Dinesen’s central purpose in Winter’s Tales is to show that women play an absolutely crucial role in life—indeed, that they are its very source and focus. The other themes of the work are linked to, and secondary to, the theme of the power of women.

From a thematic standpoint, the central story of Winter’s Tales is “The Sailor-boy’s Tale.” It tells about a young sailor-boy named Simon, who during a storm climbs the mainmast of his ship in order to free a peregrine falcon that has been caught there. Two years later, in the town of Bodo in northern Norway, Simon again meets the falcon, but in a most unusual way. Having fallen in love with a girl named Nora, he is, while on his way to see her one evening, detained by a Russian sailor named Ivan. To get away, Simon stabs the Russian, who is sexually interested in him, after which he is hunted by Ivan’s shipmates. While he is hiding in the crowd at a dance, an old pagan Lapp woman named Sunniva shows up, says that Simon is her son, and saves him from the Russians. She also reveals that she is a shape-shifter and that she is the falcon that Simon helped. She tells him that she admires his devotion to Nora and that the females of the earth hold together in a great matriarchal conspiracy. Referring to men as their sons, she indicates that the world is really run by the women. The story of Sunniva’s pagan matriarchy is Dinesen’s metaphor for the power of women in human life.

It is instructive that Sunniva is a pagan rather than a Christian, for Dinesen did not share the dualistic Christian worldview, which tends to relegate women to a secondary position. In “The Heroine,” she inverts the hierarchical relationship between man and woman by casting a woman stripper in the role of savior.

Heloise, the heroine, is traveling in Germany at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Stranded at the border in the company of several other French travelers, as well as an Englishman named Frederick, she and the rest of the company are arrested for espionage. They are told by a German officer that they will be released only if Heloise will accept an indecent proposal made by him. By categorically refusing to cooperate, Heloise displays such courage that the Germans give the group their freedom anyway. Years later, however, it is understood by Frederick, the central consciousness in the story, that Heloise’s real feat is not to have saved the lives of the French travelers but to have helped them avoid the guilt that they would have carried had their freedom been purchased by a scandalous act. Dinesen thus arranges the thematic material of the story so as to portray Heloise as a savior, and the imagery used in the text is such that this interpretation is confirmed. “The Heroine” is a powerfully twisted and ironic retelling of the Christian story of salvation.

In “Sorrow-acre,” Dinesen takes aim at one of the most cherished notions of Western patriarchy: the idea of biological succession from father to son in a family. The young wife of the story, Sophie Magdalena, has allowed herself to be married off to a much older man with the idea that she is to bear him a son. After the marriage, she becomes acquainted with her husband’s nephew Adam, who is visiting his uncle’s estate. It soon becomes clear that it is Adam, not his uncle, who will be the biological father of Sophie Magdalena’s first child, who, however, will legally...