Style

Isak Dinesen faced the accusation throughout her career that she used an archaic style irrelevant to the social reality of the modern world. While less baroque and internally complicated than some of her other stories, "The Ring" nevertheless illustrates what critics mean when they accuse Dinesen of archaism. Here, Dinesen travels beyond the baroque, back to the style of medieval folktale and saga. For example, there is a moment, in The Prose Edda, one of the great mythological poems of the Scandinavian middle ages, when the god Thor fights the World Serpent. Thor will slay the Serpent, the poet says, and then stagger back nine paces—not a few paces, not eight, not ten, but precisely nine paces—and then die from the Serpent's poison. The ritualistic exactitude is reported matter-of-factly. Dinesen's style, in "The Ring," derives from the laconic, the ritualistic, precision of medieval narrative...