The Idea of North

Peter Davidson
The Idea of North
topographics

in the same series

Fragments of the Extreme Europe

European City Stephen Barber
Stephen Barber
Airspaces
From Berlin David Pascoe
Armando
Intercities
Some Cities Stefan Hertmans
Victor Burgin
Romania
The Ruins of Paris Borderland of Europe
Jacques Réda Lucian Boia

Nights in the Big City: Bangkok

Paris, Berlin, London William Warren
1840–1930
Joachim Schlör Macao
Philippe Pons
Robinson in Space
Patrick Keiller Zeropolis
The Experience of Las Vegas
Tokyo Bruce Bégout
Donald Richie
Warsaw
Tel Aviv: David Crowley
From Dream to City
Joachim Schlör Cambodia
Michael Freeman
Liquid City
Marc Atkins and Iain Sinclair Cairo
City of Sand
The Consumption of Maria Golia
Kuala Lumpur
Ziauddin Sardar
The Idea of North

Peter Davidson

r e ak t ion books
For Winifred Stevenson

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

79 Farringdon Road
London ec1m 3ju, uk

www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2005

Copyright © Peter Davidson 2005

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the
prior permission of the publishers.

Printed and bound in Great Britain

by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Davidson, Peter, 1957–

The idea of north
1. North (The word) 2. Europe, Northern - In literature
3. Europe, Northern - In Art 4. Europe, Northern - Geography
I. Title
809.9'359148

isbn 1 86189 230 6

 Contents

Introduction: True North 7

i Histories 21
Ideas of North from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century 21
Treasures and Marvels of the North 50

ii Imaginations of North 67

Ice and Glass 67 | The North in the 1930s: Auden and Ravilious 83
Imagined Northern Territories 109 | Northern Summer 121
Northern Exile 138 | Revenants 144

iii Topographies 159

Scandinavia 159 | Japan and China 172 | Canada 187 | Britain 199

Epilogue: Keeping the Twilight 252

References 255

Acknowledgements 269

Photographic Acknowledgements 271

With milke-white Hartes upon an Ivorie sled

Thou shalt be drawen amidst the frosen Pooles

And scale the ysie Mountaines loftie tops.

Introduction: True North

The talisman that brought this book into being still lies in front of
me. A working compass is set into a disk of cloudy Perspex (the
occluded texture is like ice, like the milky air of Dutch snow paint-
ings, like the smoke-pale sky of 1930s photographs of northern
towns). On the Perspex is written The Idea of North. The compass is
translucent, so that it can be held up to catch a landscape in its lens.
Whatever place embodies your own idea of north, you can see it
through the clear glass, with the red compass needle always indicat-
ing the north of what you see. It will be framed by the icy glass and
the words, and always the compass needle pulling northwards. This
sculpture was made – as a multiple artwork – by the Scottish artists
Dalziel and Scullion. It is simple, ingenious and eloquent.1
It embodies the ideas central to this book in that, wherever it is
located, it points always to a further north, to an elsewhere. It is
multiple: every potential owner will be using it to plot their own
apprehension of north, to frame the place that is north for them.
Gritstone cities in the folds of the moors; snow streaks like veins of
quartz lying on the dark sides of walls; wooden houses clustering
to the harbour under treeless slopes; rose and fine grey in wind-
blown clouds over snow, delicate colours of deep cold and blizzard
approaching.
The sculpture acquires further meaning by being portable: own-
ership of the compass-sculpture implies a northward journey. The
compass needle of the sculpture would alter or move only when
magnetic north was reached on the polar icefield, and then it would
spin and blur, a red flash in the snow dazzle. Dalziel and Scullion
summarize elegantly the whole tradition of historical, literary and
visual thinking about the concepts of north and northness that are
the subjects of this book.
In the 1960s the Canadian musician and polymath Glenn Gould
coined the phrase The Idea of North for his radio documentary on the
place of the north in the Canadian mentality – indeed, Dalziel and

7
 Dalziel and Scullion,
The Idea of North (after
Glenn Gould), 1998,
multiple sculpture,
compass in engraved
perspex disc.

Scullion’s sculpture is subtitled as ‘a homage to Glenn Gould’. His

documentary emphasizes that the northern reaches of Canada are a
place for humbled meditation, a salutary and ever-present reminder
of the limits of human power over place and indigenous peoples.
North is always a shifting idea, always relative, always going
away from us, as in Alexander Pope’s lines from the Essay on Man:

Ask where’s the North? At York ’tis on the Tweed

On Tweed ’tis at the Orcades, and there
At Greenland, Zembla or the Lord knows where . . .2

North moves always out of reach, receding towards the polar night,
which is equally the midnight dawn in the summer sky.
Everyone carries their own idea of north within them. In
Britain, the shadow at noon points towards stone-walled slopes of
Derbyshire, steep cities of West Yorkshire, limestone solitudes of
Weardale and Allendale. It points to the river estuaries of lowland
Scotland, to the abrupt rampart of mountains, the fastnesses of the
Cairngorms, the slate fields of Caithness, Orkney and Shetland
beyond, and the remote Faroes where the wind blows the spume of
the waterfall upwards. This is the route of the Arctic expeditions, the
route not always retraced: Kirkwall, Trondheim, Tromsø, then the
ice.

8
 Everyone carries their own idea of north within them. To say ‘we
leave for the north tonight’ brings immediate thoughts of a harder
place, a place of dearth: uplands, adverse weather, remoteness
from cities. A voluntary northward journey implies a willingness
to encounter the intractable elements of climate, topography and
humanity. In an English-language fiction, the words ‘we leave for
the north tonight’ would probably be spoken in a thriller, a fiction of
action, of travel, of pursuit over wild country.
To say ‘we leave tonight for the south’ brings associations of trav-
elling for pleasure – leisured exiles in the world before ‘the wars’. The
associations are of accommodating climate, pleasure and repose –
lemon trees, fountains, frescoed ceilings. It would be too easy to
assign gender to direction: south is female, north is male. Or too often
the destroying north is gendered as the Snow Queen, the Ice Witch.
Everyone carries their own idea of north within them. This is
partly determined by origin: the English painter Eric Ravilious
entered the Arctic seas as a war artist. It was probably at Tromsø in
May 1940 that he wrote of having come home to the true north that
he had glimpsed in boys’ books, in engravings of Arctic expeditions,
in watercolours of Alpine glaciers. When he found his north, bare
hills across seas of pure cobalt, the feeling was one of recognition, of
having entered a region of austere marvels from which there is no
easy return: a shadowless, treeless place where a unicorn’s horn can
be washed up onto a beach of black sand.
For a northern Italian, the associations would be opposite: the
south is the place of dearth, perceived by northern extremists as
arid, lawless, ensnared by the past. But southern Italian perceptions
of north would see Lombardy and the Veneto as the southern fringes
of the Germanic world, barely Italian at all. In no other country is
‘north’ a more unstable descriptor, shifting and flickering, defined
and redefined minutely, almost kilometre by kilometre, the length of
the peninsula. In Lucca in Tuscany they refer to the northern sub-
urbs as ‘Germany’, the southern suburbs as ‘Africa’.
For a Scandinavian, north – further north, Arctic north – repre-
sents a place of extremes that is also a place of wonders: of the ‘fox
fires’, the aurora in the winter sky, the habitation of the Sami, of leg-
endary magicians and heroes. A humility attends most of those
nations whose territories include greater or lesser stretches of Arctic
terrain (although the Russian north is as much a place of terror as of
enlightenment).

9
 It is hard to discern a particular ‘idea of north’ in the United States
of America. The northern horizon is occupied by the non-conformist
neighbouring state; the distant north of Alaska has a place in the
mythologies of the frontiers, but it is only one frontier subsumed
into the central metaphor of topographical emotion: the movement
from east to west. The frontier as place of marvels and dangers, as
testing zone, is located to the west, a descriptor that shifts and
recedes much as ‘north’ does in other cultures.
German perceptions are not dissimilar: the Catholic south is per-
ceived as both reactionary and prosperous, the north as historically
and economically the location of struggle. Accidents of nineteenth-
and twentieth-century history placed the capital of both the unified
and reunified nations in the north-east. German emotional geo-
graphy seems to run from east to west: the place of marvels, the place
of danger out of which the invaders come, is the east.
In Europe, the German-speaking countries are perceived as north-
ern, with cities snowbound in winter, and a ‘northern’ language. The
Germanic family of languages is one of the rough descriptors that
draw across Europe the impressionistic line that divides – another
very rough descriptor – Protestant north from Catholic south.
In China, as in Britain, a wall, work of giants, marks the beginning
of the north. In China the north is the place out of which the invaders
(conquerors in the end) came. There is freedom north of the wall, but
it is also the place of exile. In the eighteenth century the K’ang-hsi
emperor of China wrote:

It is when one is beyond the Great Wall that the air and soil
refresh the spirit: one leaves the beaten road and strikes out into
untamed country; the mountains are densely packed with woods,
‘green and thick as standing corn’. As one moves further north
the views open up, one’s eyes travel hundreds of miles; instead of
feeling hemmed in, there is a sense of freedom.3

One of the early Tartar emperors had the wild grass of the steppes
sown in the courtyards of his palace.
In Japan, the North Island (Hokkaidō) is today the location of the
exceptions to the completeness of the cultural system of the heavily
developed South Island (Honshū), both ethnically – it is the home of
the Ainu people – and in terms of the remoteness, the quiet cities, the
long snows.

10
 Everyone carries their own idea of north within them. The phrase
‘true north’ is itself a piece of geographer’s precision, the difference
between the northernmost point on the globe and the slight declina-
tion marked by the magnetic north to which the compass needle
tends. The phrase has metaphoric force beyond that definition. ‘True
north’ goes beyond the idea of the prodigious (or malign) north and
suggests that, for each individual, there exists somewhere the place
that is the absolute of the north, the north in essence, northness in
concentration and purity.
For William Morris, true north was the ‘grey minster’, the holy
ground of Iceland; for Vladimir Nabokov, it was a queer imagined
kingdom of the utmost north, which has never existed but which
concentrates in essence all memories of an irrecoverable Russia. For
Strindberg, it was a prison of winter with darkness pasted over the
windows, but also a place of transformations – migrating swans,
the onion-dome of the castle bursting at length into flower. Eric
Ravilious found true north in the mountains of Finnmark, seen from
a warship across seas of ‘pure cobalt’; for W. H. Auden, it was the
uplands of northernmost England coloured by memories of the liter-
ature of Iceland. For the contemporary poet Sean O’Brien, the quin-
tessence of north is snow over the ports of Newcastle and Hull, and
great icebreakers setting forth for places that ‘exist only as numbers
on an Admiralty chart’. For the Scottish artists Dalziel and Scullion,
it is the glacial valley of Jostedalsbreen in Norway, whose image they
carry to the southern cities. For the contemporary German-Scottish
artist Reinhard Behrens, true north is an imagined snowbound con-
tinent, the location of complex nostalgias, which is the goal of all the
gallant polar expeditions that set out ‘before the wars’. For many
children in the English-speaking world, the true north is the myster-
ious source of seasonal bounty, the winter dwelling of Santa
Claus, the universal benefactor at the winter solstice. (But for Dutch
children, Sint Niklaas comes out of the south, on the steamboat from
Spain.) For Adrienne Clarkson, the current Governor-General of
Canada, north is ‘where all the parallels [similitudes as well as longi-
tudes] converge to open out . . . into the mystery surrounding us’.
For a former Governor-General of Canada, John Buchan, true north
was the Faroes, Scandinavia, Scotland, Canada, ‘Norlands’ where a
man can ‘make his soul’, or where the man who knows too many
secrets can make his escape over the moors. For the Icelandic painter
Jóhannes S. Kjarval, it was his beloved Icelandic landscape, with

11
giant figures shadowed in the lava rocks and the patterns of snow.
For the contemporary poet Pauline Stainer, north is a concatenation
of horrors – icebergs, the Titanic, the Piper Alpha oil platform disas-
ter, hostile shamans, death by plague, the disaster of the North-West
Passage, whale-flensing, hallucinations and death.

Whether they saw pack-ice or fog-bank

Or mirage, will never be known4

For Simon Armitage, north is where he stands on the Yorkshire slopes

of the Pennines, and he wrote YORKSHIRE on the basalt sand of a beach
in Iceland to prove it. For the film-maker Patrick Keiller, the north lies
beyond Hadrian’s Wall in the otherworld of the prehistoric cup and
ring markings on the rocks of the borders. For C. S. Lewis, north was
‘huge regions of northern sky . . . something never to be described
(except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote)’.5 For
Canadian artists and politicians, it has a precise longitude: it begins at
60° (less than 3° north of where this book was written). For the Dutch
poet Martinus Nijhoff (1894–1953), it is The Hague deep in winter, frost
flowers spread on the window, and the snow that has fallen on the city
all night: the white garment of a baptism that has renewed him –

De wereld is herboren na dit sneeuwen,

En ik bin weer een kind na deze nacht.6

And through the snow our fallen world’s reborn

And I a child again, born of this night.

For Philip Larkin, provincial librarian in wartime England, true

north is a voyage northward off the maps, imaginations of war writ-
ten by a non-combatant, reflections on the disasters of exploration.
North of 65° his North Ship sails into territories of dream –

Sail-stiffening air,
The birdless sea.7

For the American poet Emily Dickinson, north is the true heart of
winter,

These are the days that Reindeer love

12
 And pranks the Northern star –
This is the sun’s objective,
And Finland of the year.8

For the landscape artist Andy Goldsworthy, the shifting and reces-
sive north was finally fixed by building four arches of snow around
the North Pole itself. This could be seen either as a metaphoric gim-
mick or as the enactment of a rich paradox: through any of the four
arches, the direction will always be south.9 Direction is suspended at
the North and South Poles; they are places outside place. like the
arrival at the court of heaven in a Baroque sonnet. Quaesivit arcana
poli vidit dei (‘he sought the secret of the poles, he saw the secrets of
God’) is the (questionable) inscription on the Scott Polar Research
Institute in Cambridge.
A romantic distillation of ideas of European norths is found in
Théophile Gautier’s much-imitated poem ‘Symphonie en Blanc
majeur’, first published in his Emaux et Camées in 1852. This poem is
a virtuoso listing of ideas of north, images of north, all facets of
Gautier’s obsession with the pale beauty of a Mme Kalergis. The
poem comes to rest in the end on the predictable image of a heart
fast-frozen in ice and the impossibility of thawing it:

Oh! qui pourra fondre ce coeur!

Oh! qui pourra mettre un ton rose
Dans cette implacable blancheur!10

Oh who could melt this frozen heart

who could put one touch of rose
into this unrelenting white!

The list of whitenesses that takes up the greater part of the poem
begins with the swan-maidens of the Rhine (Gautier’s conflation of
the Wagnerian Rhine-Daughters with the mysterious blind swan-
women of Aeschylus) and moves to the notion that Mme Kalergis is
like a supernatural visitant from the regions of northern legend. Her
beauty is Alpine or Scandinavian, the moon on the ice,

Blanche comme le clair de lune

Sur les glaciers dans les cieux froids

13
 White as moonlight
on glaciers below cold skies

The snow of her skin makes camellias and white satin appear yel-
lowed, the dazzling marble of her shoulders goes beyond whiteness
into the frozen sparkle of hoar-frost,

Comme dans une nuit du pôle,

Un givre invisible descend.

As in the quiet polar night,

imperceptible rime distills,

She is the ermine, mother-of-pearl, frozen sea-foam, she is every

frost flower on every frozen window, the white beyond whiteness,
patterned in light and silver like the movement of mercury. She is
snow, the feathers of white doves on the roofs of the manoirs of
northern France. She comes from Greenland or Norway; she is as
white and distant as the Madonna of the Snows. As the progression
of images moves towards the frozen heart of the last stanza, an
image is offered of her as the snow-formed guardian of the secrets of
the northern mountains, the starry glacier:

Sphinx enterré par l’avalanche,

Gardien des glaciers étoilés

Sphinx below the avalanche

guardian of the starry ice.

