Something About Borkman

Someone rotten in the state Minnesota.

Richard Cardenas is celebrating John Bellairs Month this January and supporting an online read-along of The Dark Secret of Weatherend (1984), the second book in the Anthony Monday series. Here's a discussion point around the book and its main antagonist.

First, I've always been interested in the names Bellairs chose for his characters. They are simultaneously feasible yet somewhat far-fetched or even silly-sounding. They also reveal his interests, sometimes inspired by a minor characters in a book he's read (i.e. Melichus), named for an obscure religious figure (i.e. Remigius), or just archaic alliterative words (i.e. Isaac Izard).

So what do we know about the names of the Borkman family, Jorgen Knut and Anders?

Jorgen (or Jørgen) is a Danish or Norwegian name similar to George. People from Denmark and Norway settled in Minnesota and other Midwest states centuries ago, so Bellairs is making good use of the rural Minnesota setting. How many readers pronounced the name with a J sound instead of a Y sound?

Knut is another name used in Norway and Sweden (and similar to the English Canute) whose origins means knot. While many readers would pronounce the name to rhyme with "newt", I can't help but think someone would try to read something into the name by pronouncing it "nut". I see "knuts" is also an archaic English term for idle upper-class men-about-town.

As to Borkman...John Gabriel Borkman is the titular character in a play (1896) by Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), pictured above. Bellairs was exposed to a number of types of literature as a student at the University of Chicago and it seem feasible he crossed paths with Ibsen there. It seems just likely that Chicago was where Bellairs encountered the Jacobean play "The Tragedy of Sir John van Olden Barnavelt" (1619) and we know what, and who, this title inspired.

The book says Anders Borkman, the son, is returning from a "lengthy stay in Norway". When I search for this name I find a passage from the M.R. James's story, 'Count Magus':

“And I tell you this about Anders Bjornsen, that he was once a beautiful man, but now his face was not there, because the flesh of it was sucked away off the bones.”

Maybe Bellairs's Borkman was influenced by a corruption of Bjornsen?  The one-two, father-and-son punch really make them The Borkmen of Doom.

Sorry about that.  Any theories of your own?