Worldle players, go to the fourth paragraph to see a mention of your most favorite spot on Earth. "The Land of the Ice and Snow"
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EXTREME NORTH: A Cultural History
By Bernd Brunner
Translated by Jefferson Chase
Imagine this: While watching the final season of “Game of Thrones,” you see a screeching, undead fiend from the frozen north — a “wight” — lunge forth from its crate and try to kill any human within reach. Irresistibly compelled, you book a holiday to the gelid, hostile regions whence the creature came.
Before you scoff, “Preposterous!” the cultural historian Bernd Brunner would have you know that this (more or less) is what happened two centuries ago, when the novelist Mary Shelley invented another undead fiend — a giant corpse brought to life by a scientist named Frankenstein, who murders his creator’s bride and flees to the North Pole. As the bereaved scientist chased his monster (by dogsled) across the floes of the Arctic Sea, “surrounded by mountains of ice” and “in imminent danger of being crushed in their conflict,” enthralled readers of “Frankenstein” began making travel plans.
In “Extreme North,” his idiosyncratic inquiry into the power of the north in the popular imagination, Brunner writes that Shelley’s 1818 horror story kicked off a wave of “Arctic exploration for tourists.” Never mind that Shelley had never been to the Arctic; or that photography did not yet exist to back up her thrilling descriptions; or that most of the travelers only made it as far north as Scotland or Scandinavia before calling it quits. It was not so much a particular spot on the map that called them, Brunner suggests, as the “concept of ‘north’” supercharged, distinct and alien: “a space both real and imaginary.”
Geographically speaking, Brunner points out early on, the “north” is relative. To the Spanish, Britain is “north”; whereas the English might place the “north” elsewhere — Scotland, Germany, Russia, Scandinavia. To the Danes, up in the Arctic latitudes, the North Sea is the West Sea; while the Norwegian volcanic island of Bouvetoya, an “ice-covered speck,” lies between South Africa and Antarctica, toward the bottom of any child’s globe. So … “Where is the north, exactly?” he asks, invoking the question that the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood raised long ago. The question that consumes Brunner is more ineffable: What is the north, exactly?
In 31 chapters, each as self-contained and pointed as a shard of ice, Brunner presents a different historic, political, natural or cultural facet of his subject. Together, these shards form a glacial memory palace-cum-climbing wall that lets readers scale this myth-wreathed territory. He looks not so much for a through-line as for arresting spots on the berg of the notional north where the reader can plant an ice ax, pause for breath, look out and down, and ponder the mysteries of the northern lights, spread out across the centuries.
Among these mysteries: How can you reconcile the fact that, in 1595, when the Dutch explorer Willem Barents was already sailing the Arctic, and would soon discover (technically, rediscover) the Svalbard Archipelago, the geographer Gerhard Mercator produced a map that showed an enormous whirlpool ringing the North Pole? In 1747, in Hamburg, Germany, a merchant named Johann Anderson wrote a “voluminous,” scathing tome attacking Iceland, portraying its inhabitants as grim, tippling laborers whose eternal aim was to “catch and clean something that they can trade for brandy, their beloved brandy, the next time Danish ships dock.” Anderson, Brunner writes, had never set foot in Iceland. Within five years, a geographer for the Danish crown would publish a corrective study, utterly rejecting Anderson’s “flights of foolishness.” Why did the German and the Dane, in the same decade, have such intense, conflicting attitudes about their northern neighbor? In 19th-century England, a “wild notion circulated” that Queen Victoria was a blood relative of the Norse god Odin. Seriously? And in 1896, when the American Arctic explorer Robert E. Peary transported six Inuit Greenlanders (including a child) to the Museum of Natural History in New York for research purposes, 20,000 New Yorkers met the ship at the docks to gawk at the “exotic foreigners.” Did they understand that these captives from the north were not wights, but human beings?
Other authors investigating Brunner’s point of the compass have systematically tracked recorded landmarks of its exploration — for instance, the discoveries of the Northwest and Northeast Passages, the Yukon gold rush and the exploits of polar adventurers like Henry Hudson, Roald Amundsen or Sir Edmund Hillary. But Brunner seeks the neural north that exists off the map — or despite the map. The ancient Greeks, he notes, imagined the northern terra incognita — which they called Hyperborea (after Boreas, the god of the north wind) — as a paradise inhabited by wise, immortal giants. To medieval Europeans, haunted by memories of terrifying Viking raids, the High North was “the realm of the devil, the place whence evil would come upon the world.” To later Europeans, beguiled by Icelandic Eddas, Norse sagas, elves, trolls, the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and the folkloric music of Edvard Grieg, it was a “book of fairy tales” spread across unspoiled nature: “bucolic idylls, birch forests, and mountain and ice landscapes.” And to the young Kaiser Wilhelm II, who summered in the Norwegian fjords for a quarter-century on his yacht, the Hohenzollern, it was the ancestral home of Germanness. “Magic threads draw me to this broad-shouldered people,” he is said to have declared in 1890, the second year of his fjord expeditions, as he bestowed a viking statue upon the Norwegian people, and proudly claimed viking ancestry.
Dreams of mystical northern brotherhood like the Kaiser’s soon would be disastrously exploited by antisemites and white supremacists who, as J. R. R. Tolkien put it, perverted “the ‘Nordic’ spirit and myth in their quest for world domination.” That impulse persists to this day, Brunner shows, giving as proof a photograph of one of the stormers of the U.S. Capitol in 2021, who bore a horned helmet on his head and Nordic tattoos on his chest. But it’s not only insurrectionists who fall for the call of wild, icebound climes, he notes, marveling at the “immense success” of “Game of Thrones” and Neil Gaiman’s fantastical northern road novel, “American Gods.” He asks, “What needs are serviced by such tales from a world that no longer exists and perhaps never did in the form that we imagine?”
Thought-provoking and wide-ranging, “Extreme North” resembles the “cabinet of wonders” that he uses as the book’s embarkation point: the 16th-century Museum Wormianum, which held thousands of northern relics assembled by a Copenhagen polymath named Olaf Worms — from fossils and taxidermied beasts (a great auk, a small polar bear) to a narwhal skull, complete with its “long, sharp, spiral tusk.” Over the centuries, most of the collection has been lost; today, its breadth can only be known through a 1655 catalog that preserves the collector’s impressions of his holdings — in Latin. Worms wanted, Brunner writes, to give the public “a sense of the vast expanse of the north.” Brunner achieves that goal in a modern tongue, not with objects you can hold in your hand, but with ideas you can carry in your head.
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