Tornarsuk

The great helper

A tornaq (plural tornait, tuurngait in Canadian dialects) is a helping spirit with whom an angakkuq works. Tornaarsuk, "the great tornaq", was described by eighteenth-century observers in Greenland as the chief of these helpers, the power from whom angakkuit gained knowledge and whose guidance they sought on behalf of their communities. Labrador sources describe a similar figure, Torngarsoak.

A missionary reinterpretation

The Danish-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede, who arrived in Greenland in 1721, and the Moravian missionaries who followed, looked for a devil in Inuit religion and found one in Tornarsuk. In Christian Greenlandic, the name came to be used for the Devil. Later scholars have pointed out that this equation says more about the missionaries' expectations than about Inuit belief, in which helping spirits were neither simply good nor simply evil.

Why this entry is short

Almost everything written about Tornarsuk in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries comes through that missionary lens, and the practice of angakkuit with their helping spirits is not something this site describes in detail. The entry records the figure and the history of how outsiders changed its meaning.