2026 Niamh Criostail and Heartlands Publishing. All rights reserved.

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Image credit: Sedna, by Anthony Galbraith