By this closing movement into the permafrost of ‘implacable blancheur

/ merciless whiteness’ the whole repertoire of Romantic ideas of
north has been summarized. It is a world of the beauties of the
extreme cold, like those worlds glimpsed in the late Baroque details
of Netherlandish paintings of ice carnivals. It is easy to imagine
(minute detail of a wider view of a frozen moat and ice-leaguered
town) a figure who is like the embodiment of the woman of
Gautier’s poem. Pale-skinned and dressed in white, with a plumed
hat, she rides across the ice in an ice sledge in the shape of a white
swan, a cavalier in a plumed hat standing on the runners behind her,
drawn by a snow-white pony whose harness is crowned with a high

14
David Teniers ii (1610–90), detail from Winter, 1665–70, oil on copper.

panache of feathers. It is an operatic or balletic apparition, a visual

equivalent for the Romantic ideas of north in Gautier’s poem.
Through the wide dissemination of Low Countries winter paint-
ings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Netherlands
offer one lasting visual image to which the idea of ‘north’ attaches
itself. Frozen waterways, onion-domed spires of northern Europe,

15
air as milky as ground glass with mist and approaching snow. Ice
festivals and carnivals in the short light. The grey ice grips around
the rose-coloured tower houses, set on islands in summer, now caught
amidst the groups of skaters.
In the early 1990s a hard winter froze the canals of Leiden and
brought the whole populace out onto the ice in spontaneous celebra-
tion. By day, it was possible to walk the circuit of the moat on the ice,
to brush the snow from the carved armorials on the flanks of the
bridges, to explore the tunnels that led the waterways under the city
centre. By night, the main canal, lined with seventeenth-century
houses, became the possession of the students. Searchlights from the
windows of the student houses (Augustinus, the Hôtel Wallon) illu-
minated the ice, and furious games of ice hockey developed with the
Rococo bridges as the goals. Moving away from the light, the hissing
of skates and the shouting, the snow was lying thick in the quiet
alleys around the Botanic Garden, the box parterres in the gardens of
the almshouses were top-heavy with snow and the golden armillary
sphere on the roof of the Aula Magna of the university flashed in
the moonlight. It was an idea of north, half-known from painters –
Breughel and Averkamp – made perfect and actual.
Heavy and prolonged snowfall in the murderous winter of 1511
brought a carnival of snow sculptures into the streets of the cities of
the southern Netherlands. The snow sculptures of Brussels are docu-
mented for that year: allegorical, mythological, emblematic, satiric –
with each successive snowfall new prodigies appeared: vele schoone,
fraeye, wonderlycke personagien van sneeuw (‘many lovely, fine, won-
derful figures of snow’).11 These were not simply arte povera of the
people, made with a free and plentiful material: several of them
would appear to have been works commissioned from professional
artists.
Michelangelo’s snowman for Piero de’ Medici in the winter of
1492 in Florence is well known (as is Vasari’s opinion that it was a
decadent action to set a master to making a snowman), and as early
as 1422, in the Papacy of the Netherlandish pope Hadrian V, there
were lions of snow in the streets of Rome.12 The listing of the Brussels
figures from 1511 survives, from which it would appear that there
were more than a hundred figures, life-size or larger in the snowy
streets. It is an extraordinary vision of a northern city of the
Renaissance, more haunting even than the etcher F. L. Griggs’s imag-
inary snowbound English cathedral city, but it is more than a little

16
sinister. The cold of that winter was literally deadly, and among the
figures in the streets were the reminders of death and misfortune –
Charon, Pluto, Devils, Death personified – and wild creatures stand-
ing for those elements of nature that could not be reduced to order –
wildcat, unicorn, merman, wild man.13 There is an uncomfortable
suggestion in these figures that they embody some of the malignity
of the unnatural winter that kept them in being. An Inu elder said
to the Canadian scholar Norman Hallendy that he had forgotten
the name for the malign snow figure that a shaman could make to
capture the spirit of the person whom he wished to harm and kill.14
Netherlandish snow pictures were disseminated throughout the
world through the medium of engravings. There is one Brabantian
snow landscape of The Flight into Egypt which was copied, or more
precisely recreated, in the cathedral of Cuzco in Peru by the mestizo
painter Diego Quispe Tito in 1681, perhaps a century later than the
painted version in the Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch. It is a
winter landscape so locked in the stricture of the frost that the whole
sea is level grey ice. A bucket of frozen water hangs above the well.
The mill-wheel is frozen into the mill-pond. The way in which
Quispe Tito recreated the colouring and the details of the snow is so
original as to suggest strongly that his source must have been an
uncoloured engraving that he interpreted in the light of local condi-
tions. He disposes his snow as if it were on the altiplano of the Andes,
so that the distant mountain is white but the ground in the fore-
ground is bare earth, for all that there is visible snow on the branches
of the trees. He has added a finely realized sunset colouration to the
sky, whose apricot and rose is reflected fiercely in the frozen sea.15
A late copy of the same snow landscape hangs above the table
where I usually write, above the computer where you can check
weather warnings all through the Scottish winter, opposite the
window from which you see the twilight marching up the valley at
three o’clock on the shortest day. When the migrating geese have
passed in the autumn, the rooms of the house grow dim in the after-
noons, like the quiet interiors in evening light painted by the Danish
painter Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916).16
The early fading of the light is a part of another powerful idea of
north, of rain, twilight and loneliness. This edges towards the idea
of the north as a place of dearth: abraded cities, failed industries.
A good part of the understanding of north, throughout the world,
is bound up with melancholy and remoteness, the loneliness of

17
provincial Sundays. The Japanese poet Bashō reflected on what the
experience might be of living in one of the remotest cottages in the
wooded distances of the north of Honshū. Glenn Gould’s speakers in
the idea of north reflect on isolation, on absence, stillness, remote-
ness and the absence of alternatives. This is the English poet Tony
Harrison’s ‘whole view North’: black rain and wind from the limits
of the earth:

Now when the wind flays my wild garden of its green

and blows, whistling through the flues, its old reminder
of the two cold poles all places are between . . .
I feel the writing room I’m leaving grow
dark, and then darker with the whole view North.17

When the light goes and the year has turned, other talismans of
northness come to mind – two lines from an early poem of Auden’s,
full of harsh weather, of revenants, like the ghosts in the literature of
the Old North stirring forth into the falling snow:

Nights come bringing the snow and the dead howl

Under the headlands in their windy dwelling . . .18

Which lines have unexpected power recollected alone in winter near

the north coast, hearing the wind that brings the cold from the seas
round Iceland. There is a headland called Longmanhill nine miles
north-east of here, where a dead sea-king may stir still on bad nights,
as dead Gunnar sang under the turf of Hlitharendi.
Once they have been seen, even in photographs, the landscapes of
the Arctic are an inevitable and insistent element in anyone’s idea of
north. One of their most haunting elements is the Inuit work in
placed stones within the Arctic landscape of Nunavut, in northern-
most Canada. These works are minimal interventions – the slight,
but moving rearrangement of what is already there – placed and bal-
anced stones. These inuksuit articulate, transform and (at times liter-
ally) frame the north. The installations that take the form of stone
windows, niungvaliruluit, are direction finders, sightlines to signifi-
cant places or objects that may or may not be within view. But the
frame can be larger, a door, a tupqujaq visibly framing rock and sky,
but also marking an invisible threshold, the entrance by which a
shaman can enter the spirit world. These are works of power,

18
embodiments of the idea that place is composed both of physical
geography and of essence or idea.19
The Arctic is perhaps more of an off-stage presence in this book
than some readers might expect, given the central role that polar
expeditions played in twentieth-century apprehensions of north.
This is deliberate, a recognition of the comprehensiveness of Francis
Spufford’s definitive study, Ice and the English Imagination.20 How-
ever, the journeys of Nansen and Scott have so much resonance,
have such an afterlife worldwide, that Arctic exploration plays some
part here, but only in so far as it is an element in the formation of an
idea of north. (All the ways of thinking about Antarctica are taken
from ideas of the far north, raising the question that there may be
places – mountain ranges as well as the South Pole – that are thought
of as honorary norths.) For many twentieth-century writers and
artists, indeed, polar exploration offered an idea of the essential or
‘true’ north. To have avoided the subject entirely would have been
to falsify a history. For writers in English, the shadow of the Scott
expedition is long, and there is a presupposition attending ideas of
north of disaster, loss, expeditions that fail to return.
This book tries to map the specific territory defined by its title.
Everyone carries their own idea of north within them. It is not a book
about northern places so much as about places that have been per-
ceived to embody an idea or essence of north, or northness. It is only
in part a sequence of northern topographies – tracings of an idea
about place that is shifting and recessive. As you advance towards it,
the true north recedes away northwards.
This book offers first a history of ideas of the north, from the first
tentative reports of travellers returning to archaic Greece, through
the medieval and Renaissance periods of speculation and cartogra-
phy, to the scholars and travellers of the nineteenth century. Since
the value of far northern trade goods – even Homer knew of amber
from beyond the Baltic – has always shaped the routes into the north
and has led merchants into dangerous territories, the history of the
idea of north moves on to a consideration of its treasures and mar-
vels. The central section of this book considers imaginations of
north, north as perceived by writers, visual artists and film-makers.
The selection of subjects, of areas for consideration, has to be subjec-
tive – it would be unthinkable to attempt a comprehensive treatment
in a book of this scope. Thus I write about imaginations of north that
seem particularly indicative or representative: the fascination with

19
the north in the England of the 1930s; fictional norths like the
Zembla of Vladimir Nabokov; a tracing of the metaphoric and actual
relations of glass and ice; thoughts about the brief northern summer;
the north as a place of exile; and, finally, the particularly northern
nature of revenant narratives, stories about the ghosts of the dead.
The last section is a set of topographies, a gathering of considera-
tions of particular northern places: Scandinavia, the north in the Far
East, Canada, northern places in Britain. Again this is a subjective
selection of territories that have been held at one time or another to
embody an essence of north or northness.
The more we try to capture the essential idea of north, for which
the phrase ‘true north’ is a poetic shorthand, the more the true north
recedes, to ‘Greenland, Zembla or the Lord knows where’. Everyone
has a different north, their own private map of the emotional –
indeed the moral – geography of north and south. In everyone’s
mind there is a line drawn across the maps, known to that person
alone, of where ‘the north’, in the sense that means more than ‘north
of where I happen to be’, begins. As a descriptor of place, ‘north’ is
shifting and elusive, yet, paradoxically, it is a term that evokes a pre-
cise – even passionate – response in most people. In the minds of
almost everyone to whom I have spoken about this book, the British
road signs that offer ‘The North’ have a poetic or symbolic status.

[Herbert Read] . . . has recorded, ‘The Way North is the Way into
the Unknown.’ To me that is a true feeling which I always feel
when I am driving on the Great North Road and see the sign
which bears the three words ‘to the north’.21

In the end, those signposts point towards each person’s own private
Zembla – their version of the lost, prodigious northern kingdom of
Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Nabokov’s Zembla is a place whose
very existence depends on the unsupported word of one untrust-
worthy witness. And yet the whole country lives so deceptively in
the novel (Russia as a mirror ghost lost to American Nabokov) that it
is almost with a grief for the death of one’s personal north that one
reads the last sentence of the novel. In that sentence, Zembla (with
its school of seventeenth-century church music, its forest castles and
its neo-Classical palaces) dwindles into a throwaway definition, the
last entry in a mad glossary, a name for the undefinable: Zembla: A
Distant Northern Land.22

20
i Histories

ideas of north from antiquity to the twentieth century

The north grows in rumours out of the dark – a magician riding on

an arrow, emissary from the place of perpetual daylight; women
who share the nature of swans, who are blind and live in the night
of perpetual winter. Travellers’ stories, magnified by repetition, of
a sea-beach in endless fog where blood poured on the sand can
summon the likenesses of the dead, of a brilliant sea of wandering
rocks formed of translucent crystal.
These are some of the first notions of the northern regions to reach
the ancient inhabitants of the Mediterranean, in the remote antiquity
of the Homeric poems, of the first Greek tragedians. Already, the
north is reported as a place of extremes and ambiguities. Two oppos-
ing ideas of north repeat (and contradict each other) from European
antiquity to the time of the nineteenth-century Arctic explorers: that
the north is a place of darkness and dearth, the seat of evil. Or, con-
versely, that it is a place of austere felicity where virtuous peoples
live behind the north wind and are happy. This section traces the
interplay of these two ideas of north, moving forward through time,
and aware always that ‘north’ can never be a sole or simple descrip-
tor: there have always been as many norths as there have been stand-
points from which to look northwards.
The idea of north as a place of purification, an escape from the
limitations of civilization, has echoes in early writers. The cleansing
properties of the northern wind are unexpectedly celebrated by the
late Roman aristocrat Boethius – unexpected, in that Roman attitudes
to the north are almost uniformly negative:

Hanc si Threicio Boreas emissus ab antro

Verberet et clausam reseret diem,
Emicat ac subito vibratus lumine Phoebus
Mirantes oculos radiis ferit1

21
 The Thracian north wind freed from his cave,
sweeps clear the sky, reveals
the sunlight to dazzled eyes.

The medieval physician-philosopher Albertus Magnus similarly

thought that the ‘north wind strengthens virtues, whereas the south
wind weakens them’.2
‘European Civilization’ – the tradition whose perceptions are
fixed in the heritage of the European languages – came into being at
the known centre of the world, around the Mediterranean: ‘We sit
around the Mediterranean, like frogs around a pond.’3 Aristotle
defines the superiority of this position,

The Hellenic race, occupying a mid-position geographically . . .

continues to be free, to live under the best constitutions, and to be
capable of ruling all other people.4

The human world was known to be 70,000 stadia (c. 14,000 km) in
width, from the west coast of Iberia (Spain) to the east coast of India.
It was wider than it was high, only 30,000 stadia (c. 6,000 km) from
south to north, running from Ethiopia, which was almost too hot to
live in, to Ierne (Ireland), ‘a wretched place to live because of the
cold’. ‘Regions further north, where Thule lies’, according to Strabo
the geographer, ‘are no longer habitable’. Ultima Thule, the most dis-
tant place on earth, has done long service as a metaphor and refer-
ence point for the end of the knowable world.
The journey northward is imagined as a journey into unimagin-
able barbarism: Strabo states that Ierne lies to the north of
Brettanika, and that

The people living there are more savage than the Britons, being
cannibals as well as gluttons. Further, they consider it honourable
to eat their dead fathers, and to openly have intercourse, not only
with unrelated women, but with their mothers and sisters as well.5

Hippocrates, the father of Greek medicine, wrote a treatise on ‘Airs,

Waters and Places’ in which he argued that an individual’s character
and capacities were directly affected not merely by their personal
genetic inheritance, but by everything they imbibed from their place
of origin. Northerners were certainly affected by their outlandish

22
diet, but their shapeless, inhuman liberty was the fault of the air that
nourished them.6 As Aristotle defines it,

The nations that live in cold regions and those of Europe are full
of spirit, but somewhat lacking in skill and intellect; for this
reason, while remaining relatively free, they lack political cohe-
sion and the ability to rule over their neighbours.7

European antiquity also believed that, beyond the malign and

barbarous north, there was a civilization at the back of the north
wind (Boreas) – literally, hyper-Borean. The ‘blameless’ or ‘fortu-
nate’ Hyperboreans are mentioned in some of the earliest Greek lit-
erature, the so-called Homeric hymns. A fuller account of them is
given by the geographer Hecataeus, who says that in the regions
beyond the land of the Celts there is an island in the ocean, beyond
the North Pole, inhabited by people who are called the Hyper-
boreans because they live beyond the point of origin of the north
wind.8 Their island was fertile and blessed, and its people were
devoted to the god Apollo. It contained a sacred wood and a great
round temple, both consecrated to the sun-god.9 Pindar describes its
fortunate inhabitants:

The Muse is not absent from their customs; all around swirl the
dances of girls, the lyre’s loud chords and the cries of flutes. They
wreathe their hair with golden laurel branches and revel joyfully.
No sickness or ruinous old age is mixed into that sacred race;
without toil or battles they live without fear of Nemesis.10

It is logical to associate sun worship with a northern civilization: the

deities most culted are those whose favours are capricious. The
Renaissance topographer Olaus Magnus says of the Inuit, ‘they wor-
ship the sun, which shines upon them during the whole course of
the summer, giving thanks to him for bringing light to oppose the
darkness which they have endured, and warmth to dispel the
immeasurable cold.’11
Insofar as the land of the Hyperboreans has any connection with
ideas about physical geography, the significant factor that explains it
is the ‘Ripaean Mountains’, an unidentifiable range often referred to
in Greek sources, vaguely located in the north-east, north or north-
west. When the sun descends, creating night, it is the Ripaean

23
mountains that hide him. Therefore, all his heat and splendour must
be there, somewhere, beyond the north. Once the sun-god has
passed out of sight, where has he gone? Where but the north, behind
the Ripaean mountains, where he goes each evening? Hence the
Hyperboreans’ devotion to Apollo, who plays in their fortunate
fields.12 In the late 1970s the Scottish poet and gardener Ian Hamilton
Finlay began a new temple to Apollo of the Hyperboreans, at Little
Sparta, in the Pentland Hills; an act of Classical translation that refig-
ures the Greek god as an aspect of a sacralized modernity, refracted
through the stern neo-Classicism of the French Revolution. The front
elevation of the temple dedicates it ‘To Apollo: his music, his mis-
siles, his muses’.13
Finlay rightly honours the Hyperborean Apollo in his northern
garden: a far northern origin has been conjectured for the cult of the
god, with myths of the appearance of a shamanic prophet out of
Siberia, Abaris, riding on an arrow, to spread the cult of the northern
light-god, called by the Greeks the Hyperborean Apollo. The conclu-
sion of E. R. Dodds, in his study of the shadows and magic in Greek
religion, is that indeed the origins of this cult lie in the Arctic north:

[His] . . . origins are to be looked for in northern Europe: he is

associated with a northern product, amber, and with a northern
bird, the whooper swan; and his ‘ancient garden’ lies at the back
of the north wind. It would seem that the Greeks heard of him
from missionaries like Abaris, identified him with their own
Apollo (possibly from a similarity of name . . . if he is the god of
Abalus, ‘apple island’ the mediaeval Avalon) and proved the
identity by giving him a place in the temple legend of Delos.14

The idea of the kingdom of the Hyperboreans has persisted – that

beyond the terrors, the dark and the cold of the far north, there is
somehow a paradisal oasis of peace and plenty:

I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and
desolation; it ever presents itself to me as the region of beauty and
delight . . . There – for with your leave, my sister, I will put some
trust in preceding navigators – there snows and frost are ban-
ished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land
surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto dis-
covered on the habitable globe.15

24
Thus Mary Shelley, in Frankenstein. It is a myth that has refused to
die, because there have always been people who want to believe it:
after Admiral Richard Byrd overflew the South Pole for the first time
in 1947, stories circulated that he had discovered an anomalous,
almost sub-tropical land.16 The Hyperboreans themselves were
taken up with enthusiasm by Clark Ashton Smith, L. Sprague de
Camp and the other writers of fantasy fiction in the 1930s and ’40s,
and all these traditions flow together in New Age writing. Dr Tunalu
of the Institute of Druidic Technology declares that

Stonehenge is the prodigal daughter of a larger, more advanced

Hyperborean super-computer which was located at the
Hyperborean base at the North Pole . . . this base must have been
protected by an invisible radio-thermal shield, powered by the
same underground volcanic sources that powered Stonehenge.
The greenery was the result of the greenhouse effect caused by
this radiation dome. This was the third Hyperborean ‘Biosphere’
project – an experiment to prove the adaptability of the Hyper-
boreans to life on other planets by creating a self-contained
ecosystem.17

(In the seventeenth century, the architect Inigo Jones wrote a treatise
arguing that Stonehenge was a Roman – not a British – temple, of the
Tuscan order dedicated to Coelus, the god of the sky.18)
The paradox of the Hyperboreans is resolvable in some degree,
although its mythic and metaphoric life is less containable. Beyond
the fields we know, at the edges of things, there may either be hor-
rors or the islands of the blest. The optimist believes in the latter. ‘It
does seem to be true that the countries which lie on the circumfer-
ence of the inhabited world produce the things we believe to be most
rare and beautiful’, said Herodotus.19 The north is the place of
amber, ivory, white furs, treasures; blond slaves, greatly prized by
the dark-haired, Mediterranean masters of the world.20 Sun-haired
Scandinavians look like children of light, not darkness, a living
reminder that the north’s relationship to the sun is ambiguous.
The tendency of northern frontiers to fade into debatable lands of
fog and conjectural map-making21 was firmly countered by the
Emperor Hadrian, who built the wall from Tyne to Solway, with the
clarities of the Empire on one side and the shapeless north on the
other. After the Romans withdrew from Britain, the memory of the

25
wall lingered on. It was ‘the work of giants’ to the Saxons, but it was
remembered in what was left of the Empire as a metaphysical fron-
tier with the land of the dead.
The land of the dead (or rather, the interface between the two
worlds, the desolate sea-beach to which the spirits of the dead can be
summoned) in the Odyssey is north and west beyond the land of the
‘Cimmerians’, in a landscape that is hinted rather than realized,
walls of rock like a Scandinavian fjord. When Odysseus needs to
consult the ghosts, the wise witch Circe tells him he need not look for
a pilot, for the breath of the north wind will bear his ship to its desti-
nation.22 Boreas, the north wind, takes him to Ocean (the name the
Greeks gave to the sea at the world’s end – in effect, the Atlantic or
the English Channel), where lie the land and city of the Cimmerians,
wrapped in mist and cloud:

Never does the bright sun look down on them with his rays, either
when he mounts the starry heaven or when he turns again to earth
from heaven, but baneful night is spread over wretched mortals.23

The Cimmerians alternate with the Hyperboreans – the people of the

endless night of the northern winter, the people of the perpetual
light of the northern summer, live alternately in the geography of the
ancient mind. The north as the gateway to the land of the dead might
be understood as rationalization of a simple kind. The sun setting in
the west, winter and bad weather coming out of the north suggest
the north-west as a malign otherworld. Etymology also helped: the
‘Orcades’, the Orkney islands, sounded as if they might be associ-
ated with Orcus or Hades, both of which are Greek names for the
world of the dead; even the seventh-century encyclopaedist Isidore
of Seville associated Thanet with the Greek word thanatos, meaning
death. A superstructure of psychic geography has been built on
these simplicities.
The building of imaginary walls between the habitable places and
the outland continues: the Ural mountains were thought to be a wall
of iron raised by Alexander the Great, the dividing line between the
known and the place of the unearthly Samoyeds, who died every
winter frozen in trance and were revived on 24 April every year by
the returning sun. Finnic tribes in Siberia believed that they existed
in two worlds at once and that everyone had a shadow self in an icy
underworld.24

26
 In late antiquity, as the Roman world shrank back towards the
Mediterranean, the view from Constantinople linked the idea of the
boundary between two worlds with the boundary between the
living and the dead.

