1. Finding a Footing: Th E North Before 1700

1. Finding a Footing: Th e North before 1700 Th e Mediterranean Looking North In his magisterial history of the arctic regions, Nord i Tåkeheimen (In Northern Mists, 1911), Fridtjof Nansen reproduces a map of Europe as it is thought to have been perceived by the Greek historian and geographer Th e world as perceived by Herodotus (Nansen 1911). Herodotus, nearly half a millennium before Christ. Th e map provides a surprisingly accurate and detailed image of the snug enclosure of the Mediterranean and the territories immediately surrounding it. Starting from the west coast of Spain, however, there is a vague and hesitant line moving in a curve north and then gradually east, before vanishing into a white space. Not even the British Isles are anywhere to be seen. Th en 34 Th e Dream of the North around Denmark, which is also absent from the map, the frame cuts off any further speculation about the northern part of the world. One could hardly ask for a more striking illustration of the Mediterranean perspective on the North in the early phase of Western civilisation: a place at the back of the world and fundamentally alien, where one’s total ignorance could be replaced by an unfettered imagination. Not that the ancient Greeks were indiff erent to the North; though far away, it always retained a sense of majestic awe. Observing the stars, they could see that it lay beneath the constellation of the Ursa Major, and consequently they “called the whole of the region Arktikós, the country of the great bear” (Lopez 1986, 16). Still, in their triadic climate theory, their home grounds in the Aegean served not unexpectedly as the golden mean, the ideal place for a free, rational and happy life, between the extremes of cold to the north and the burning heat of Egypt to the south (Gonthier-Louis Fink, in Arndt et al. eds. 2004, 52). But it is not for nothing that the Greeks are famed for their curiosity – intellectual as well as geographical – and a historical legend (or a legendary story) has it that Pytheas, a cosmopolitan Greek astronomer and geographer living in present-day Marseilles in the fourth century BC, sailed to Britain and possibly as far north as Norway or Iceland, or perhaps even Greenland, relating upon his return a tale whose written version is long lost. One of the seeds he planted in the collective imagination of the Greeks was that of the mysterious land of Th ule or Ultima Th ule, which would persistently appear on maps until the Renaissance and continue to produce visions of a northern Atlantis for considerably longer.1 Other ethereal speculations among the ancient Greeks included Hyperboria, the land – as the name indicates – beyond the north wind, where happiness ruled and people lived for ever, passing their lives “in music, dance, serenity and comfort, untroubled by work, strife or disease” (McGhee 2005, 22). Th is, then, was the fi rst of a long line of utopias of the North. But there were also visions of the opposite kind: the North as a world of barbaric cruelty, mythical monsters and monstrous weather. Correspondingly, and as an additional feature of the ancient view of the world, an idea of cosmic balance suggested that there must be some fundamental similarity between the extreme north and the extreme south. As a result, if “the North Pole was horrifying […] the terra incognita australis was literally dreadful beyond words”. On the other hand, according to the same critic, “some classical geographers projected onto the southern void fantasies of paradise or visions of the sublime” (Wilson 2003, 145–46). Such extreme ideas were going to play a major role for more than two thousand years in the numerous imaginative and scientifi c attempts to unravel the mystery of the polar regions. 1 In 1944, the American arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson published the book Ultima Th ule, an attempt to restore the credibility of Pytheas’s reports, which had been regarded as fanciful lies for two millennia..

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