Epic Journeys II

I listed several epic journeys in Poul Anderson's works here and have just found another:

the Inuit tribe gathers in an oppressively hot house;

the angakok (shaman) strips naked and lies on a bearskin on a ledge where he is bound with thongs;

the lamps are extinguished except for one tiny flame;

the angakok chants rhythmically to the beat of a drum;

the people sing, sway, writhe, speak in tongues, howl and scream;

the angakok enters a trance (or disappears physically but in the dark?);

he -

- swims down through the rock;

enters the underworld;

goes out under the waters;

passes the country of the dead and an abyss with an eternally whirling disc of ice and a boiling cauldron of seals;

evades a baying, snapping guardian dog greater than a bear;

crosses a bottomless chasm on a knife-thin bridge;

comes before huge, one-eyed, hostile Sedna, Mother of the Sea;

compels her to divulge undersea intelligence;

returns when the single flame has been extinguished;

prophesies for the tribe;

tells the merfolk where their kin have gone, using coastal place names unfamiliar to him that Sedna has learned from drowned sailors.