Now in this island of Britain the men of ancient times built a long
wall, cutting off a large part of it; and the climate and the soil and
everything else is not alike on the two sides of it. For to the south
of the wall there is a salubrious air, changing with the seasons,
being moderately warm in summer and cool in winter. But on the
north side everything is the reverse of this, so that it is actually
impossible for a man to survive there even a half-hour, but count-
less snakes and serpents and every other kind of wild creature
occupy this area as their own. And, strangest of all, the inhabi-
tants say that if a man crosses this wall and goes to the other side,
he dies straightway. They say, then, that the souls of men who die
are always conveyed to this place.25

The transport of the dead was believed to be actual, something

that happened at definable points on the map of the real world of the
living: at Finisterre in Brittany, the people were exempted from
paying tribute to the Franks because they were subject to nightly
summons to ferry the souls of the dead across in their boats and
deliver them into the hands of the keeper of souls. The idea lingered
on in Brittany into the nineteenth century:

On the mysterious Île de Noirmoutiers, at the mouth of the Loire,

after a witches’ sabbath, a boat would appear on the beach. There
was no one aboard, but a voice would cry, ‘Embarque, allons en
Galloway!’ Then the boat would slip off, so filled with invisible
passengers it seemed almost ready to sink.26

In Europe, in the Christian centuries, the negative associations of

the north were expanded still further. The prophet Jeremiah states
flatly, in Jerome’s translation, ab Aquilone pandetur malum super omnes
habitatores terrae (‘Evil is brought from the north over all the inhabi-
tants of the Earth’)27 – a statement frequently simplified to ab
Aquilone omne malum, all evil comes from the north. The Britons
themselves came to feel this. In the words of the last voice of Roman
Britain, that of Gildas:

27
 As the Romans went back home, there eagerly emerged from the
coracles that had carried them across the sea-valleys the foul
hordes of Scots and Picts, like dark throngs of worms who wrig-
gle out of narrow fissures in the rock when the sun is high and the
weather grows warm . . . they seized the whole of the extreme
north of the island from its inhabitants, right up to the Wall.28

Among the strangest of ghost books of the north – works that have
existed and been copied in part but that now appear to be lost
beyond recall – is the narrative of the northern voyage of Jacobus
Cnoyen from Den Bosch in Brabant. It seems to have been available
in manuscript to the cosmographers of the Low Countries for part of
the sixteenth century and then to have vanished. It claims that King
Arthur, the Dux Bellorum of the Britons, sent an army on an Arctic
expedition, and found and conquered an island beyond Greenland
called Grocland. Four thousand men were lost in the whirlpool of
the sucking sea, but some survived and eight of their descendants
are claimed to have made their way to the medieval court of
Norway. On the basis of this fantasy, Elizabeth i of England is
asserted to have claimed dominion over all the north, from Scotland
to the Pole. (This is not impossible: she rested part of her claim to
Ireland on the feudal superiority of King Arthur to the fabulous Irish
king, Art MacMurrough.)29
The evil of the north was no less real to the Saxons than it had
been to the Romans. Like their predecessors, the English found
themselves withstanding random invasions from the north, heathen
battalions who appeared out of nowhere, worked devastation and
then moved on like flocks of birds. The imaginative context of these
incursions had changed. The English, watching their churches burn,
could not but wonder if the Vikings were the armies of Gog and
Magog forecast in one of the supreme pieces of imaginative litera-
ture of the early Middle Ages, Adso’s On Antichrist, written in
Germany in the eighth century and read all over Europe. In the
year 1000, the Archbishop of York promulgated a sermon that was
a sort of open letter to the entire English people. It began: ‘My
beloved people. The world is in haste, and it has nearly reached its
end’– a conclusion that he had reached as a result of the Viking
raids.30
The Northmen were outriders of apocalypse, but another set of
perceptions linked the north with the actually demonic. Both the

28
supernatural idea of the north and the ancient perception of the
north as a place of extremes are found in the words of the Danish his-
torian Saxo Grammaticus, writing in the decades around 1200:

This region, lying beneath the Northern heavens, faces Bootes

and the Great and Lesser Bear; beyond its highest latitude, where
it touches the arctic zone, the extraordinary brutality of the tem-
perature allows no human beings to settle. Of these countries
Nature decided to give Norway an unpleasant, craggy terrain; it
reveals nothing but a grim, barren, rock-strewn desert. In its fur-
thest part the sun never withdraws its presence; scorning alter-
nate periods of day and night it apportions equal light to each.
To the west is Iceland, an island surrounded by vast ocean, a
land of meanish dwellings, yet deserving proclamation for myste-
rious happenings beyond credibility. There is a spring here which
by the virulence of its gaseous waters destroys the original nature
of any object. Certainly anything tinged by the vapour it emits is
petrified. This phenomenon might well be more dangerous than
wonderful, for such hardening properties are inherent in the
gentle fluidity of the water that anything brought to steep in its
fumes instantly assumes the qualities of stone, merely retaining
its shape.
Again there is a mountain in this island which gives off a mete-
oric light from the surging flames which it belches forth without
cease. This is in no whit inferior to the previous marvels I have
described, in that a land enduring bitter cold can produce abun-
dant fuel for such heat, to feed its undying fires with secret sup-
plies, from which it stokes its blaze to eternity. At certain definite
times too, an immense mass of ice drifts upon the island; immedi-
ately upon its arrival, when it dashes into the rocky coast, the
cliffs can be heard re-echoing, as though a din of voices were roar-
ing in weird cacophony from the deep. Hence a belief that wicked
souls condemned to a torture of intense cold are paying their
penalty there.31

The north is receding yet again; Saxo, himself the inhabitant of a

region that Strabo would have considered ‘beyond the habitable
world’, perceives Norway as lying on the far side of that invisible,
shifting wall that divides the utter north from civilization. Although
he himself came from a land in which the hours of daylight fluctu-

29
ated widely between summer and winter, he fails to see a continuum
between his own experience and that of Norway, where there is sun
half the year, and night the other half. Norway and, even more,
Iceland are presented as the unnatural north that lies beyond the
north that is merely wild: Icelandic water can petrify anything it
touches, and in another unnatural reversal, the volcano Hekla is an
astonishing, portentous welling-up of intense heat in a land of cold.
Even the Vikings themselves had negative views about the north,
as did the Finns; several times in the Kalevala, the Finnish national
epic, we have a set of lines,

. . . dark Northland,
the man-eating, the
fellow-drowning place.32

Jötunheim, the land of the Giants, is the name of the frosted moun-
tains lying between Sweden and Norway: Jötunheim is also a
metaphysical place northward from Asgard, since the north is tra-
ditionally the land of death and the land of man’s enemies. There
is another of Saxo’s stories in which the journey north explicitly
becomes a journey out over the boundary between the natural and
the uncanny: the voyage of Thorkil, one of the strangest of the
many prodigious voyages in early Scandinavian literature. The
necessary background information can be found in the ‘Prose
Edda’, a medieval collection of Scandinavian pagan lore, in a story
in which the god Thor attacks and finally almost kills the giant
Geirrod, maiming three of his daughters on the way.
Saxo’s account of the adventures of Thorkil are introduced in the
context of sober history:

King Harald’s son Gorm won a considerable place of honour

among the ancient generals of the Danes by his record of mighty
deeds. For he ventured into fresh fields, preferring to practise his
inherited valour, not merely in war, but in searching the secrets of
nature; and, just as other kings are stirred by warlike ardour, so
his heart thirsted to look into marvels; either what he could expe-
rience himself, or what were merely matters of report.33

One report that came to him was that somewhere in the north there
was an astonishing treasure-house belonging to a man called

30
Geirrod, so he sent Thorkil to look into it. Travelling north, Thorkil
found that he and his men

were wafted forward by a favourable wind and sailed on to the

further coast of Biarmaland. This is a region of everlasting cold,
spread with deep snows, for it does not experience the sun’s
vigour even in summer, abounding in trackless forests, it is inca-
pable of producing crops and is haunted by animals uncommon
elsewhere.

Thorkil has sailed beyond the sun, to a region of strange beasts and
strange beings. The first personage he meets is Guthmund, brother
of Geirrod, who is of extraordinary size; in fact, although Saxo does
not say so, a giant, and, as it turns out, a sinister magician, who puts
various temptations in their way, to which some of the sailors suc-
cumb. But most of them win through, and he reaches Geirrod’s hall:

They went on; and saw, not far off, a gloomy, neglected town,
looking more like a cloud exhaling vapour.

Inside, once they pass the ravening dogs and the stakes surmounted
with the heads of warriors, is dismaying.

Inside, the house was seen to be ruinous throughout, and filled

with a violent and abominable reek. And it also teemed with every-
thing that could disgust the eye or the mind: the door-posts were
begrimed with the soot of ages, the wall was plastered with filth,
the roof was made up of spear-heads, the flooring was covered
with snakes and bespattered with all manner of uncleanliness.
Such an unwonted sight struck terror into the strangers, and, over
all, the acrid and incessant stench assailed their afflicted nostrils . . .
Going on through the breach in the crag, they beheld an old man
with his body pierced through, sitting not far off, on a lofty seat
facing the side of the rock that had been rent away. Moreover, three
women, whose bodies were covered with tumours, and who
seemed to have lost the strength of their back-bones, filled adjoin-
ing seats. Thorkil’s companions were very curious; and he, who
well knew the reason of the matter, told them that long ago the god
Thor had been provoked by the insolence of the giants to drive red-
hot irons through the vitals of Geirrod, who strove with him, and

31
 that the iron had slid further, torn up the mountain, and battered
through its side; while the women had been stricken by the might
of his thunderbolts, and had been punished (so he declared) for
their attempt on the same deity, by having their bodies broken.

Geirrod and his grim daughters are un-dead, unclean, ruined giants
living amid squalor; Thorkil, a captain reporting to a historically
attested king roughly contemporary with Alfred the Great (r. 871–99),
has sailed beyond wilderness into the otherworld. Geirrod’s hall was
indeed full of treasures, but they were as unusable as the food of the
dead, which, if eaten, prevents one from returning to the world.
Elsewhere in the same account:

They saw a river which could be crossed by a bridge of gold. They

wished to go over it, but Gudmund restrained them, telling them
that by this channel nature had divided the world of men from
the world of monsters, and that no mortal track might go further.

Once more there is a barrier that is both physical and metaphysical,

separating two worlds, like Hadrian’s Wall.
The persistence of these tropes is such that the journey to the
northern otherworld may surface even in twentieth-century writing
in a realist mode. John Buchan’s Sick Heart River (1940) is one clear
example – the valley of the Sick Heart River is a strangely inaccessi-
ble Hyperborean paradise with magical properties, reached after
agonizing effort through the Northern Territories of Canada, but
somehow not quite part of them. The matter is never explained; the
reader is given instead scenes of deliberate mystery. A husband and
wife stand in a remote valley in Québec:

‘Leithen had a fleuve de rêve also. I suppose we all have. It was this
little stream.’ . . .
‘Which stream?’ she asked. ‘There are two.’
‘Both. One is the gate of the North and the other’s the gate of the
world.’34

More recently, in Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow

(1993), the nightmarish final chapters take Smilla to the ice for an
unravelling of the mysteries that enmesh her. She journeys in a
modern icebreaker, and the very considerable difficulties of getting

32
across the North Atlantic to Davis Strait at the wrong time of year are
prosaic and realistic. Ultimately, the Kronos runs into the ice: the pro-
tagonists have come, as the aim of their journey, to a glacier, Gela
Alta, off the Greenland coast, which disobeys all the normal rules of
glacial formation. It contains an unnatural lake of water that should
not be there, and may or may not hold a destroying plague, and a
meteoric stone that may or may not be alive. None of these mysteries
is solved; they are intrinsic to the place, and remain with it.35 (It has
been little noticed that much of the plot of this novel, especially the
meteorite landing in the remote north, would seem to derive from
Hergé’s Tintin adventure, The Shooting Star.)
The story of Thorkil, Geirrod and Gudmund suggests that, to the
imagination of a medieval Danish Christian such as Saxo, there was
a certain dark suspicion that whatever the priest might say, there
were still giants to be found in Jötunheim. But it is understandable
that the sight of a volcano in a snowfield should also make a
medieval Christian think about hell. In the dreamlike Voyage of St
Brendan, written in Ireland in the seventh century, the monks rowing
in the northern Atlantic encounter an iceberg and, immediately
afterwards, a volcano.

It looked as if the whole island was ablaze, like one big furnace,
and the sea boiled, just as a cooking pot full of meat boils when it
is well plied with fire. All day long they could hear a great howl-
ing from the island. Even when they could no longer see it, the
howling of its denizens still reached their ears, and the stench of
the fire assailed their nostrils. The holy father comforted his
monks, saying, ‘Soldiers of Christ, be strengthened in faith
unfeigned and in spiritual weapons, for we are in the confines of
Hell. So, be on the watch, and be brave.’36

Many other witnesses were sure that the road to hell was northward.
Snorri Sturluson, recalling pre-Christian Norse legends, says that
‘the road to Hel [the Viking hell, that is] lies downwards and north-
wards’.37 There were good reasons to believe that hell was in the
north, and so was Satan. There is a long tradition that associates
Lucifer with the north, going back to Isaiah 14: 12–13:

How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the Morning!
How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the

33
 nations! For thou hast said in thy heart, I will ascend into heaven,
I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, I will sit also upon
the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the North.

