The Ice Museum Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright Page

  FLIGHT

  FORWARD

  NOSTALGIA

  THE UNCANNY

  ANOTHER WORLD

  SILENCE

  SAVAGES

  PURITY

  FIRE

  ICE HEART

  PROPHETS

  Acknowledgements

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE ICE MUSEUM

  Joanna Kavenna has worked for The New York Review of Books, The Observer, the Daily Telegraph, The London Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. She currently holds a writing fellowship at St. John’s College, Cambridge.

  Praise for The Ice Museum

  From the U.S.

  “The Ice Museum is a beautiful prose poem to an elusive idea. Anyone who loves Scandinavia and nature writing will surely enjoy it.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “The prose reverberates as Kavenna sails up the west coast of Greenland through packed ice . . . [with] visions straight out of Wallace Stevens. . . . A wonderful mixture of the exact and the fanciful—much the way icebergs will assume shapes that blend the solid and the fantastic.” —The New York Review of Books

  “A gorgeously written and unusual book . . . Riveting . . . The Ice Museum transcends all genre description, and holds its own as a journey into a world that somehow vibrantly exists on paper and nowhere else.”—Booklist

  “Joanna Kavenna’s mix of travelogue, scholarship and memoir is an endlessly provocative voyage, heading from one alien outpost to the next. . . . The Ice Museum moves between myth and reality, past and present, so seamlessly that it seems the easy embodiment of Ezra Pound’s belief that all history is contemporaneous.”—Newsday

  “Captivating . . . It’s hard to imagine a more enchanting tour guide.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “A well-grounded, suspenseful history of a unique intersection of poetry and geography.”—San Francisco Chronicle

  “[Kavenna] is a chromatic, poised writer with an eye for evocative images. . . . The Ice Museum is a lambent chronicle of wandering north and encountering an old idea brought forcibly into a new age.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  From the U.K.

  “She tows us with a tempting diet of romantic legend leavened with clear-eyed criticism, of the blight of modern tourism, even at these far ends of the earth, and the threat of global warming.”—The Independent

  “An evocative account of crossing frontiers—geographical, cultural, political and personal.”—The Sunday Times (London)

  “Exceptionally readable . . . Compelling . . . Beautiful.”

  —The Times (London)

  “An exciting and profound book . . . It is hard to envisage a more compelling or wiser guide than Joanna Kavenna.”—The Spectator

  “An astoundingly self-assured debut. A sensitively poised, cherished book.”—The Independent on Sunday

  “Wonderfully eloquent and compelling.”—The Guardian (London)

  “An involving, astonishing book of travels . . . This is a wonderful realization—in action, description, and memory—of that fascinated longing of the North which even C. S. Lewis could not quite articulate.”

  —Scotland on Sunday

  “Beguiling . . . Her story sheds light on our own growing knowledge of Earth and our persistent wish for something strange just beyond the horizon.”—New Scientist

  “A fascinating cultural history . . . The descriptions are truly poetic. . . . It is a book that coolly recommends itself to those who yearn for the North.”—Dagbladet

  “This is a beautiful, clever, ambitious, funny book. . . . Kavenna’s writing . . . is gifted.”—Literary Review

  “Kavenna has created an enchanting work that transcends conventional genres, full of poise and passion.”—The Observer (London)

  “Her depictions of the natural world, full of concrete detail, are worthy of Dorothy Wordsworth.”—Sunday Telegraph (London)

  “Kavenna’s book is part geographical history and part travelogue. Her ability to draw together the strands of the Thule myth is deft and entertaining.” —Time Out (London)

  “Meditative in its approach and luminously poetic in its phrasing.”

  —The Daily Mail

  “This is a truly original debut: the sensitive exploration of a dark myth.”

  —Colin Thubron

  “A book for anyone who has ever been fascinated by ice landscapes and ice myths. I was captivated.”—Giles Foden

  “The Ice Museum is a fascinating travel book and a magnificent literary accomplishment. Joanna Kavenna’s accounts of her travels through northern Europe are always vivid and evocative, usually insightful and illuminating, and sometimes very amusing. But her writing is also informed by a profound knowledge of Nordic history, literature, and mythology. The result is a magical book about a magical land.”

  —Avi Shlaim

  “Joanna Kavenna writes in many forms, and in many voices, beautifully, always convincingly: the literary essayist, the historian, the child, the memoirist, the social sketcher, and the travel writer. . . . This is a brilliant debut, an important and unusual book about how metaphors and myths can drive history.”—Robert Macfarlane

  For my parents

  and B. H. D. M.

  with love

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in Great Britain by Penguin Books Ltd 2005

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2006

  Published in Penguin Book (UK) 2006

  Published in Penguin Books (USA) 2007

  Copyright © Joanna Kavenna, 2005

  All rights reserved

  eISBN : 978-0-143-03846-7

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  LIST OF MAPS

  FLIGHT

  . . . ONLY THE PAST IS IMMORTAL.

