When I decided to write on the shaman, I was aware that I was
venturing into a difficult and very sensitive area of research.
Although there had been an explosion of interest during the previous
two decades in the role of the shaman in the West and numbers of
books of various depth had appeared, I still felt that my special area
of interest, the Greenlandic shaman or angakkoq, was not usually
represented in the literature on shamanism which was available in
English. I therefore set myself the task of writing on the Greenlandic
shaman utilising some sources that had only appeared in Danish.

To capture the nature of the angakkoq is a challenge. What is
available is a variety of sources produced by narrators who describe
not only the behaviour of different angakkut but also voice their own
'approach' to the angakkoq and his relationship to the spirit world. I
have, however, used descriptions that I hope through their diversity of
opinions on the role of the angakkoq ultimately draw a picture of this
mediator between his society and the world of the spirits.

My interest in the traditional Greenlandic belief system started
with a chance visit to the Tukâk theatre in 1980. This theatre,
situated on the rough west coastline of Jutland in Denmark, was
created with the intention of educating young Greenlandic actors and
helping them to re-establish contact with their roots, the traditional
beliefs in spirits, and the mythology, but in a form that was a mixture
of those old traditions and the experiences of the young Greenlander
in the modern Westernised society that Greenland, in many ways, had
become. As far as I have been able to establish, however, traditional
shamanism has not been revived in Greenland.

The attempt of the Tukâk theatre to present a different kind of
spirituality was an eye-opener to me. Participating in some of the
theatre's courses, I became highly interested in Greenlandic

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