If ab aquilone omne malum, then it is fitting that the primal rebellion of

Satan against God begins with the setting up of Lucifer’s throne in
the north.
This tradition is summarized in the heterodox work of Guillaume
Postel, Cosmographicae disciplinae compendium of 1561, which places
(among other wild ideas) the lost tribes of Israel in Arsareth, north of
China. His ideas on the North Pole are equally strange: the North
Pole is the literal seat of evil; the polar constellations of the dragon
and the bears are not merely symbols of the Devil, but signs of his
actual presence, tokens of the fact that the devil is chained by God at
the pole, as in the imagination of Dante.
Postel also tries to make the north the seat of all virtues, with the
peak of the mountain of the Pole (presumably above the prison of
the Devil) bathed in perpetual sunrise, the place on earth closest to
heaven. The positive and negative notions of the north are inter-
twined to the point of confusion.38
One of the Anglo-Saxon homilies offers a particularly bleak and
northern view of hell:

As St Paul was looking towards the northern regions of the earth . . .

he saw above the water a hoary stone, and north of the stone had
grown rime-cold woods. And there were dark mists, and under
the stone was the dwelling place of monsters and terrible crea-
tures. And he saw hanging on the cliff opposite to the woods,
many black souls with their hands bound, and the devils in the
likeness of monsters were seizing them like greedy wolves, and
the water under the cliff beneath was black.39

The Devil, in Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale, gives his diabolic nature away
very discreetly, with an inward smile:

‘Brother’, quod he, ‘where is now youre dwellyng,

Another day if that I sholde yow seche?
This yeman hym answerde in softe speche,
‘Brother’, quod he, fer in the north contree,
Wher-as I hope som tym I shal thee see.’40

34
The fiends of the English and Scottish ballads are often ‘from the
north lands’. Saxo Grammaticus believes that ghosts, satyrs and
demons dance in the Scandinavian woods.41 Olaus Magnus declares:

In the region under the Seven Stars, in other words the North
(where in a quite literal sense, the abode of Satan lies), demons,
with unspeakable derision and in diverse shapes, express their
encouragement to people who live in these parts, and indeed they
also do them injury.42

The folk tradition that the north was the region of demons and
spirits even came down to William Blake, and forms part of his char-
acterization of the Luciferian Urizen,

Of the primeval Priest’s assum’d power,

When Eternals spurn’d back his religion
And gave him a place in the north,
Obscure, shadowy, void, solitary.43

The spectres of the north also haunt Chinese imaginations. In the

ancient Mountain-Sea Classic there is a land of deformed ghosts in the
extreme north:

It lies sixty days travelling from the kingdom of Kiao-ma. Its

inhabitants roam about in the night, but hide themselves during
the day. They dress in dirty pieces of deerskin. Their eyes, noses
and ears are like those of the people in the Middle Kingdom [the
Chinese], but they have their mouths on the top of their heads.
They eat from earthenware dishes.44

Within the Chinese system of thought, the north is ‘the region of the
Yin or cold and darkness, with which spectres are assimilated’.
Perhaps as a result of similar malignant association, burial on
the north side of a church was considered unlucky throughout the
Middle Ages: suicides were buried there, as well as the unbap-
tized infants and the excommunicate.45 Iona Opie and Moira
Tatem recorded a continued suspicion of the north side of the
church up to 1984.46 Some medieval churches had a Devil’s Door
to the north, which was opened at baptisms for the escape of the
fiend, and otherwise kept carefully closed.47 It is a north wind that

35
heralds the approach of the queen of the otherworld in the ballad
of Tamlane,

There came a wind out of the north,

A sharp wind and a snell . . . 48

And the helpless mortal is taken under the Eildon hills to live as a
captive, a hostage at the court of Elfhame. In the northern Scots
ballad called ‘The Gardener’, an ancient opposition of north and
south, summer and winter, has come down in an apparently diluted
form as the dialogue between the Gardener and the girl he is court-
ing. He is an embodiment of the summer, offering her a garment of
all the modest flowers of the north. But she is the winter in person,
the incarnation of the malign cold, and she lays its curse upon him:

Young man, ye’ve shaped a weed for me,

In summer among your flowers;
Now I will shape another for you,
Among the winter showers.
The snow so white shall be your shirt,
It becomes your body best;
The cold bleak wind to be your coat,
And the cold wind in your breast.49

The most horrible of the prisons of the damned in Dante is north-

ern, icy, darkened by frosty mist. It is the last place of exile. The
lowest tier of his hell, at the centre of the earth, and thus at the fur-
thest point in his cosmology from the light whose centre is the
golden rose of paradise, enacts energy turned against itself, the self-
will to damnation of the damned. The source of the icy cold and the
freezing wind is the movement of the bat-wings of Lucifer, yet he
himself is frozen into the lake of ice created by his own action.50 Both
his motion and his stasis are self-defeating. Evil is circular, energy
turned against itself and wasted in an inward spiral.
The last three cantos of the Inferno are all set on the frozen lake,
where those who have broken the last taboo of medieval society and
betrayed state or family, who have tried to destroy the orders that
give a medieval individual humanity, are frozen into the ice of their
own selfishness, like fowls in aspic. The culinary image, part of the

36
ferocious, self-devouring hardness of this lowest circle of hell, is
hinted by Dante himself: degna . . . d’esser fitta in gelatina.51 The image
is of a piece with Dante’s own savagery towards these lowest of the
damned, with their biting and consumption of each other, if the stric-
ture of the ice gives them a chance.
To define the absolute frozenness of the place, the unbearable
density of the ice, Dante specifically alludes to the rumoured horrors
of places that are (from his own Mediterranean perspective) far to
the north, regions of barely imaginable cold and deprivation. The ice
is so thick that it is glass not water. (Dante, here, like many who have
tried to imagine the ice world of the north, imagines the pack ice to
be as transparent as the ice skin on shallow water.) There is no such
ice in the worst winter on the distant Austrian reaches of the Danube,
nor even on the Don under the frozen sky of Russia.

Non fece al corso suo sì grosso velo

di verno la Danoia in Osterlicchi
né Tanaí lá sotto ‘l freddo cielo. . .52

The Danube does not make itself so thick a veil as it flows

in winter in Austria
nor the Don under the frozen skies.

And yet the traitors generate from within their own unending rage,
metaphoric masks and helmets of ice that envelop even their
screaming faces, which stop their cries, freeze their tears into knots
of crystal on their cheeks. They are so much alone that they cannot
even communicate a curse. The tears of the poisoner Fra Alberigo
are sharp glass, even as they are wept.53 The natural sign of sympa-
thy, grief, compunction here denies its own essential nature and
becomes unnatural, sharp, wounding.
At the centre of this landscape of negation is the negator himself,
Lucifer mantled in ice, generating an unnatural combination of
adverse northern weathers: ice mist and freezing wind at once.54
Like the lesser traitors, the original betrayer literally freezes his own
body fluids. Tears and the slobber from his three mouths congeal
together with the blood of the arch traitors on whom he chews for
eternity: Brutus, Cassius, Judas.55 It is Dante’s image for all that is
most repugnant to him, the betrayal of the just order, the orders of
society destroyed by the traitor.

37
 This hell of ice has its real counterpart in one vision from the
winter war of 1939–40, when an inexperienced Soviet army
advanced into Finland and perished in their thousands in tempera-
tures of 30° below zero. The shadowy Italian war correspondent
Curzio Malaparte saw a frozen lake with a whole cavalry regiment
of horses held dead in ice that had set in one moment of Arctic night-
fall. The lake was full of the frozen horses all the winter through, and
Russian soldiers frozen dead on guard were everywhere in the forest
about the lake. When Malaparte told this to Prince Eugen of Sweden
in his drawing room full of Impressionist paintings, with the distant
sound of the music of the pleasure gardens no louder than the small
waves of the Baltic, the last Christian prince of Europe to have
known nothing of the war wept like a child to hear of the horrors of
that place.56

ii

In Europe the map of relations between north and south was cata-
strophically redrawn at the Reformation: a new set of divisions
appeared and, from the sixteenth century, travel between north
and south was gravely restricted. Legends once more grew about
places rarely visited. In the south the proverbial evil of the north
was equated with the writings of Luther, the armies of Gustavus
Adolphus – ab aquilone omne malum. In the north, the black legend
began to grow of the backwardness and decadence of the south.
In Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, the handbook of personifications,
allegories and symbolic figures that was used throughout the Baroque
world, there are detailed instructions for the visual representation
of the idea of north. The Iconologia first appeared at Rome in 1593
without illustrations, and subsequently in many illustrated editions
throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The subtitle
of the original publication gives an indication of the universality of
the culture within which it functioned: ‘Universal images drawn
from antiquity and other sources, a work no less useful than necessary
to poets, painters and sculptors.’57
Ripa’s personification of the north comes at the end of the
Iconologia among the four quarters of the world: the east is a young
woman with a censer and a rising sun; the south is a young black
man holding the arrows of the sun and a spray of lotus; the west is
an aged man, personification of the domain of sleep, his lips bound

38
After Cavalier D’Arpino(?), Personification of North, 1618, woodcut.

to silence, carrying poppy heads and attended by the evening star.

The north is the only one of these personifications represented in the
prime of life and vigorous movement. The four quarters of the world
are linked to the times of day, the south to the hot noon, east and
west to morning and evening, the north to the brief afternoon of
action before the early dark.
A fair-haired knight in armour strides forward, hand on sword
hilt, walking on snow, surrounded by clouds that drop ice showers,
drawn as if they were cut gems. Ripa’s rationalization of this image
is a summary of Baroque views of the north: his personification’s
azure baldrick bears the northerly signs of the zodiac (Cancer,

39
Scorpio, Pisces); he looks up into the cloudy sky, out of which ice
and snow are falling, at the Seven Stars of the Great Bear which
give the usual Classical word for ‘northern’, septentrionalis, as they
do in John Florio’s Italian–English dictionary of 1611: ‘Settentrione,
the north part of the world. Also the north coast or pole. Also the
Northren-winde. Also the seven starres of Charles-waine’.58 North
is represented as pale-skinned and strongly built, these being the
features of northern peoples as opposed to the darker and slighter
southerners. He is armed, since the people of the north are viewed
as the most bellicose on earth, full of blood and given to anger. In
support of this his authority is the 28th of Petrarch’s Canzone, lines
46–51, which describes northerners (typified by Horace’s prover-
bially remote Scythians) as conditioned by climate to be ferocious
and unafraid of death, since they are born far from the highway of
the sun, in a snowy and icy place, where the brief days are over-
shadowed by clouds:

Una parte del mondo è che si giace

Mai sempre in ghiaccio et in gelate nevi
Tutta lontana dal camin del sole . . .59

The world’s waste where it freezes always

deep in ice and frozen snow
far from the pathways of the sun . . .

What is remarkable is that the north is represented as starkly power-

ful, an aggressor in his prime, at the height of his power. The Italian
of the late sixteenth century had much to fear from the north, from
the mercenary knights, from the fury of the Reformers. Il male viene
dal Nord. Ripa chooses to emphasize that force and bleakness: his
generation are inheritors of narratives of the sack of Rome of 1527,
when the Germanic knights bivouacked in the painted rooms of the
Villa Farnesina. One of the Landesknechten turned the frescoed ‘Room
of the Perspectives’, the illusionistic fantasy of Baldassare Peruzzi,
into a grim impresa of northern power. Into the painted sky above the
serene towers of the fictive city is a German couplet coarsely scored
into the plaster:

40
 1528
Why should I not laugh who write,
the Hun have put the Pope to flight.

The painted illusion, an untroubled city glimpsed between marble

columns, is not strong enough to withstand the dagger of a single
northern soldier.
To the Italians of the seventeenth century there would have
seemed no need to revise Ripa’s personification of the north: the
forces of destructive heresy (as they saw it) were marshalled by the
new northern terror, Gustavus Vasa, King of Sweden. However
wonderful its carvings, its inlaid marble, its frescos of battles in the
distant north, Santa Maria della Vittoria, the Roman church erected
shortly after 1620 to celebrate the ‘final’ defeat of Protestantism at
the Battle of the White Mountain (which saw off the Protestant chal-
lenge to the Holy Roman Empire), betrays by its very splendour
Roman fear of the northern knights.
In the seventeenth century this fear also took the form of a propa-
ganda revival of the idea of Scandinavians, Finns and Lapps in
particular, as powerful enchanters. The victories of the armies of
Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years War were ascribed to the
powers of the Lapps and Finns in his armies, and their control over
winds, clouds and tempests. There were supposed to have been
three regiments of Lapps among the Swedish forces that came into
Germany in 1630, and their actions were supposed to have obtained
advantages and victories by supernatural means. Later commenta-
tors denied the presence of any such troops. Oddly, and perhaps
with an awareness that the Swedish territories comprehended peo-
ples with an equivocal reputation as sorcerers, the very first item in
Gustavus’s Articles of War consisted of a prohibition of idolatry,
witchcraft and the enchanting of weapons.60
A more positive estimation of the north appears in a late seven-
teenth-century poem of praise from the Mexican poetess, intellectual
and nun Sor Juana Inès de la Cruz to a sister-poet, Sophia Elisabeth
Brenner of Stockholm:

Aplaude lo mismo, que la fama en la sabiadura de la señora Misoña

Sophia Elisabeth Brenner, Musa Polare, la única maravilla de nuestros
siglos, Una de las maravillas en el Norte, que encanta con su Canto, Y
triumpha de el Olvido61

41
 I praise equally the renown and the wisdom of the Gothic Lady
Sophia Elisabeth Brenner, the Polar Muse, the true marvel of our
age, one of the wonders of the North, who enchants in her song
and triumphs over oblivion.

The poem opens with ‘Great Minerva of the Goths!’, and later in the
same set of verses Sophia Elisabeth is also the ‘Lucid Sibyl of the
Visigoths’. This is a generous, bravura Baroque north, viewed by a
fellow woman and from Mexico City. Sophia Elisabeth is at once the
Polar Muse, Minerva and Sibyl, qualified by a random set of epithets
from Pliny and the Roman historians, Misonian, Gothic, Visigothic.
There is a hint of the memory of polar magicians in the praise of the
‘enchantments of her song’. From Sor Juana’s convent, Stockholm
must have seemed a prodigiously distant place, but it was still com-
prehensible within the structures of Baroque thought. There was a
space, so to say, in this Mexican woman’s imaginary cabinet marked
‘north’, even if it is a schematic perception of the polar star and
Finnmark enchanters.
The brief voyage into the region of polar ice in the fourth book of
Rabelais is altogether less menacing, though no less fantastical.62
When Pantagruel and his companions, in mid-banquet, unwit-
tingly approach the Arctic seas, they begin to hear invisible people
talking in the air about the ship. Then voices of all kinds of men,
women, children and horses. Then the noise of cannon is heard,
though still nothing is visible around the ship. Pantagruel specu-
lates that perhaps they are hearing voices from a triangular reser-
voir of Words, Ideas and Examples that lies in the middle of a
triangular universe whence falls occasionally to earth words or
ideas ‘comme tomba la rousée sus la toison de Gideon’ (‘as the dew
fell on Gideon’s fleece’) – or as if they had sailed into a metaphysi-
cal equivalent of today’s Bermuda Triangle. Then he hits on the
idea that they must be hearing words frozen in a hard winter,
‘gelant et glassent à la froydeur de l’air’ (‘freezing and congealing
with the cold of the air’).
Whereupon, the Pilot calmly assures the company that
Pantagruel is right, and that they are hearing the thawing noises of a
great battle fought on the ice the previous winter. At this point, the
narrative moves into a mode of surreal beauty, as Pantagruel casts
handfuls of frozen words down on the deck , plucked out of the cold
air. The words are all the colours of heraldic blazons and melt like

42
snow in the hand. The cacophony of the miscellaneous thawing of
the words is rendered as –

Hin. Hin. Hin. Hin, ticque, torche, lorgne, brededin, brededac, frr,
frrr, frrrr, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, tracc, tracc, trr, trr,
trr, trrr, trrrrrr, on, on, on, on, on, ououououon, goth, magoth . . . 63

– with the last two having the appositely northern suggestion both
of Goths and of the giants Gog and Magog. After the company have
played enough with the words, they consider the possibility of keep-
ing some preserved under oil or packed up in straw like the ice in an
icehouse. The whole episode fades away, with beautiful inconse-
quence, and the divagatory quest for the Holy Bottle resumes, across
seas of wonders, the seas of the emergent Baroque imagination,
where frozen words must compete for attention with, for example, a
flotilla of Jesuits in small boats, crossing the waves to attend the
Council of Trent.
A final example of Baroque imagination of the world of the
north, in this case of the extreme north, is the painting by Abraham
Hondius, called Arctic Adventure, in the Fitzwilliam Museum in
Cambridge. This was painted in England – Hondius spent the latter
part of his life in London – and the Fitzwilliam catalogue ascribes it
to the year 1677. This would put it in the same year as one of
Hondius’s specifically London paintings, The Frozen Thames, a
record of one of a series of severe winters, now in the Museum of
London. This shows ice sports, shooting and skating on a stretch of
frozen river, with a frozen weir. (Hondius also painted a well-known
image of The Frost Fair on the Thames, seen from Temple Stairs; this is
dated 1684 and is also in the Museum of London.) The Arctic
Adventure painting is very much the visual embodiment of an idea of
north. Whether it is derived from Netherlandish accounts of polar
voyages (Hondius came from a distinguished family of cartogra-
phers) or is simply a capriccio for an English patron is uncertain. It
may be wholly a fantasy based on Hondius’s own observations of
the depth of winter in the year when it was painted.
It is a representation of the hostile north: of a ship lifted and held
by the pack ice under an angry sky, from which the last daylight is
fading. In the foreground a group of men shoot at a (rather small)
polar bear, harried by dogs, from whom one of their comrades is
fleeing. A longboat is beached on the ice.

43
Abraham Hondius, Arctic Adventure, 1677, oil on canvas.

Hondius has invented his icescape from materials close to hand,

painting his pack and sheet ice from studies of river or puddle ice.
This produces an effect of pure fantasy. He has not thought that the
mass of ice in great sheets would refract light and thus appear as
opaque (a phenomenon observed accurately enough in the flat ice of
his Frost Fair painting) and has painted it with thin sheets of clear ice.
So that his stilled ship and foreground figures inhabit a ‘crystal land’
of the imagination – where the ice is not snow-covered it is translu-
cent and prismatic. It is like the superlative comparisons of Baroque
poetry – vast crystals, lustres of ice, sheets of diamond.
In the early nineteenth century the German painter Caspar David
Friedrich (1774–1840) painted another icy shipwreck signifying a
betrayal as grievous as the treasons of the damned in Dante’s pris-
ons of ice: the betrayal of the people by the restoration of absolutism,
of the ancien régime, throughout a Europe that had known three
decades of revolution and reform. In the painting now usually called
Arctic Shipwreck or The Sea of Ice (1823–4), this betrayal is expressed
by the image of a ship caught in the Arctic winter, initially barely vis-
ible in the landscape of broken and rearing pack ice. The image of

44
the state as a ship is ancient, much used in the Renaissance and the
Middle Ages, but Friedrich uses the image in a novel way to repre-
sent the betrayal of the people by their rulers after the Congress of
Vienna. The image of polar shipwreck was perhaps first suggested
to his mind by accounts of the many expeditions towards the North
Pole undertaken by Sir William Parry’s ship Griper, but the land-
scape of exploration is no celebration of human enterprise, but
rather a meditation on the destructive force of the north.
Friedrich’s painting represents allegorically the wreckage of
hopes, the powerlessness of the human individual against absolute
forces. Indeed the painting was at once time known casually as The
Wreck of the Hope, as though ‘Hope’ had been the name of the ship.
That which is human and vulnerable is literally crushed out of shape
by the expanding forces of the ice.
The allegory is pessimistic: the thaw has functioned only to allow
the ship to venture too far north for safety. The inevitable Arctic

Caspar David Friedrich, Arctic Shipwreck, 1823–4, oil on canvas..

45
winter (which occupies nearly the whole year) has returned to
imprison the ship in ice that is packing and rearing into strata under
the forces generated by its own expansion. The times of thaw are
only two months in the year. The winter lasts ten months; the polar
night always balances the lengthened days. If the painting is indeed
a political allegory, there will be a long wait before the next thaw, far
longer than any lifetime that the painter could have anticipated, and
a bleak prospect of repression stretches ahead to fill the nineteenth
century.
Like Hondius before him, constructing an Arctic icescape from
descriptions, Friedrich’s frozen sea and rearing ice are studied from
frozen waters nearer home. He was thinking about these Arctic
expeditions by 1820, perhaps also thinking of the allegorical poten-
tial of the image of the ship in ice. To this end he was making studies
of the movement and packing of ice on the river Elbe in the severe
winter of 1821. So the finished picture is a scaling-up of the frag-
ments of river ice, presumably using a model ship from which to
paint the wreck. The small scale and near-at-hand is used as material
for a grand imagination of the destructive north.
One of the most terrible of all norths is the north of Russia, the
prison of winter. In 1848, when the traveller Lucy Atkinson passed
north to Siberia out of the Great Gate of Moscow, there was already
reason to be afraid.

