Qivittoq

In Greenlandic tradition, a qivittoq is a person who turned away from the community to live alone in the mountains, and who was thought to gain sharpened senses and supernatural abilities. The idea is known from 18th-century West Greenland.

Writing in the Danish reference work Lex, Bo Wagner Sørensen explains that the Greenlandic word means mountain-walker or hermit, from qivi-, to turn away. It named a person who felt wronged or let down and chose to live alone in mountain caves. People imagined that over time such a person took on animal-like traits, with keen senses and supernatural powers, and believed a qivittoq lived on as a ghost after death. Sørensen writes that unexplained events are sometimes put down to these mountain-walkers, who are still glimpsed now and then in present-day Greenland, and that the qivittoq stands for loneliness set against the good life of the community. He says the idea is known from 18th-century West Greenland and apparently not from other Inuit peoples.

Hinrich Rink's Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo (1875) spells the word kivigtok. He describes a man who fled human company for a solitary life in nature, usually inland, and gained great agility, the power to understand animals, and knowledge about the world-pillars. Rink gives the causes as unjust treatment, or even a scolding from relatives or housemates, who then always had to fear the runaway's revenge.

In a 2003 Kristeligt Dagblad article by Inger Anneberg, Svend Kolte, head of the Greenlanders' House in Aarhus, explains that the qivittoq came to be seen as a kind of punishing spirit: people believed such figures changed from humans into spirits, and so into dangerous beings. The German Wikipedia notes that the Danish film Qivitoq (1956), set in Greenland, takes the idea as its title and central theme, and sets traditional belief against a modernised Christian community.