The Icelandic for “midwife,” ljósmóður—ljós (light) and móður (mother)—was once declared the country’s most beautiful word. In Herostories, poet-historian Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir composites poems using lexis from Icelandic Midwives, a three-volume set of 19th- and early-20th-century accounts authored by midwives, their associates, and priests.

These sources present the midwife as an idealized figure, and delivering babies as “a job that could not help but stir / all the warmest and best / in womanheart.” “Mothers of life and light,” midwives are:

keen on healing and relief
keen on nurse nursing the sick
keen on help helping and comfort
keen on binding the wound.

That these paeans grow monotonous is no accident. Tómasdóttir explains that she “didn’t feel bad about tearing at the romanticized female image” of the midwife—for instance by arranging encomia into solid text blocks until the repeated praise rings hollow.

Tómasdóttir observes that, in the 20th century, ljósmóður displaced a “more descriptive but much less romantic” word for midwife, yfirsetukona, meaning “a woman that ‘sits over’ a woman in labor.” Tellingly, the accounts are scrubbed of the gush of amniotic fluid and the laboring mother’s grunts. The perils of a compressed umbilical cord are less central than the midwife’s valiance during treacherous journeys, where she:

leapt on horseback and dashed off
dashed out in the nightmurk
over roadless ground and fen
out in madblind blizzards
out in rabid impasse
relentless she pressed against the storm
sat mannish astride her sidesaddle and set off unshrinking

And we see the midwife’s bravery generously rewarded, with “a splendid silver baptismbasin,” a “goldbracelet good ridinghorse,” “honor verse fine goldwatch,” and more.

Tómasdóttir’s chief poetic tools are patterning, repetition, and sound, which translator K.B. Thors ably transmits, particularly in her compounds: “Never was the shortdaydark so black,” “snowthrashed out of frost storms,” the “caringhands midwifehands curinghands.” The rest is latent in the gaps, left for the reader to discern.