As we passed through, I seemed to be bidding farewell to the

world; I thought of the many exiles who had crossed this barrier;
and it was a relief when we had passed beyond the great archway.
Amongst the prisoners who are marched through this portal on
their way to Siberia . . . hundreds have passed this spot whose only
crime was resisting the cruel treatment of their brutal masters.64

In addition to the physical realities of starvation, slavery and cold,

the prisoners suffered a more metaphysical horror derived from the
sense of the otherness of the diabolic north.

On the Russians, in particular, the effect of the long cruise north-

ward over the open ocean greatly enhanced the feeling already
common to prisoners that they had been removed from the ordi-
nary world. It seemed not merely a transportation from the
‘mainland’ (as the prisoners always referred to the rest of the

46
 country) to some distant penal island, but even to another
‘planet’, as Kolyma was always called in songs and sayings.65

The extreme cold of the Russian north and the hostility of the land
struck many nineteenth-century travellers as literally infernal, par-
ticularly when the land itself smouldered in sulphur, like lava. A
barely credible account by a nineteenth-century visitor to Siberia
describes the ground beginning to sound as hollow as a drum under
the hooves of the horses pulling the sledge. The driver explains that
subterranean fires eat their way to the surface, causing subsidences,
great hollows in the burnt earth, so that there is always a danger of a
horse breaking the crust and sinking into the fire. The appearance of
the burning earth is described at nightfall:

What an unearthly scene met my eyes. The whole earth, not the
forest, for miles around seemed full of little flickers of fire; flames
of many colours – red, gold, blue, and purple – darted up on
every hand, some forked and jagged, some straight as a javelin,
rising here and there above the earth.66

But there is a whole alternative way of regarding the Russian

north, as sacred land, a region of transition where the otherworld is
very near. The sacredness of the Russian north was first given con-
crete expression by the nomadic indigenous people, the Sami. The
Sami saw the Solovetski Islands in the White Sea, far to the north of
Archangel, as a point halfway between this world and the next, so
they buried their dead shamans and chiefs there, and covered the
islands with a labyrinth of stones to prevent the souls of the dead
from returning to the world of the living: installations relating to the
Inuit-placed stones that mediate in the Arctic landscape between the
worlds of the dead and the living. The Orthodox monks, in their
turn, saw the Sami constructions as ‘Babylons’, symbols of man’s
wandering in the world of sin; a neurotic, fractal repetition from
which the monk withdraws himself into a world of silence and
prayer.67 The Polish journalist Mariusz Wilk spent the last years of
the millennium in the Solovetski Islands. The words he finds for this
north focus at first on amorphousness, topographical chaos, mud:
‘Russian reality, especially in the North, has no form: expanses here
are endless, mud is bottomless, settlements are shapeless.’68 The
peculiar amorphousness of the Russian north is that of an endlessly

47
repeating labyrinth (of mud, lakes, forest, sea) with no possible clue
to a way out. A muddle, even, between day and night. ‘The day
would take hours to fade, and everything – sky, tall flowers, still
water – would be kept in a state of indefinite suspense.’69And yet the
shape given to the Russian north, particularly by these monasteries
of the White Sea islands, is a sense of the order of an austere place
which is in itself a threshold of an otherworld – the paradises of the
monasteries, with their precarious gardens, are the successors to the
metaphysical constructions of the Sami. ‘Reality in the North is thin-
ner than anywhere else, like a jumper worn out at the elbows, and
the other world shines through it.’70 And it is out of this sense of an
extreme place, half an otherworld, that Wilk eventually hazards the
plotting of a point on the real maps where a supernatural realm
begins, right at the edge of the Arctic seas: ‘The Kanin peninsula,
separating the White Sea from the Barents Sea, is the point where the
world meets the beyond.’71
Everywhere, the nineteenth century was much concerned with
the frozen seas at the extremes of the world. The theatre of the poles
is not my main subject, particularly as that particular idea of north
has been recently and comprehensively studied in Francis
Spufford’s I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination.72
Nevertheless, no account of nineteenth-century ideas of north can
ignore that, in the contemplation of the explorations of the Arctic
and Antarctic, the familiar images of hostile desert and place of aus-
tere truth are combined afresh. More specifically, there is a distinct
nineteenth-century expansion of the territories that can be compre-
hended by the ideas usually associated with the north. In the century
that invented Alpinism and made heroes – if not secular martyrs – of
explorers, Antarctica, the Himalayas and indeed everywhere above
the snowline became, by extension, ‘norths’.
The ship threatened by masses of ice is an immediately comprehen-
sible representation of humanity overwhelmed by the forces of winter
and the cold. The year 1912 was a time of crisis for the technology and
courage that had sustained the self-belief of the world of voyages and
explorations throughout the nineteenth century. It was a year domi-
nated by the realization of the strength of the cold. The failure of the
Scott Antarctic expedition was firmly linked in the popular mind with
the sinking of the Titanic. Both disasters were represented as being
qualified, even redeemed, by the (real or imagined) chivalry of the men
who were killed. Popular apprehension of the Scott expedition had to

48
resort to baroque extremes of metaphor to find an angle from which a
defeat could be shown as a victory, however paradoxical. The whole,
familiar legendary of the Titanic (bravery, formality, codes of behaviour
maintained in the last extremity) makes a similar attempt to reclaim
what would otherwise be readable only as a failure of technology, a
failure of human domination of nature, a memento mori.
This unconsoled reading is the one advanced by a haunting
song written, not long after the event, for the Yiddish music halls of
New York. The iceberg and the sea are personified as the cold ones,
the destroyers, the inevitable victors who hold all the cards. The
refrain begins with a reminder, a call to humility, a restatement of
the limits of human capability. It is out of sympathy with the elite
culture of its time, but in retrospect it sounds realistic, sadly wise.

Mensch megst ob mesten scarfen dein moi,

Oy kenst zich nit mesten mit dem yams koi,
Oy megst zich vi kligner is der goyver,
Ot mus tu ligen in zein nasen keiver.73

Humanity thinks itself clever or brave

but cannot fight with the power of the seas.
Know that the cold is stronger than you are,
now you must lie in its watery grave.

Know that the cold is stronger than you are. The perception of the
destructive power of the north is unrelieved, with the same stark
perception that is found in an Old English riddle-text whose answer
is ‘iceberg’. The Jewish immigrants in New York and the first-millen-
nium seafarers had no illusions of human chances of survival unpro-
tected in a Russian winter or in an ice storm on the North Sea. Like
Thomas Hardy’s poem on the Titanic, the Old English riddle of the
iceberg sees the ice as an anti-ship, a ship in negative. The iceberg in
the riddle destroys not as an act of ruinous chance, but with mali-
cious pleasure. In this, the iceberg, the not-ship, embodies northern
realism about the hostility of northern weather, about the hostility of
the north itself.

With cwam aefter wege wraetlicu lithan,

Cymlic from ceole cleopode to londe,
Hlinsade hlinde hiealitor waes gryrelic

49
 Egesful on earde ecge waeran scearpe.
Waes wo helegrim . . .74

The monster came sailing, wondrous along the wave, it called out
its comeliness to the land from the ship; loud was its din; its
laughter was terrible, dreadful on earth; its edges were sharp. It
was malignantly cruel . . .

It is not only the destructiveness of the ice that is felt here, but, in a
complex of attraction and repulsion, the beauty and riches of the
north are also present, the capacity to attract and then to destroy.
From remotest antiquity to the present, as this book will demon-
strate, and in almost every part of the world, two central ideas of
north – endless dark and endless day – alternate and intertwine in
patterns that are unending and self-replicating.

treasures and marvels of the north

An important part of the perception of the north, and the crucial

reason for undertaking the most dangerous of northern voyages, is
that it is the place of treasures and marvels. Not only is the north the
site of prodigies – icebergs, volcanoes, the magnetic mountain – it is
also the place from which come the treasures – furs, ivory and
amber, which are the luxuries of the south.
A compass axiomatically points to the north, but beyond that
simple fact, rock itself can have an idea of north, and remember
where once it was in relation to the north, even if geological
processes have subsequently shifted it to another orientation.

Several rock types contain magnetic minerals . . . The magnetic

field streams between the magnetic poles just like the ‘lines of
force’ that iron filings trace on paper around a bar magnet . . .
Magnetite is a common mineral in nature, often occurring as dis-
seminated grains in sandstones, scattered like seeds in a cake.
When a rock is deposited (or a lava erupted), if it contains mag-
netic minerals they will acquire the magnetization prevalent at the
time. This magnetisation remains, a fossil of its own kind, even
when the plate on which the rock ultimately resides may have
moved far from its place of origin . . . like an accusing finger point-
ing polewards, the rock magnetism reveals its place of origin.75

50
 The compass remains the governing object that charts northward
progress, which enables instant orientation by the north, which
guides the ways to the treasury of the north. It seems apposite to
begin an account of the marvels of the north with this fundamental
marvel of the earth itself having an idea of north, a northern
memory. The phenomenon of magnetic north was for centuries
explained by geographers and cartographers as deriving from the
existence somewhere in the unexplored northlands of an actual
lodestone of gigantic proportions: the magnetic mountain. One of
the ghost books of the north – another manuscript that was circulat-
ing among the cartographers of the Low Countries in the sixteenth
century only to disappear in the battles and sieges of the Eighty
Years War – is the Inventio fortunata, an account of travels in the
northern seas by a fourteenth-century Franciscan from Oxford. His
narrative of the magnetic mountain, which he describes as a black
lodestone 30 miles across, would appear to be the source for its
appearance in Mercator’s map of 1569, which takes account of recent
developments in surveying by placing the magnetic mountain not at
the Pole itself but at some distance from it, between the continents of
Asia and America.76
The treasures of the north are organic. Many of the Petrarchan
terms for beauty as the Renaissance perceived it – the common cur-
rency of European beauty in white furs and ivory – relate to items
perilously traded out of the deepest north. These white luxuries,
prized at the courts of France and Italy, were ermine, walrus ivory
and, most costly of all, unicorns’ horns (narwhal tusks), which were
antidotes to all poison and which could purify a well with a single
touch. One of the persistent myths of the north in our own time is
that the exploration of the Arctic is morally pure, connected with
concepts such as askesis and self-knowledge. Previous centuries
were blunter. They went north for treasure.
It emerges strongly from the accounts of early explorers and
traders that, for all practical purposes, the north was not a place, it
was a series of trade routes. Apart from the chimeric searches for
the north-east and north-west passages to India and the Far East
that claimed so many lives, there were invisible, established roads
– the amber road, the fur road – some of them highly local, others
stretching for thousands of kilometres.
Amber was one of the earliest of the organic treasures and mar-
vels of the north to be assigned a value, and, indeed, one of the

51
Bacchus with a Satyr and a Panther, ad 70–250 , Roman amber carving

oldest of all trade goods. Baltic amber beads were found in the pyra-
mid of Tethys, from 3,400–2,400 bc, and when Heinrich Schliemann
excavated Troy in the years 1871–90 he found amber beads there.
(He also found trade goods that would appear to have come from
China.) It has since been established that the Trojan beads were
made from amber that had been brought from the Baltic around 3000
bc. The hair of Achilles in Homer is like amber. Under the Greeks,
the sun-coloured fossil resin of the Baltic went due east to Vienna,
and along the Danube to the Black Sea. Then it went by land or
sea through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles into the Aegean.
Alternatively, the merchants turned south before Budapest, and took
it around the eastern flank of the main Alps, across the Julian Alps to

52
Aquileia at the head of the Adriatic.77 The Odyssey (which was being
composed and recited around 1100 bc) refers to a necklace set with
amber beads ‘that glowed as if with sunlight’.78 After the Romans
opened the Brenner Pass, amber was carried across the Alps via
Innsbrück in Austria, down the Adige to Padua and thence to Rome.
The legend of amber was that it was the precious tears shed over
Phaëthon by his sisters:

The brotherless Heliades

Melt in such amber tears as these.79

Phaëthon, who borrowed the chariot of the sun for one fatal day,
and his sisters the Heliades were the children of the sun (Helios /
Apollo), so it is interesting that the legend implicitly places the
garden of the Heliades in the far north, like Apollo’s Hyperborean
home. This accords with the seventeenth-century poet Andrew
Marvell’s similitude of the amber tears weeping from the trees in the
ruined garden of England.
The appetite for amber continued, and even increased, during
and after the Roman period. It was valued for its beauty, and also
because it was a natural wonder, since it was one of the first sub-
stances in which electro-magnetic reactions were observed (by
Thales of Miletus, around 585 bc). In Nero’s time, due to its rarity, a
small amber statuette was worth the same as a slave. Since amber
continued to be valued throughout the early Middle Ages, when the
Teutonic Knights became absolute rulers of Prussia in 1283 they
created a monopoly on amber production, which at that time mostly
went into rosary beads.
In the following centuries both amber workers and amber gather-
ers formed guilds, and the whole industry was jealously controlled.
In 1713 the Prussian ruler Friedrich Wilhelm i sponsored perhaps the
most ambitious amber-based project ever conceived, the building of
an entire room panelled in amber, subsequently given to Tsar Peter
the Great of Russia. The panels vanished in 1944, and although a
variety of rumours have circulated as to their whereabouts, they have
not reappeared. The Prussians flaunted their monopoly on amber
throughout the Baroque centuries by using large and elaborate amber
objects as state gifts, such as the splendid amber cabinet presented by
the same Friedrich Wilhelm to Augustus the Strong of Saxony, which
is still in the Wunderkammer of the Grüne Gewolbe in Dresden.80

53
 Although amber was perhaps the earliest trade item to come out
of the far north, fur has historically been the most important. Entire
nations and states have been shaped by the value attached to the
pelts of Arctic animals. The north Norwegian captain Ottar who vis-
ited Alfred the Great’s court in ninth-century England was already
taking marten, reindeer, bear and otter pelts in tribute from Sami
hunters further north, and selling them on to southern Norway,
Denmark and England. The early history of Russia is based on the
gradual domination of one river basin after another by the establish-
ment of portage routes, the speed of the expansion being determined
by the exhaustion of fur-bearing animals in each successive basin.81
As time went on, the remaining stocks of the principal fur animals
were confined to ever more inaccessible areas. By the seventeenth
century the profit from fur constituted 10 per cent of the state rev-
enue of Russia, but sables were only to be found in Siberia. In 1697
Peter the Great acknowledged the emerging problem by declaring
the sable trade to be a monopoly of the government, and in the same
year Russian hunters began their conquest of Kamchatka in search
of sable, which was not merely warm but also socially significant: a
sable-lined caftan was the basic dress of a Russian noble. Due to the
resistance offered to the Russians by the Itelmen of Kamchatka, the
tsar went on to order that a Russia–Kamchatka sea route should be
found and mapped. The Russian navy officers Vitus Bering, Martin
Spanberg and Alexi I. Chirikov were sent on an expedition to Siberia
in 1725, and then on a second, still more ambitious voyage that
aimed at the mapping of the entire Arctic coast of Russia, the discov-
ery of sea routes to Japan and America, and the gathering of infor-
mation about the land and peoples of Siberia.
In the process, Bering discovered the sea otter, whose life, spent
placidly floating in freezing water, demands the heaviest insulation.
Thus the fur of sea otters, to their undoing, is perhaps the thickest
and most lustrous in the world. Just as sable had once ranged from
Finland to the Kuriles, the otters’ range initially extended from
southern California, north and west through the Aleutian Islands to
the Kamchatka peninsula, and south to the northern islands of
Japan. But in 1742 Vitus Bering’s men returned with sea-otter pelts
from their second voyage of discovery, and the demand for the beau-
tiful fur, in effect, created Alaska. It was only in 1867, when the num-
bers of sea otters had been reduced from hundreds of thousands to
mere hundreds, that Russia sold the territory to the United States.

54
 Similarly, the beaver was for long the most economically signifi-
cant trade out of Canada. Its fur was principally used for making felt
for hats, popular, virtually mandatory, from the late sixteenth century
until the early nineteenth. The principal New World towns whose
prosperity was built on fur were Québec and New Amsterdam (New
York), the trade towns of the Company of New France and the Dutch
West Indies Company respectively, thus ensuring that competition
between the two was given an extra edge by European political
rivalries. Québec controlled the St Lawrence, and therefore the road
to the Great Lakes; New Amsterdam controlled the Hudson, and the
route westward to Oswego on Lake Ontario. The trade moved rapidly
westward as one beaver population after another was hunted out,
radically disrupting and distorting relationships between the Native
American tribal groups. The Iroquois, for example, came to realize
that their separate and collective future rested on the beaver, so to
reduce or eliminate competition they began a series of bloody
wars against tribes who dealt with the French, notably the Hurons,
changing the entire political geography of northern North America.
The pursuit of ever more distant beavers thus became the impetus
both for mapping and for the creation of empires, indigenous and
colonial.82
The gleaming piles of beaver and sable pelts were not the only
significant objects of desire from the far north. There was also the
pale gleaming hair of blond slaves. In ad 922 an Arab delegate in a
deputation from the Caliph al-Muqtadir to the King of the Bulghārs
on the Volga came across a group of merchant adventurers he called
the ‘Rūsiyyah’, a group of the Scandinavian adventurers who were
to create the first Russian kingdom centred on Kiev. He found them
at a trading encampment by one of the tributaries of the Volga:

They are accompanied by beautiful slave girls for trading . . . the

moment their boats reach this dock every one of them disem-
barks, carrying bread, meat, onions, milk and alcohol and goes to
a tall piece of wood set up in the ground. This piece of wood has a
face like the face of a man and is surrounded by small figurines
behind which are long pieces of wood set up in the ground. When
he reaches the large figure, he prostrates himself before it and
says, ‘Lord, I have come from a distant land, bringing so many
slave-girls priced at such and such a head and so many sables
priced at such and such per pelt.’83

55
In this context, women are simply trade goods. It is clear that
the prestige of fair hair was long established throughout the
Mediterranean world: women had been taking care to keep their
skins as pale as possible since the days of Classical Athens, and, as
early as the first century bc, they had also taken to bleaching their
hair.
Ivory was another significant item of northern treasure in the
Middle Ages. The best ivory, of course, comes from elephant tusks,
so the Romans did not bother with walrus. In post-Roman Europe,
with hostile Muslim states controlling northern Africa and the road
to India, tusks were so hard to come by that walrus ivory came to be
greatly valued.
The narwhal tusk was the greatest northern marvel of all – uni-
corns’ horns, worth ten times their weight in gold. Since the touch of
the horn was supposed to dispel poison, horns were kept in the
treasuries of kings and bishops. The first Englishman to see one in
situ was probably Martin Frobisher in 1577. In the course of a luck-
less voyage to discover a north-west passage to Cathay, the ship’s
company saw

A dead fish floating, which had in his nose a horn straight and
torqued [spiralled] of length two yards lacking two inches, being
broken in the top, where we might perceive it hollow – into the
which our sailors putting spiders, they presently died. I saw not
the trial thereof, but it was reported to me of a truth, by the virtue
thereof we supposed it to be the sea-unicorne.84

The narwhal, Monodon monoceros, carries a single tusk of pure ivory

two metres or more in length, of no very obvious utility. The animals
seldom venture south of Greenland, which explains why the horns
remained a mystery for so long. The name ‘narwhal’ is ill-omened –
Pablo Neruda thought it ‘the most beautiful of undersea names, the
name of a sea chalice that sings, the name of a crystal spur.’85 It seems
to be from Norse nár+hvalr, corpse-whale, perhaps on account of the
drowned-sailor colour of its pale, marled skin.
In an unparalleled moment of northern splendour, the absolute
kings of Denmark built a state throne of unicorn’s horn – it was
begun under Frederick iii, and Christian v was crowned in it in 1671.
The officiating bishop congratulated him:

56
 History tells us of the great King Solomon that he built a throne of
ivory and adorned it with pure gold, but Your Majesty is seated
on a throne which, though like King Solomon’s in the splendour
of its materials and shape, is unparalleled in any kingdom.86

In its day, when the kings of Denmark were kings of Greenland,

kings of all the Arctic, it was one of the wonders of Europe.
Apart from its treasures, the north has also always been a place of
marvels and wonders, of which the first, perhaps, is ice itself. The
strangeness of ice is something to which we are accustomed. But a
sixteenth-century Dutch ambassador was entertaining the King of
Siam with stories about the envoy’s native land. In Holland, the king
was told, water sometimes became so hard that men walked on it,
and that it would bear an elephant, if he were there.