  DECIDE TO TAKE A TRIP, READ BOOKS OF TRAVEL

  GO QUICKLY! EVEN SOCRATES IS MORTAL

  MENTION THE NAME OF HAPPINESS: IT IS

  ATLANTIS, ULTIMA THULE, OR THE LIMELIGHT,

>   CATHAY OR HEAVEN. BUT GO QUICKLY . . .

  “PERSONAE,” DELMORE SCHWARTZ (1913-1966)

  Seen from above, the ice sounds a ceaseless warning. A vicious blankness emanates from the white expanse below. The shadow of the plane falls on fleeting clouds. The ice smothers forests and mountains under a thick pall. Nothing moves across the whiteness.

  The plane is drifting downwards, falling towards the glazed countryside. The ice is a vista of emptiness, like a paradox, a symbol expressing the inexpressible; here is the vivid realization of absence. As the plane descends, the warning sounds insistently: LEAVE. A single syllable resounding across the smothered land. No point in coming here. The country is closed for the ice deluge, to be opened in the spring. The plane is plunging through a white sky, into banks of drifting cloud. The trees below are bleached, their branches bent under the weight of the snow. As the plane skids across the runway the trees blur into lines of whiteness.

  Shaking their heads, the passengers disembark. A pale sun shines onto the rigid arms of the trees. I step slowly onto the frost-coated runway. A thick wind blasts at my body, forcing me to bend against it. A woman is signalling frantically, pointing at a bus. We all board, obediently.

  In this icy landscape, it is hard to discern distance and gradient. Complex layers of vegetation are simplified into one dense line of thick snow-bound forest. Only the most violent features of the landscape remain—the most jagged and stark. Trees seem to be locked in the ice, bowed by the weight of their casing, like statues struggling to become free of a block of stone. The sun trembles above the horizon, casting squat shadows on the snow, waiting to sink into darkness again. It is a landscape ripe for fantastical embellishment; the silence invites it. Something about the brute simplicity of the nature outside—cold, white, blank—sends me into thoughts of the remote and atavistic—stumbling monsters, shambling old trolls, vast footprints in the snow.

  Under the snow, the ice land is an anonymous world, the trees stripped of colour. The frost breath of the wind makes me blink, the frigid air rips at my lungs. The fjord is frozen, the trees are silver splinters.

  I was travelling through northern lands, compelled by the endless indeterminacy of a myth: the land of Thule—the most northerly place in the ancient world. Before the regions north of Britain were mapped, there was a dream of a silent place, where the inhabitants lived under darkened skies through the winter, and enjoyed constant sunshine in the summer. A land near a frozen ocean, draped in mist. Thule was seen once, described in opaque prose, and never identified with any certainty again. It became a mystery land, standing by a cold sea. A land at the edge of the maps.

  A Greek explorer, Pytheas, began the story: he claimed to have reached Thule in the fourth century B.C. He had sailed from the sun-drenched city of Marseilles to Britain. He sailed up to the north of Scotland, and then sailed onwards for about six days into the remote reaches of the ocean, until he sighted a land called Thule. There, so the story goes, the inhabitants showed him where the sun set on the shortest day. In the winter, the land was plunged into darkness. Near Thule, the sea began to thicken, and Pytheas saw the sea, sky and land merging into a viscous mass, rising and falling with the motion of the waves. He turned away from the seething semi-solid ocean, and sailed back to Marseilles.

  Where was Thule? The question perplexed the ancient geographers, as they fashioned their fantastical maps—imagining the known world encircled by an impassable river, or crisscrossed by vast belts of water from Pole to Pole and around the equator. There were contenders throughout history—Iceland, Scandinavia, Britain—but the precise location of Thule was never categorically determined. Thule remained a mystery—an island, shrouded in a mist, standing on the edge of a frozen ocean.

  Pliny the Elder described Thule as the ‘most remote of all those lands recorded,’ a place where ‘there are no nights at midsummer when the sun is passing through the sign of the Crab, and on the other hand no days at midwinter, indeed some writers think this is the case for periods of six months at a time without a break.’ Virgil called it Ultima Thule—farthest Thule—emphasizing its remoteness, its status as the shadowy last country of the northern world. Strabo poured scorn on the idea. Pytheas—a charlatan, wrote Strabo—had made up a load of fiction about the north, and Thule was just one among the mass of lies and fables he had spun. He had said that Thule was six days’ sail north of Britain, which was absolutely impossible, Strabo insisted. It was obvious that Britain was the most northerly inhabited land in the world, a place where the inhabitants lived in misery because of the cold. Only Ireland was more miserable, Strabo thought, where everyone lay with their sisters and ate their parents.

