Morbid memories: The hauntology of Theodor Kittelsen’s Svartedauen

‘What does it mean when the ghosts of our past refuse to leave?’ Norwegian illustrator Theodor Kittelsen’s book, Svartedauen ([1901] 2011) utilizes pictured poetry, or poetry written in conjunction with illustrated elements, to tell a mythologized version of the story of the Black Death, an illness that claimed approximately 60 per cent of the Norwegian population in the fourteenth century. Curiously, his depictions of icy fjords and dark forests contain elements contemporary with Kittelsen’s life, implying that the mythological characters and ghosts of the fourteenth century still inhabit his homeland. I argue that the book represents the temporal rupture felt by Norwegians at the end of the nineteenth century, caused by extreme societal changes driven by their fight for independence and rapid industrialization. Using a ‘hauntological’ lens developed by Jacques Derrida, this article explores how Kittelsen’s landscapes of anachronism are displayed both in the book’s motifs and its medium.