‘Hitherto’, the offended king told the ambassador, ‘I have

believed the strange things you have told me, because I look upon
you as a sober fair man, but now I am sure you lie.’87

Even in lands where ice abounded, and men regularly walked upon
it, icebergs were objects of awe. St Brendan saw one:

One day when they had celebrated their Masses, a pillar in the sea
appeared to them that seemed to be not far distant. Still it took them
three days to come up to it. When the man of God approached it he
tried to see the top of it – but he could not, it was so high. It was
higher than the sky. Moreover a wide-meshed net was wrapped
around it. The mesh was so wide that the boat could pass through
its openings. They could not decide of what substance the net was
made. It had the colour of silver, but they thought it seemed harder
than marble. The pillar was of bright crystal.88

The unidentifiability of polar ice appears in a number of accounts

– it is as if the imagination simply refused the concept of so much
ice. A Jesuit missionary in 1632 saw his first icebergs with simple
wonder: ‘they were longer than our ship and higher than our masts,
and as the Sunlight fell upon them you would have said they were
Churches, or rather, mountains of crystal’.89 In Gerrit de Veer’s
account of Wilhelm Barent’s last voyage north, he records coming on
the edge of the polar ice for the first time:

57
 The fifth, wee saw the first Ice, which we wondered at, at the first,
thinking it had been white Swannes, for one of our men walking
in the Fore-decke, on a sudden began to cry out with a loud
voyce, and said, that he saw white Swannes: which wee that were
under Hatches hearing, presently came up, and perceived that it
was Ice that came driving from the great heape, showing like
Swannes, it then being about Eevening.90

The strength as well as the lustre of ice is a marvel of the north:

In the beginning and middle of winter, the ice is so strong and

holds so well that with a compactness, or thickness, of two inches
it will support a man walking, of three inches an armoured horse-
man, of one and a half spans military squadrons or detachments,
of four spans a whole battalion or thousands of people, as I must
record later where I discuss wars fought in winter.91

So says the seventeenth-century bishop, Olaus Magnus. But the ice is

only one of a range of phenomena of the cold that he discusses:

Cold burns the eyes of animals and stiffens their hairs.

Cold makes wild beasts seek out men’s dwellings, wanting to
relieve their hunger . . .
Cold makes wolves fiercer than normal to all animals and also to
each other . . .
Cold causes the pelts of all animals to be thicker and handsomer.
Cold allows fish to be kept fresh for five or six months without
salt.
Cold causes fish to die of suffocation under the ice if it is not
broken.
Cold always stimulates greater voracity in animals . . .
Cold makes hares, foxes and ermines change colour.
Cold causes copper, glass, and earthenware vessels to break . . .
Cold allows games and most delightful shows to be held on
the ice . . .
Cold causes dry and leafy tree-trunks to produce a huge noise
when they crack.
Cold causes clothes, when slightly damp, to stick to iron, if they
touch it . . .
Cold makes all seed sown in the ground come up in greater

58
 abundance . . .
Cold causes inns to be set up, markets to be held, and wars to
take place on frozen waters . . .
Cold causes nails to spring out from walls, doors and locks
Cold breaks stones in the field, earthenware, and glass jars.
Cold compresses greased shoes or leggings till they are as hard
as bone.
Cold causes coughs, colds, and similar ailments.
Cold makes lips that touch iron stick to it as if held by indissol-
uble pitch.

The fire of the Iceland volcanoes continued to sustain the reputa-

tion of Iceland as the place of wonders. The medieval Scottish cos-
mography called the Carte [map] of the Warld describes Iceland as a
place of ‘mony ferlyis’ (strange things / prodigies), notably ‘scal-
dand watter that birnis baith stanis and Irne’ – boiling water that
burns both stones and iron – and a mysterious, unnatural lake, ‘to
which there come black fowls without number daily, and fall
therein, and rise up again white when they are purged, but no man
may come there’.92
Iceland’s volcanoes appear in Olaus Magnus, contexted this time
with the widely found notion of the north as a way station, a terri-
tory between worlds, for the souls of the dead.

Praise is due to this island for its unusual marvels. It contains a

rock or promontory . . . which like Etna, seethes with perpetual
fires. It is believed that a place of punishment or expiation exists
there for unclean souls. Undoubtedly the spirits or ghosts of the
drowned or of those who have met some other violent death, are
to be seen there exhibiting themselves in human occupations.
These spectres make themselves so apparent to gatherings of their
acquaintances that those who are ignorant of their death receive
them as though they were alive and offer their right hands; nor is
the mistake detected before the shades have vanished.93

The north is also the region of ambiguous paradises: apart from

the fortunate territories of the Hyperboreans, there are the unac-
countable roses of Lake Niemi in northern Lappland seen by
Maupertuis in the eighteenth century: ‘roses of as lively a red as any
that are in our gardens’.94 There are also Chinese stories of a polar

59
earthly paradise that links the north with the world of ghosts. A trav-
eller called Tung Fang Soh recalled:

I made a journey to the North Pole, and came to a mountain

planted with fire, which neither the sun nor the moon ever illu-
mines, but which is lighted to its uttermost bounds by a blue
dragon by means of a torch which it holds in its jaws. I found in
that mountain gardens, fields, and parks with ponds, all studded
with strange trees and curious plants, and with shrubs which had
luminiferous stalks, seeming at night to be lamps of gold. These
stalks could be broken off and used as torches, in the light of
which spectres were visible . . . It was also called the spectre-light-
ing plant. Shoes made of plaits of it were impervious to water.95

Another form of northern wonder is the Arctic mirage, refraction

of light, creating the appearance of islands, ships or cities where
none could actually be.

I recall seeing a beautiful, four-masted schooner appear one

morning in a sea littered with floe ice. And then, right before my
eyes, it simply faded out. This kept on intermittently for four
days, then the real ship did pull into the roadstead . . . when the
trading was completed, we saw that same ship sail proudly away
to the north on the very tip of its masts!96

One of the most complete and strangest accounts comes from

William Scoresby’s Account of the Arctic Regions (1820), where he
speaks as an eye-witness of attenuated images, like the spider-
legged elephants and giraffes of the Surrealists:

There are several phenomena of the atmosphere caused by

refraction which deserve to be noticed. Under certain circum-
stances, all objects seen on the horizon seem to be lifted above
it a distance of 2 to 4 or more minutes of altitude, or so far
extended in height above their natural dimensions. Ice, land,
ships, boats, and other objects, when thus enlarged and ele-
vated, are said to loom. The lower parts of looming objects are
sometimes connected with the sensible horizon, by an apparent
fibrous or columnar extension of their parts, which columns are
always perpendicular to the horizon: at other times they appear

60
 to be quite lifted into the air, a void space being seen between
them and the horizon . . .
A most extraordinary appearance of the Foreland or Charles’s
Island, Spitzbergen, occurred on the 16th of July 1814. While sail-
ing to the southward along the coast with an easterly wind, I
observed what appeared to be a mountain, in the form of a slen-
der but elevated monument. I was surprised that I had never seen
it before; but was more astonished when I saw, not far distant, a
prodigious and perfect arch, thrown across a valley of above a
league in breadth. The neighbouring mountains disclosed the
cause, by exhibiting an unnatural elevation, with the columnar
structure of looming objects. Presently, the scene was changed,
the mountains along the whole coast assumed the most fantastic
forms; the appearance of castles with lofty spires, towers and bat-
tlements, would, in a few minutes, be converted into a vast arch
or romantic bridge. These varied and sometimes beautiful meta-
morphoses, naturally suggested the reality of fairy descriptions,
for the air was perfectly transparent, the contrast of snow and
rocks was quite distinct, even in the substance of the most uncom-
mon phantasms, though examined with a powerful telescope,
and every object seemed to possess every possible stability.97

In the real world of Arctic expeditions, requiring major commitments

of both money and human courage, ‘Crocker Land’, the ‘Barnard
Mountains’, ‘President’s Land’, ‘King Oscar Land’, ‘Petermann Land,
‘Keenan Land’ were at one time or another seen, and, by subsequent
laborious and dangerous explorations, proved not to exist.98
The Northern Lights themselves are a principal northern wonder:
the maximum occurrence of auroral displays is at a latitude of about
65°, distributed in a narrow, asymmetric band called the auroral
oval. The Romans, rather surprisingly, had some knowledge of the
aurora: on rare occasions, it can come surprisingly far south, even to
the Mediterranean. Seneca observed:

There are chasmata, when a certain portion of the sky opens, and
gaping, displays the flame as in a porch. The colours also of all
these are many. Certain are of the brightest red, some of a flitting
and light flame-colour, some of a white light, others shining, some
steadily and yellow without eruptions or rays.99

61
The red aurora (‘the sky filled with blood’) was naturally perceived
as ill-omened, and because light rays from the lower end of the spec-
trum (red to indigo) are longer, they travelled furthest out of the
Arctic. Thus red-tinged skies were the form of auroral display with
which the ancient world was most familiar. A Chinese description of
absolute precision is of ‘a red cloud spreading all over the sky, and
among the red cloud there were ten-odd bands of white vapour like
flossed silk penetrating it’.100
The Inuit of Labrador had a very developed legend of the aurora:

The ends of the land and sea are bounded by an immense abyss,
over which a narrow and dangerous pathway lead to the heav-
enly regions. The sky is a great dome of hard material arched over
the earth; there is a hole in it through which the spirits pass to the
true heavens. Only the spirits of those who have died a voluntary
or violent death, and the raven, have been over this pathway, The
spirits who live there light torches to guide the feet of new
arrivals. This is the light of the aurora. They can be seen there
feasting and playing football with a walrus skull.
The whistling cracking noise which sometimes accompanies
the aurora is the voices of these spirits trying to communicate
with the people of the earth. They should always be answered in
a whispering voice. Youths and small boys dance to the aurora.
The heavenly spirits are called selamiut: ‘sky-dwellers’.101

In the thirteenth century a Norwegian text, the Speculum regale,

described the lights of the aurora:

In appearance they resemble a vast flame of fire viewed from a

great distance. It also looks as if sharp points were shot from this
flame up into the sky of uneven height and constant motion, now
one, now another darting highest; and the light appears to blaze
like a living flame.102

The tattered curtains of the aurora have lent their strangeness to

northern skies; they have been to many an aspect of the way that the
extreme north is seen as a bridge between worlds. The Finnish word
revontulet means ‘fox fires’. The Finn and Sami belief was that the
aurora is caused by a fox running across the snowy fells of the north
with its tail sweeping the snow and sending up radiances, ‘fox fires’,

62
into the sky. Other Finnish interpretations see the aurora as the fox’s
tail itself swishing through the sky, or – a vision of polar abundance
– understand it as a reflection of the scales of the innumerable fish
that swim in the Arctic seas.103
In the Northern Isles lying between Scotland and Norway, the
streamers of the aurora are called the merry dancers, an acute obser-
vation of the resemblance between the shifting veils of light and
garments lifting and folding as the dancer swings round in the turns
of the dance. In the Gaelic islands off the western coast of Scotland, the
streamers are called Na Fir Chlis (the active, the quickly moving ones)
and are thought to be warriors fighting in the skies, and, magically,

. . . the blood of their wounded falling to earth and becoming con-

gealed forms the coloured stones called ‘bloodstones’, known in
the Hebrides also by the name of fuil siochaire, elf’s blood.104

And among the northern curiosities exhibited in the Wunderkammer

located in the former King’s Library of the British Museum is a fig-
ured stone from the far north of Europe, of which it was claimed that
filaments of the aurora were trapped within it, caught and petrified.
It has also long been assumed that the uncanniness of the distant
north was enhanced by a population of magicians, whose principal
skill was raising and controlling the wind.

Erik, a king of Sweden, was held in his time to be second to none

in magical skills, and he was on such good terms with evil spirits,
devoting most of his time to their honour, that in whatever direc-
tion he turned his hat the desired wind at once blew in from that
quarter.105

The Finns and the Sami were particularly notorious as sorcerers.

Their effectiveness, according to Johannes Scheffer’s ethnographic
study of the Sami, Lapponia (1674), rested on the familiar demons
who were attached to certain families. It was these obedient spirits
who were put to work.106 A seventeenth-century president of Harvard,
the theologian Increase Mather, believed this:

They bequeath their Daemons to their Children as a Legacy, by

whom they are often assisted (like Bewitched Persons as they are)
to see and do things beyond the Power of Nature.107

63
Thus the effectiveness of northern enchanters was a product of the
swarms of demonic beings that inhabited the Arctic.

Finland, the northernmost land, together with Lappland, was

once during pagan times as learned in witchcraft as if it had had
Zoroaster the Persion for its instructor in this damnable science . . .
There was a time when the Finns . . . would offer wind for sale to
traders who were detained on their coasts by offshore gales, and
when payment had been brought would give them in return three
magic knots in a strap not likely to break. This is how these knots
were to be managed: when they undid the first they would have
gentle breezes; when they unloosed the second the winds would
be stiffer but when they untied the third, they must endure such
raging gales that, their strength exhausted, they would have no
eye to look out for rocks from the bow.108

Wind-knots were not peculiar to the Lapps: probably the earliest such
in world literature were given to Odysseus by Aeolus, King of the
Winds. But by the Renaissance they were strongly associated with the
far north. In the fourteenth century there were wind-witches in the Isle
of Man, according to Ranulf Higden: ‘wommen there sellith to schip-
men wynde, as it were i-closed under thre knottes of thred’109 – at that
point Manx culture was essentially Scandinavian. Macbeth’s northern
witches had power over the wind; Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of
Newcastle, in a poem she published in 1653, has a version of the legend
that combines the prosaic with the supernatural in equal measure.

Lapland is the place from whence all Winds come,

From Witches, not from Caves, as doe think some.
For they the Aire doe draw into high Hills,
And beat them out againe by certeine Mills:
Then sack it up, and sell it out for gaine
To Mariners, which traffick on the maine.110

Olaus Magnus reports that Lappland also harboured sinister indi-

viduals with other kinds of skill, shape-shifting, teleportation and
ability to cause death at a distance:

By their immense skill in deceiving the eye they knew well how to
disguise their own and other persons’ countenances with differ-

64
 ent appearances . . . not only champion fighters but women and
delicate virgins would at a wish borrow from the thin air masks
that were horrifying in their livid foulness and faces marked with
a pallor not their own . . . It is well established that there was such
a great force in their charms that, however far away a thing might
be and however intricate the knots with which it was trussed up,
they made it visible and ready to hand . . . Vitolf deprived those
he wished of his sense of sight . . . Visinn, too, a fighter of extraor-
dinary reputation had the habit of reducing the edge of all
weapons to a state of bluntness merely by his glance.111

He also refers to a magician called Holler who used to cross the sea
on a bone that he had engraved with fearful spells, which allowed
him to skim over the surface.112 Another of Olaus Magnus’s narra-
tives is of a wizard called Gilbert, who is bound in a cavern in the
middle of an island. There were several such prisoners in northern
waters – like the god Loki, who also lies bound in a cavern to wait
for Ragnarök, according to Snorri Sturluson, and Judas, who waits
till Doomsday on a rocky northern island.113
Whatever the truth of the stories about Lappland wizards,
shamans are an undoubtedly real pan-Arctic phenomenon, first
described by the much-travelled Franciscan monk William van
Ruysbroeck in the thirteenth century.114 The shaman, viewed from the
perspective of modern appropriation, offers yet another version of
two archetypic northern journeys: the journey from civilization to
wild and untamed nature and then beyond that to a supernatural
domain, and the journey into one’s own interiority, the self-under-
standing, clarification and focusing of the spirit that may be looked
for as a result of a journey into the far north.
Whereas modern uses of shamanic ritual tend to focus on the
inward journey, in which the shaman prepares his mind to receive the
assistance of his spirit helpers, goes on an otherworldly journey, and
returns with a message from the entities he has consulted, one of the
earliest detailed accounts of a shamanic seance is in Johannes
Sheffer’s Lapponia of 1674, which suggests that the shaman’s essential
tool was then a drum. In Scheffer’s account, these drums were made
out of tree-trunks and covered with animal skin painted with various
figures – Christ and the Apostles, Thor and other gods, birds, stars,
moon and sun, animals, cities and roads – and they were beaten with
a reindeer horn. The way the drum was used for divination was that

65
a bundle of metal rings called an arpa was laid on it, and, as the
sorcerer beat the drum, the vibrations caused it to travel across the
surface. Its direction of travel and the figure it moved towards were
significant data, which the sorcerer then interpreted. If the matter
was an important one, the preliminary indications given by the drum
were used together with songs and incantations until the sorcerer
had thrown himself into a trance, in which he would undertake a
spirit journey and return with the desired information.115
The existence of shamanic artefacts creates some overlap between
the realities of Arctic manipulations of the otherworld and earlier
varieties of fantasy about the north as a home of spirits and wizards:
the shaman’s paraphernalia that ended up in the wunderkammern of
Europe was perceived as belonging to northern sorcerors. Charles i
owned a ‘conjuring drum from Lappland’.116 The Scottish adven-
turer John Bell brought ‘a sort of root growing in Siberia . . . being
poudered and given inwardly causes drunkenness’ to Sir Hans
Sloane.117 The Danish royal collection in the seventeenth century
included both drums and a Greenlandic tavsik, or a hunter’s amulet
belt, ornamented with 133 reindeer’s teeth.118 The journey into the
north in search of treasures and marvels comes round in a circle: a
movement from the unaffected rapacity of the Renaissance, harvesting
amber, fur and the horns of unicorns to the complex appropriations
of our own time, seeking both oil and shamanic enlightenment,
while at the same time longing to believe that the Arctic can remain a
reservoir of peoples undamaged by civilization, a natural world,
unexploited, pure.

