PESTA

Pesta is the Norwegian personification of the Black Death, a pandemic that has resulted in 75 to 200 million deaths in Europe and Asia. It represents an attempt to explain this horrifying experience through a tale. We can observe that the descriptions of Pesta's travels trace a path that the disease has taken, in the tale it is said that it wandered through fields, farms, villages, boats and even mountains. An interesting part of the tale says that Pesta arrived in the Norwegian lands through a ghost ship stabbed by rats, and that his sailors carried their curse. While Pesta, his travels and his curse are not literal, we can imagine it as the representation of the bacteria we know today (Yersinia pestis), its mode of propagation and its symptoms.