Tupilaq
In Greenlandic tradition, a tupilaq was a figure its owner made in secret to cause harm. No real one has ever been found in Greenland; the carved tupilaq figures made in large numbers since 1905 are representations.
Hinrich Rink, in Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo (1875), set the tupilak apart from an amulet: its user made it himself, in secret. That might make it look like witchcraft, Rink wrote, but Greenlanders of his day held it to be a fair and proper remedy, made with the help of a serrat. He added that witchcraft was wrong because of its secret origin and the teaching handed down with it, whatever a given tupilak was meant to do.
Wikipedia says tupilaq were made secretly, in lonely places and from materials that rot, so none survive. Inge Kleivan, in Lex, writes that real tupilaks have never been found in Greenland. Wikipedia adds that early European visitors were keen to see a tupilaq, and Inuit started carving versions of them from sperm whale teeth.
Kleivan writes that tupilak figures have been made in large numbers since 1905 to depict real ones. Nationalmuseet holds examples collected in East Greenland between 1930 and 1960, in blackened wood with skeleton patterns and inset bone teeth, and in walrus tusk with pupils painted black. Martin Schultz of Museum Cerny, writing in Polar Journal in 2021, says the carvings made as art are just pictures of tupilait, since nobody makes them to cause harm any more. Carvers mostly use teeth from sperm whales and orcas, which limit a figure's size and shape, with a second material for the eyes; they also use caribou antler and wood, and now and then stone or musk ox horn.
- Origin
- A Greenlandic Inuit tradition. The oldest text recorded here is Hinrich Rink's Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo (1875), which reports how Greenlanders of that time judged the tupilak. The carving of tupilak figures dates from 1905 according to Inge Kleivan in Lex, and carvers still make them as art (Polar Journal, 2021).
- How we treat it
- The label covers the historical belief and the carving tradition that grew from it. It makes no claim that a tupilak ever worked as believed. The carvings it describes are art objects, which the sources call images of tupilait.
- Routes out
- No source written by Greenlanders could be recorded, so Greenlanders' own judgement, as Rink set it down in 1875, comes first. Inge Kleivan's Lex entry, drawing on Nationalmuseet's collection, and Martin Schultz's museum article on the carvings follow, then Wikipedia.
"The tupilak differed from the amulet in being the work of its own user, and being secretly fashioned by himself. It therefore might seem to belong to witchcraft ; but according to the opinion of the present Greenlanders, it is considered as having been a just and proper remedy, made by help of a serrat. It must always be remem- bered that its secret origin and traditional teaching, and not the immediate intention of it in every single case, constituted the evil of witchcraft."