66
ii Imaginations of North

ice and glass

Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen is one of the paradig-

matic narratives of northward journey. Once the heroine has reached
the utter north to attempt the rescue of her friend who has been kid-
napped by the Snow Queen, she comes to the ice palace, which is the
epicentre of frost and cold. Ice, glass and mirrors interchange and
duplicate throughout the story of The Snow Queen. A splinter of
mirror-glass from the distorting mirror of an evil magician enters the
heart of the innocent child, Kay. At once the sliver of glass takes on
the property of ice.

It was one of those glass splinters from the Magic Mirror, the
wicked glass . . . Poor Kay had also received a splinter in his heart
– it would now become hard and cold like a lump of ice.1

The property of the icy glass is to make Kay cold, to draw him to the
epicentre of coldness, to the palace of the Snow Queen in the utter-
most north, in ‘terrible, icy-cold Finnmark’. (The only mitigating
element in Finnmark is the humanity of the Sami shaman or wise
woman who helps the child Gerda on her northward journey to
rescue Kay.) This is the Scandinavian imagination of the power of
the winter and the cold at its bleakest: the Snow Queen’s palace is
the centre of metaphorical and actual cold, all that stands against
metaphorical or actual warmth, desolate and desolating:

The walls of the palace were formed of the driven snow, its doors
and windows of the cutting winds; there were above a hundred
halls, the largest of them many miles in extent, all illuminated by
the Northern Lights; all alike vast, empty, icily cold, and dazzlingly
white . . . In the midst of the empty, interminable snow-saloon lay
a frozen lake; it was broken into a thousand pieces; but these
pieces so exactly resembled each other, that the breaking of them
might well be deemed a work of more than human skill. The

67
 Snow Queen when at home, always sat in the centre of this lake;
she used to say that she was then sitting on the Mirror of Reason,
and that hers was the best – indeed, the only one – in the world.2

Kay, black with cold, but unaware of it, is playing with the shards
of the cracked mirror-ice. He is in hell: his are the futile endless jobs
of the damned. He is trying to make the word ‘eternity’ out of the
fragments of ice, but he cannot remember what word it is that he is
trying to form. Knowing his hopeless condition, the Snow Queen
has promised him freedom, the whole world and a new pair of skates
(to engrave bright lines on the mirrors of ice) if he should succeed in
the hopeless task.
Against the northern winter, the only antidote is society, intercon-
nectedness with others. Thus, in exact allegory, Kay is released from
his wintry servitude by the warmth of Gerda’s tears. He finds it within
himself to cry also, to melt the ice in his heart and eyes. As soon as
they return to society, to the safe embrace of the orderly northern city,
they forget ‘the cold, hollow splendour of the Snow Queen’s Palace’
so that ‘it seemed to them only an unpleasant dream’.3
As an image of the final heart of the north, the palace of the cold is
a powerful one. In Selma Lagerlöf’s The Further Adventures of Nils, the
hero has a dream of northernmost Sweden as isolated, bleak and neg-
ative: warmth, civilization, the brave Sami people, trees, animals and
vegetation can only reach so far north.4 As the child Nils progresses
northwards, all these fall by the way: they can go so far and no further.
When he finally comes face to face with the utmost north of his coun-
try, it takes the form of a cave of ice, inhabited by an old witch with
hair of icicles, body of ice, cloak of snow. The Ice Witch is attended by
three black wolves whose mouths issue cold, the north wind and the
winter darkness. The sun confronts her for a moment and her mantle
begins to melt, but the breath of the wolves drives even the sun to flee
to the south, as the Ice Witch screams that the sun will never conquer
her, for the far north belongs only to the ice and the black cold. The ice
witch rises again and again – in Edith Sitwell’s The Song of the Cold,
as Emma Tennant’s Aunt Thelma in her Wild Nights, and in the
work of later writers for children, as the Great Cold in Tove Jansson’s
Moominland Midwinter, and, of course, as the Witch in C. S. Lewis’s
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Silver Chair.5
When first we moved to the 57th parallel, my partner dreamed
that the incarnate cold had manifested herself on the snowy lawns

68
around the house. She told me about it in high summer at night
when Andrew was smoking at the greenhouse door and moths were
battering the Venetian lantern as I watered the vine, the tobacco
plants and the black Mexican morning glories.
She had dreamed it on a still night in deep winter when we
were snowed in. She had gone out of the house in her dream sensing
that the animating spirit of the cold was coming dangerously close.
Moving across the white levels of the lawns was a terrible old woman
with long straight white hair and mad, sightless eyes like a gannet’s.
My partner, sensing the spirit’s power for destruction, propitiated the
incarnate cold with the only gift that she would find acceptable: a fan
to make the cold air colder still. The old woman took it and moved on
down the course of the frozen burn. Did she give the cold my grand-
mother’s painted fan from the fan case in the back drawing room?
Spanish late Baroque showing the chariot of day rising above the arid
mountains on the one side and the personification of the night on the
other, in brocade and pearls, standing by a carved fountain draped
with roses and the scented vine called dama del noche.
Although the Arctic itself is conceptualized as a man’s world, a
proving ground, ‘no place for women’, it is for that very reason
sometimes seen as female in itself (for example, by Robert Service, ‘I
wait for the men who will win me . . .’).6 The principle of cold tends
to be female, in both the east (where cold is associated with yin, the
female principle) and in the west: in the English medieval winter
ballads of holly and ivy, Ivy is cold and female, Holly is fiery and
male – winter misery, yuletide pleasure.7
Margaret Atwood has recently drawn attention to a different
approach to embodying the north, the way that the ice demon called
the Wendigo, a figure from the mythology of the Algonkian speak-
ers of the north-eastern Canadian wilderness, has become a potent
symbol for Canadian writers.8 It is an ogreish and ravenous entity
with a heart of ice, which eats moss, frogs and mushrooms, or,
preferably, human beings. Unsettlingly, the line between humans
and Wendigos, as between humans and vampires, is a fluid one: a
human can become a Wendigo as the result of either being bitten by
one, tasting human flesh or being bewitched. A Wendigo human can
be killed, but it is important in such a case to remove the heart and
burn it so as to melt the ice. Kay’s ice heart in The Snow Queen was
the allegory of solipsism, withdrawal from community, the selfish-
ness that is invariably fatal in the far north.

69
 The belief that one has become a Wendigo is a recognized psy-
chosis among Algonkian speakers, and to a number of modern
Canadian writers the Wendigo is a spirit of the north. To Paulette
Jiles, it is the person who has been conquered by the north, who has
disappeared into a malignant or even diabolic wilderness and been
swallowed alive:

He is the Hungry Man, the one who reached this wasteland of

the soul and did not emerge . . .
Sometimes he wants to be killed . . .
he wants his soul or what there is of it
to spring heavenwards. . . .
People shoot the Windigo, they
do not pray for him, or it.9

Wendigos are people who have crossed that invisible but fatal bar-
rier that divides the natural from the supernatural north, and lost
themselves in so doing: like Virgil’s ghosts, it seems as if they may
then hold out their arms in longing from the opposite bank.
In another Canadian story, ‘A Tale of the Grand Jardin’, by W. H.
Blake, a fisherman tells a tale: he was travelling in a region known as
la Rivière à l’Enfer, and camped by a lake of black water – the name of
the river, if nothing else, an indication that the speaker is very near
that perilous boundary – where he is attacked by a Wendigo, who
seems to be all that remains of an experienced guide called Paul
Duchêne: familiarity with the wilderness, skill, strength and energy
are not necessarily enough to save a man who becomes susceptible
to its diabolic aspects.10
Ice, rock crystal and glass interchange and interrelate in
Scandinavian mythologies of the otherworld. In Norse myth the sin-
ister kingdom of the giant Guthmund, somewhere on the edge
between this world and the other, is called Glaesisvellir, ‘glittering’ or
‘glassy plains’. The glittering ice recurs in the medieval Norwegian
otherworld-journey poem, the Draumkvæde.

Then I came to those lonely lakes,

Where the glittering ice burns blue;
But God put warning in my heart,
And thence my step I drew.

70
 I was in the otherworld,
And no one knew I there
But only blest godmother mine
With gold on her fingers fair.11

The ‘godmother’ is the Virgin Mary, in her frequent medieval role as

protectress. These descriptions surely owe their origins to observa-
tions of the icebergs fusing in the imagination with the idea of the
crystal city in the Book of Revelation.
Ice and glass come together frequently in the work of Osip
Mandelstam (1891–1938); for example, in his first collection, Kamen
(Stone), which pre-dates the Russian Revolution, even an Impression-
ist scene of the lovely caducity of the northern summer is refracted
through images of ice and glass – and snow:

The snowy hive more slow,

The window’s crystal more clear . . .
. . . ice diamonds glide
In the eternally frozen stream . . .12

An English imagination of the Mandelstams’ later internal exile

in Russia, in David Morley’s Mandelstam Variations, is enclosed
and reflected by ice and glass: the poem is a fantasia on lines of
Mandelstam, but also a set of variations on the idea of ice and glass
and their resemblances: there are recollections of glass factories, of
shaving in exile in the mirror of a sliver of ice. The image of turning
to ice is his image for the process of exile:

I’d read about glaciers and I’d seen glaciers. How a stream runs
Under their bellies, sluices from their lower reaches . . .
And the taste of it as water, both sweet and sullied
Or tender as blown glass. Which explains how in poems I confuse
Glaciers and glaziers. Which won’t explain how I am becoming
Both ice and glass.13

The centred text is symmetrical in its own ice mirror, symmetries of

vowels in the lines, the image of becoming ice-glass expresses hard-
ening in exile in the unremitting cold, but also a process of a deepen-
ing mode of poetic expression moving consistently into clarity. At
the end of this section the ice mirror becomes a mirror of truth, the

71
place of exile becomes a place of freedom and the ice turns to gems,
real diamonds in the discourse of the dream:

I became frozen to my image. Out of earth, out of water,

I ran clutching the ice-mirror. Through forests,
Through rain. But all I know is: I
Would wake walking, in controlled
Free-fall, diamonds
In my fist.

There exist, in reality, simulacra of the ice palaces of the Snow

Queen and the ice witch. In Italy, on the border of southernmost
Tuscany and Lazio, in Niki de Saint-Phalle’s Tarot Garden there is a
version of the ice palace.14 The largest of her Tarot Card sculptures, a
Sphinx, standing for the atout of the Empress, has a substantial room
within, floored in white tiles, patterns repeating like snowflakes, and
entirely lined with interlocking fragments of bright silver mirrors.
The effect is an extraordinary one: the brightest Mediterranean sun-
light through the windows is splintered and refracted by the mirror
pieces, blanched to snow dazzle by the whiteness of the floor. It is a
place of displacement within the thaumaturgic garden, the bright-
ness of the north created from the light of the south.
In the north of Europe there are in actuality palaces of ice that rise
annually in January, melt to water and vanish in May. The marvels of
the north have, in this one sense, not yet ceased. At Jukkasjärvi in
northernmost Sweden, the original of these ice palaces is built on
this annual cycle to function as a hotel.15 The most striking aspect of
the whole enterprise is the degree to which the conventions of both
traditional and modern movement Scandinavian architecture are
imitated annually in ice. The entrance hall for the ice hotel of the
early months of 2003 had great neo-Classical columns and an illumi-
nated chandelier, itself made with of lustres of ice. The sister hotel in
the province of Québec in Canada had also great columns of trans-
parent ice within the bedrooms, where guests sleep in the sub-zero
temperatures in sleeping bags on piles of reindeer hides. A similar
enterprise using smaller units of Inuit snow houses is also being
tried in Greenland at Sønder Strømfjord. (One of these ice hotels
appears in a James Bond film, Die Another Day, 2002.)
In 2003 the Swedish ice hotel moved further into the realm of the
fantastical with a theatre constructed of snow and ice imitating the

72
form of an Elizabethan playhouse, where Shakespeare’s Macbeth (in
the Sami language) and Verdi’s Falstaff were performed in the Arctic
night with the aurora in the sky above. The palaces of ice cater for
other eventualities: there are ice chapels for polar weddings; there
are nightclubs; there are vodka bars which exploit the interchange-
able nature of ice and glass by using ‘glasses’ that are moulded ice.
At Harbin in Manchuria annual glacial cities rise on the frozen river;
Hokkaidō in northern Japan has a snow festival with packed-snow
facsimiles of famous buildings. (I will discuss these cold sculpture
festivals of the Far East in the ‘Topographies’ section.)
An annual ice castle arises at Kemi on the Gulf of Bothnia in
Finland, and Kemi and the more northerly town of Rovaniemi are
the venues for the most ambitious contemporary snow and ice struc-
tures – constructions somewhere between building and sculpture.
This is of its nature a completely different event to the many other
snow-sculpture competitions now being held worldwide. The struc-
tures are designed by internationally known visual artists, each
twinned with an equally well-known architect. This gives to these
pieces something of the status of the ephemeral architecture of the
Baroque world: they are not only works of high art in ephemeral
media, they are also a testing ground for ideas. They make a trial in a
humble (indeed free) material of ideas that could in future be given
permanent form. Among many works of considerable beauty –
amphitheatres of snow, labyrinths of sheet ice – is a snow house by
Rachel Whiteread and Juhani Pallasmaa. From outside it presents a
perfect cube of packed snow with a central doorway, as unadorned
as any adobe fort. But inside, lit by refracted snow light and by the
shaft of sunlight from the small doorway, the snow is richly worked.
The interior is composed of folding and apparently suspended
planes of packed snow, forming an intricate canopy overhead. At
ground level there is a plain snow bench, placed along the bottom of
a wall detailed with fluting, like the fluting of a column, but on a
cyclopean scale. Apart from the strangeness of perfect architectural
detailing in snow, the building offers the strange illusion of being
larger inside than the outer walls suggest. It is a place of transforma-
tion, like the arches of stone placed by the Inuit in Nunavut, leading
from one reality to another.16
Ice buildings can counterfeit glass and equally glass can imitate ice.
In the Getty Center in Los Angeles there are two fine examples from
different parts of late Renaissance Europe of glass carefully processed

73
Rachel Whiteread and Juhani Pallasmaa, Untitled (Inside), 2004, snow sculpture,
installed at the 2004 Rovaniemi Snow Show, Finland.
to have the appearance of ice. There is an Italian ice-glass situla from
the sixteenth century, a holy-water pail with handles.17 The surface is
treated to have the appearance of cracking ice, precisely to have the
appearance of ice that has shattered, partly thawed and then reformed
into a solid mass. The effect was repeated in the twentieth century by
the Finnish designer Arttu Brummer in his ‘Finlandia’ vase, which
went into production at the Riimhimäki Glassworks in 1945.18 The
appearance of ice, here associated with Finnish national style and
interest in ice effects in glass-making, is achieved by cutting crystal.
The sixteenth-century Italian glassmaker achieved the effect by rolling
the still-hot vessel in fragments and shards of glass. A different tech-
nique, that of dipping the still-hot vessel into cold water to produce a
finely crazed surface like thin ice that has just been cracked by a blow,
is shown on a Dutch ice-glass beaker from the turn of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.19 The best-known ice glass of twentieth-
century Finland is the Ultima Thule range of glassware designed in
1968 by Tapio Wirkkala.20 The stemmed glasses, three-footed tumblers
and jugs are all reeded as if with the evaporation of freezing liquid
within, or as if they were made out of wind-scoured ice. This glass
advances the metaphors inherent in ice and glass one stage further:
certainly the glasses themselves look as if they might be made of ice,
but they also have the effect of making any liquid in them look as if it
was cold enough to send vertical runnels of freezing condensation
down the outside of the glass.
Vessels made by rolling hot glass in glass shards, or cutting
crystal to resemble re-frozen ice, have a natural counterpart in an
ephemeral sculpture by Andy Goldsworthy made at Scaur Glen in
Dumfriesshire on 30 January 1992, described by the artist as
‘Overnight frost/ river ice/ frozen to the shadow sides of a rock/
becoming warmer/ shedding the ice’.21 The plates of ice that overlap
on the shadowed side of a grey standing boulder are thin, holding
the dim light of a misted January day only along their edges, like the
leaves of glass that form the lustres of Scandinavian chandeliers.
There is just a dust of snow or rime in the tussocky, dun grass
between the grey boulders. Goldsworthy’s small adjustment of
nature serves for a moment to cast doubt into the spectator’s mind
that the transparent substance might be ice. Since ice cannot in
nature adhere vertically in broken sheets to an upright surface, an
inevitable paradox is created – ice or glass? The same paradox
attends a work that Goldsworthy was able to make in unusually

75
cold weather conditions. This was a spiral of transparent icicles
wound around the trunk of a tree made at Glen Marlin Falls,
Dumfriesshire, on 28 December 1995.22 This sculpture made a sur-
prising appearance on the British Christmas stamps for 2003. The
extraordinary effect here is the way in which the spiral of ice holds
the winter sunlight apparently within it, standing out against the
duller background of powdery snow. The quality of light is one usu-
ally associated with optical glass or (rarely) with rock crystal. In both
these ice works, the natural material and the artificial one change
places in the spectator’s perceptions, ice being used in forms and
planes more readily associated with glass.
The glass designer James Houston, who trained in his native
Toronto and then worked as a civil administrator for the Canadian
Government, derived from his experiences in Arctic Canada a popu-
lar sense of the paradoxes of ice and glass. His work with the Inuit
setting up a co-operative in West Baffin Island and his knowledge of
Inuit art are central elements of the styles that he has developed
since joining Steuben Glass in New York in 1962. His work is poised
between the refined end of commerce and the creation of prodigy
objects, the descendents of the glass and rock-crystal objects found
in Baroque Wunderkammern. He claims that the rapidity with which
glass must be worked demands of the glassworker the swift
responses of an Arctic hunter. He sees the relation to ice as essential
to glass as a medium: glass being, like ice, a liquid that freezes to a
metal. He describes the process of the manufacture of crystal as one
of fire turning to ice. Many of his designs use glass to simulate ice
and draw on northern images and Inuit styles. There is a clear
market for these designs, for objects that use the resources of glass to
evoke the appearance of ice. (There is also, remarkably, still a flour-
ishing trade in representational ice sculpture for banquets, some of
extraordinary scale and elaboration. One London firm, Duncan
Hamilton’s, has four employees working on ice sculpture full time.)
The Canadian painter Lawren Harris (1885–1970) attached deep
symbolic significance to the iceberg, which for him was a symbol
both of spiritual power and hidden truths.