  With each new discovery in the north the name of Thule was evoked. The Romans reached the north of Britain, and claimed they had conquered Thule. The scholar Procopius thought Thule was in Scandinavia, and wrote garbled anthropologies of the Thulitae, the inhabitants of the vast country of Thule. In search of a retreat, clerics from early medieval Ireland sailed to Iceland—a land they thought was Thule—and brought back stories of a place where hermits clung to sea-lashed rocks, and cried for the forgiveness of their God. The Venerable Bede called Iceland Thule, as did King Alfred of England. The medieval German poem “Meregarto” described Thule as a place where the sun never shone, and the ice became as hard as crystal, so the inhabitants could ‘make a fire above it, till the crystal glows.’ Petrarch mused on where it might be; the cartographer Mercator fixed Thule at Iceland. Christopher Columbus claimed he had been there, long before he arrived in America. As the lands of the north were mapped—Iceland, Scandinavia, Britain, Greenland, the Baltic coast—the name of Thule was moved around, from Iceland to Norway, from northern Britain to the tip of Greenland. Northerly latitude was enough, a midnight sun and a frozen ocean still more persuasive.

  Ultima Thule, distant island, place of dreams, but disconcerting and somehow strange—writers flung the words into their verse and prose, drawing on their resonance. A few scholars tried to find the solution in the meaning of the word “Thule,” stacking up their definitions, squabbling about Old Norse and Phoenician meanings. Some said Thule might have come from the Old Norse for frozen earth or tree or from the Old Irish for silent or from the Old Saxon for limit or from the Arabic for far off. But no one could decide for certain; eventually most seemed to agree that the origin of the word was unknown. The spelling of Thule was inconsistent through the ages: Thule, Thulé, Thula, Thyle, Thile, Thila, Tyle, Tila, Tylen and Tilla, among others. Faced with the subject of the pronunciation of Thule, the scholars shrugged their shoulders. Some said ‘Toolay,’ some said ‘Thoolay,’ a very few said ‘Thool.’ Poets rhymed Thule with newly, truly and unruly, but never, it seemed, with drool.

  Mist, sea and land, a frozen ocean, a midnight sun in the summer, a twilight sky throughout the winter. Pytheas’s account of his journey was lost, and no one could decide where Thule might have been. It left the story of Thule as a glimpse of a distant land. It was an empty page, its silent rocks inviting interpretation. Gradually, through countless verses and learned hypotheses, Thule became a symbol of remoteness, of the shadowy world of the north. Nothing could be known for certain about Thule, and so the word was drawn into imaginative histories, poems, novels and explorers’ accounts. It was worshipped and parodied, cited in stanzas and used for rhetorical phrases. Thule was entwined with thousands of years of fantasies about what might lie beyond the edges of the maps. As the maps came to cover the world, Thule was bound up with the crusades of modern exploration.

  In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as more and more travellers set off for the remote north, Thule recurred in explorers’ accounts: Fridtjof Nansen from Norway, Richard Burton from Britain, Vilhjalmur Stefansson from Canada, Knud Rasmussen from Denmark all sounded the cry Thule, as they travelled across the Arctic. Imaginative explorers filled in the blank moment of arrival with a devout incantation. Where the ice stretched away, and the birds plunged and dived, c
rying into the cold air, the explorers remembered Thule, pinning the word to the empty wilderness.

  I found Thule as a curious footnote, a detail that enticed me. I was working in an office in London, dreaming of escaping the city. The crowds were grinding me down; it was a common complaint, but I found I could hardly board a tube. I had lost the will to push myself forward, and as spring broke across the grey-fronted houses I knew I had to leave. I was not vehemently anti-city; in the evenings when the crowds had become more shambling and slow-paced I liked to wander through the centre, from the South Bank to the City, along the Strand, past the fractured façades of the old buildings. I liked the incongruous noises outside my window in the mornings—a solitary bird trilling like a soloist, above an accompaniment of cars and trains. At weekends I sat in parks, reading the papers, staring at the city shimmering under smog. But I was tired of standing in an endless sea of people. I wanted to walk through empty serenity and hear nothing but the thump of my feet on the rocks.

  I knew about the idea of Thule from earlier reading. I remembered it as a plain white place, a land that was startling and strange. But I hadn’t known there was a US air base called Thule, and it was this that set me thinking about the far north. Thule Air Base was in northern Greenland, and had been a staging post for nuclear bombers during the Cold War. It was—when I read the article—being upgraded, as part of America’s new missile defence system. It had seen off one threat, the threat of war between the USSR and the USA, and now it was part of a new sense of security concerns. Thule Air Base was the most northerly listening post of a vast military empire. A military base called Thule, nuclear bombers in the remote north, military waste spreading across the silent ice. It was a potent idea; it intrigued me as I read. I thought of this camp, at nearly eighty degrees north, in the most northerly land in the world.