Despite its mass and presence, unlike a mountain, an iceberg is

perishable. This fact, too, had symbolic potential for Harris, given
his belief in evolution and reincarnation. The cycle of spiritual
birth, development, death, and reincarnation is mirrored in the

76
 life cycle of the iceberg. It breaks free of an Arctic glacier (equiva-
lent to the cosmic or universal soul), drifts away during its brief
individual lifespan, then dissolves into the warmer oceans of the
south, only to be returned to its starting point as rain or snow. The
iceberg, like the human soul, is powerless to escape this cosmic
cycle. It is carried toward its ultimate fate by currents it cannot
defy and to an end that is a beginning.23

This is expressed in a series of notable paintings, Icebergs, Davis

Strait, Icebergs and Mountains, Greenland and Grounded Icebergs, Disco
Bay (all painted in 1930).
Glass and ice share the quality of being deceptive, of being able
through refraction either to create images in their depths or to project
them into empty space. This is the optical basis of the whole phenom-
enon of scrying in a crystal. The polar icefields bring into being illusory
territories, spectral mountain ranges. The cabinets of curiosities of
early modern Europe reserved places of honour for mirror illusions,
for distorting and multiplying glasses. Adalgisa Lugli illustrates
three objects from the Wunderkammer of Schloss Ambras in the Tyrol
(the most prodigious, the most truly Baroque of all the surviving
chambers of marvels).24 She illustrates a faceted chalice of mirror-
ing glass multiplying miniscule reflections; a small cube of glass
that seems to have trapped within it the shadow or form of a small
human or diabolic figure (Diabolus in vitro); and a convex Venetian
mirror of the sixteenth century in the shape of a flower, repeating the
image caught within it in the central boss as well as on the surfaces
of the fourteen curved petals that radiate from it. The same study of
the Wunderkammer also reproduces a muliplying mirror (Miroir de
sorcière) with eleven circular bosses in the mirror surface, each repeat-
ing the captured image, this from the twentieth-century cabinet of
curiosities of the Parisian surrealist André Breton. In her commentary,
Lugli classifies these deceiving mirrors among objects that may be
identified by their potential to produce fear in the spectator.
It seems possible that the early medieval Scandinavian voyagers
used a refractive rock crystal as a means of navigation in the absence
of the stars or the sun. The precise nature of this sun-stone –
sólarsteinn – is unknown, and perhaps unknowable.25 The one brief
mention of it in the Saga of St Olaf simply says that this sólarsteinn
showed the position of the sun when it was obscured by clouds. It
has been suggested that such crystals as corderite, which has natural

77
polarizing characteristics, might have been the sólarsteinn of the
Vikings, since it can locate the sun within two and a half degrees, but
subsequent scholars have been sceptical about this possibility. As a
poetic idea the sólarsteinn has considerable power, the rock crystal of
the north offering a substitute for the obscured sun. The association
inevitably arises of underground starbursts of brilliant ‘Iceland spar’
in the grottoes of the eighteenth century.
The refractions and distortions of the polar ice can function like
the distorting mirrors of the chambers of marvels. Sunlight reflecting
upwards from the ice on the sea is distorted by the progressively
warmer layers of air into a simulacrum of a distant cliff. The eye is
confused further by any wind movement that will tilt the image in
the air into the appearance of mountain peaks. Francis Spufford
explains the absolute credibility of the illusion in his classic study of
polar exploration:

Seasoned explorers, vehemently insisting on what they had seen,

set down mountains and islands on their charts where there was
nothing but empty sky . . . Expeditions sent out later to verify
these new lands sometimes saw the same fata morgana, further
confusing the issue. Only by prolonging their arduous journeys,
thereby observing a constant receding of the image, did they
prove that the land was not there at all.26

A different confounding of ice and glass attends the naturally

occurring rock crystal that was anciently believed to be a kind of
super-ice. (This is reminiscent of the advertisements that used to
appear in expensive magazines for pre-atomic, utterly pure ‘fossil
ice’ hewed from the lower strata of glaciers.) St Jerome, quoting
Pliny, says that rock crystal was ‘formed by the congelation of water
in dark caverns of the mountains, where the temperature was
intensely cold so that “While a stone to the touch, it seems like water
to the eye”.’27
Sir Thomas Browne, in the first chapter of the second book of his
Vulgar Errors, shows that this belief was still current in the seven-
teenth century:

The common Opinion hath been, and still remaineth amongst us,
that Crystal is nothing else but Ice or Snow concreted, and by
duration of time, congealed beyond liquidation . . . though

78
 Crystal be found in cold countries, and where Ice remaineth long,
and the air exceedeth in cold, yet it is also found in regions where
Ice is seldom seen or soon dissolved.28

The optical properties of rock crystal are far beyond those of

primitive glass, and rather different from those of lead crystal or
optical glass. Rock crystal has the capacity to hold light within it, to
give the impression of being illuminated from within by the light
that falls upon it. Objects of rock crystal, designed to exploit its
refractive properties, as well as its icy clarity, were another staple of
the baroque Wunderkammern. The attempt to equal the translucency
and refraction of rock crystal fostered the making of ever finer glass
in Renaissance Europe. The improvements in drinking glasses led to
a distinctive moment of revived diamond-point engraving on glass,
an art that was practised in early modern Venice and London but
which reached its high point in the Netherlands. The engravings
of Anna Roemers (1584–1651) and her sister Maria Tesselschade
Roemers (1594–1649), eminent Dutch intellectuals of the seventeenth
century, make extraordinary use of their medium, the creation of a
trap for brilliant light in every scratch that the diamond makes on
the surface of the glass.29 Again it is an icy art, the catching of light
within transparency, analogous to the stars of cracking ice in low
winter sun. The poet Constantijn Huygens summarized the effect in
a single line:

Doorluchtigh, hart, bruin, broos papier, met witten Int

Translucent, hard, black, brittle paper with white ink30

The Roemers sisters combined mottoes in Latin or Dutch with fine

depictions of flowers or insects, both themselves thought of in the
symbolic language of the Renaissance as symbolic of transience. The
mottoes are usually quasi-emblematic. The glass itself represents
both conviviality and fragility, so any motto that is added becomes
inevitably a consideration of the transitory nature of pleasure. The
fragility of the glass itself adds another dimension to the meaning:
all the effort that has been put into the engraving is vulnerable to a
slip of the hand, to a moment of carelessness. The idea is near the
surface of the mind of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, a
literally fragile state, delighting in still-life paintings symbolizing
the lack of lasting of worldly things.

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 The starkest northern glass inscription is on the windowpane of a
country house near Edinburgh in Scotland. Windowpanes were
often the site for graffiti scratched with the coarse point of a rose-cut
diamond in a ring. This anonymous example, at Caroline Park in
Midlothian, seems to be a reflection on what the presumably female
author of the inscription had seen through that particular window in
the past and in the present. The words on the windowpane are a
verse commentary on the view through it, the author’s emotional
response to it, and on changes wrought by the seasons turning from
summer to winter. It is unclear if the separation that the oblique lines
seem to encode is the result of parental or political compulsion in a
troubled time. There are lines of conventional couplet poetry reflect-
ing on the apparently permanent departure of a lover:

The walks are withered all sence thou art gon

As if for thee they put their mourning on . . .
These words will never reach Silvander’s ear.31

But the whole is taken to a different level of intensity by the

appended line of prose which reads simply ‘I have done it’, with a
date. The diamond has dug deeply into the glass in that last line.
For the wealthiest inhabitants of Renaissance Europe, their
delight in transparency could be met not only by ever finer window
glass, but by chandeliers of rock crystal, exploiting to the full the
visual properties of the material (until the sixteenth century, chande-
liers had been made of polished metal). But as well as existing in
actuality, magical rock-crystal lamps were a part of Renaissance and
Baroque imaginations of the glories of antiquity, from the undying
lamp supposed to burn in the tomb of Cicero’s daughter to the won-
derful crystal lighting the underground chamber in the castle of the
Rosicrucians. The French queen Catherine de Médicis owned a
chandelier of rock crystal, and another early modern example, the
‘lion and unicorn’ chandelier, surmounted by a crown, survives at
Hampton Court. When the technology of glass manufacture devel-
oped to the point where a passable imitation of natural crystal could
be made, this crystal was used throughout Europe to imitate the rare
chandeliers of rock crystal.
The northern European countries were quick to adopt the cut-
glass chandelier for its potential to raise the light levels in winter
rooms. The aesthetic is different from the aesthetic of the first glass

80
chandeliers, which were made in Venice, which very rarely have cut
prisms or brilliants. Their effect rather is of a sculpture of ice, some-
times of coloured ice floating in the air. The wonder evoked by old
Murano chandeliers is that of apparent weightlessness, spun glass,
not refraction and glitter, as in the extraordinary eighteenth-century
chandelier of entwined fishes at the Villa Widman on the Brenta,
where the ingenious use of hollow-glass forms catches the light to
create, hanging in defiance of gravity, what seems a solid sculpture
of ice and light.
Some of the most prodigious winter rooms of the north are in
Russia, where the chandeliers are an essential part of the aesthetic of
the alternating abundance and paucity of light. At the Peterhof in St
Petersburg the dining room is deliberately wintry, and the chande-
liers of the throne-room have the leaf-shaped lustres found across
northern Europe:

An extraordinary white dining room, blinds drawn against the

sun, green upholstery, green curtains, even the Wedgwood dinner
service green, tones of green and white, wintry and ghostly-
enchanted: the aquamarine-tinted crystals of the great chande-
liers . . . And, of a sudden, the throne room, vast and white; at
both ends dark canvas, on both sides windows; and above,
twelve big chandeliers whose leafy crystals, suspended in their
autumn fall, are glowing clear above, pale, then intense violet
below.32

And at Pavlovsk the chandeliers play with trapped light and colour:

The domed Italian Hall, where coffering in the apses is overlaid

with great shells . . . and here is a sensational chandelier, with
Prince of Wales’ feathers whose every frond is a separate crystal.
Then, in a wing, a curving picture gallery has chandeliers with
opaque turquoise glass at their hearts.

The chandeliers of Scandinavia are as essential to the overall aes-

thetic effect of the rooms as in Russia: the visual source of light is
equally important. The earliest Scandinavian chandeliers lacked the
virtuosic play of colours in the Russian examples or the fluid virtu-
osity in twisted glass of the Venetian glassmakers. They are simple
constructions with glass leaves on a visible metal frame. These leaf

81
lustres are not yet cut into prisms but are carefully cut around the
edges to trap the light, and sometimes engraved with a star to create
further reflective surfaces. The lower finial of even the earliest
Swedish chandeliers is usually a ball of hollow glass, sometimes
reeded or, more usually, faceted with a series of surface cuts.
The effect of these early chandeliers (and versions continued to be
made for centuries, with ever more sophisticated glass) is extraord-
inary: they are usually large in scale for the space that they occupy.
Their presence is notable in all lights: if illuminated, the facetings in
the ball at the bottom of the chandelier multiply small images of the
room and the chandelier itself, as in the Miroir de sorcière that once
belonged to André Breton.33 In summer, the edges of the leaves of
glass hold the light from the windows like a tree of ice illuminated
from within. Even in the flat light of the Scandinavian autumn the
chandeliers have a ghost lustre, seen against the windows down
long enfilades of grey-panelled rooms. From below, indeed, the effect
is not unlike walking under the branches of a frozen tree with rimy
leaves and icicles holding the light.
As well as chandeliers, the northern countries have long manu-
factured girandoles, candelabra with faceted lustres to catch and multi-
ply the reflections of the candle flames. In their earliest form, these
are like trees of metal with a candle-holder at the end of each branch,
the whole structure hung with faceted glass leaves.34 More sophisti-
cated versions, like the chandeliers of the neo-Classical period, have
a central stem (topped with a lustre, a star, a gilt crescent moon) and
three hoops of graduated size encircling it (like the poles with hori-
zontal garlands set up in Scandinavia on midsummer night). The
candle-holders are fixed to these hoops, from which hang icicles or
spears of faceted crystal. The simplest girandoles of the Gustavian
period take the form of a cone of strings of faceted glass with candle-
holders on either side. These echo the long flowing lines of linked
lustres that make up the ‘bag’ chandeliers of the Empire period.
The effect when the candles are lit is to maximize their flames as the
different degrees of prismatic light are multiplied, developing differ-
ent intensities, different variations of colour, as they refract through
the strings of prisms as through curtains of icicles. If the girandoles
stand in front of a mirror, the effect is deepened, since the colours of
refracted light vary infinitely in reflection.
The British equivalent to these girandoles are the mantelpiece
vases often of deeply cut Bohemian glass, known simply as ‘lustres’.

82
Occasionally these have a place for a candle at the top, but usually
they are designed to hold spills or flowers. From the overhanging
rim of the vase are suspended long prisms of crystal, either plain
rectangles of triangular section or faceted and pointed ice spears.
These are designed to pick up and colour the light from adjacent
candles or from lamplight in the room. Like all these faceted candle-
holders, they stir to the draughts created by the movements of air
around the fire.
In the Scandinavian countries even the gazebos and summer
garden houses on the shores and promontories of the sea inlets
around Stockholm are furnished with chandeliers or with oil lamps
with hanging crystal prisms. These little structures, often octagonal,
with windows in every face, must have been of great beauty, viewed
by night from the water, when the chandeliers were lit, glimmering
against the half-dark sky. Even in winter when the surrounding
waters are frozen and snow-covered there is an extraordinary charm
to these small buildings, since the pendant lustres of the chandeliers
just visible through the frosted windows echo the icicles that fringe
the eaves.
Only in the north are rooms disposed so as to seize the midwin-
ter light. In their different ways, the Scottish castle room, with the
boards and beams of its ceiling richly painted with ochre and red,
and the Scandinavian manor house, with its grey panelling and
white ceilings, are designed to work in the light that is thrown
upwards by snow. At midwinter, the double function of the prisms
of chandeliers (or of the rustling groves of glass leaves and faceted
spheres of the chandeliers of Scandinavia) is to cast fragments of
rainbows about the room from the low sun or from the refracted
sunlight. An icy consolation, a diminished and domestic echo of
the aurora borealis.

the north in the 1930s: auden and ravilious

The compass needle of the 1930s pointed unequivocally northwards.

The 1920s had looked to the south: to the Hôtel Welcome at
Villefranche, to the urbane magic of Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus in his
Mediterranean villa. At the decade’s end, in April 1930, Evelyn
Waugh was photographed strolling on the quay at Villefranche, but
by 1935 even he felt the compass-pull of the decade sufficiently to
join an Oxford University reconnaissance expedition to Spitzbergen,

83
on which he very nearly died.35 ‘In our continental villas, mixing
cocktails for a cad’, was W. H. Auden’s sour summary of how the
previous ten years had been spent. This line is from a sad, indecisive
poem, full of images of a wrecked northern industrial landscape,
‘Get there if you can and see the land you were once proud to own’,
written on Easter Sunday, 1930.36
North was the inevitable destination for the 1930s, given the two
leading preoccupations of the writers of the period: social concern
focusing on the troubled and decaying industries of the north of
England; and that complex of survivor guilt and hero-worship felt
by many members of the Auden generation towards fathers and
older brothers who had fought, or were killed, in the First World
War. This bred a perverse obsession with sport, climbing, aviation
and neurotic ‘tests of manhood’, as well as a liking for the remorse-
less heroes and austere landscapes of the thriller. Such thrillers as
John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps – genre fiction highly influential
on the poets of the decade – are also full of northern settings, man-
hunts in wild country. The Forth Road Bridge, unmentioned in
Buchan’s original text, becomes in Hitchcock’s 1935 film of the book
an important metaphor for the divide between north and south.
Again and again in the 1930s the north was equated with authen-
ticity or heroism. Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, which in its earliest
form included documentary photographs, was published in 1936.
The north (northern England or Scotland) forms the setting for most
of the documentaries made by the GPO film unit, which employed at
different times in the decade many of its leading writers and musi-
cians. Auden’s most famous documentary text for them, for the film
Night Mail of 1935, begins with the imitation of the sound of the train
evoked in the repeated word ‘North, North, North, North’.
Auden’s own trajectory through the 1930s was a continuous
movement northwards, from the Cumberland and County Durham
of his adolescent holidays, through his time as a schoolmaster in
Scotland, to his journey to the ‘sacred ground’ of Iceland in the
summer of 1936. Following Auden’s lead, Cecil Day-Lewis and
Stephen Spender wrote of the journey to magnetic north, of high-
land travel and polar exploration. The essentially 1930s project,
Mass-Observation, looked to northern England to make particular
studies of Bolton and Blackpool, documented by Tom Harrison’s
proto-scientific observers, but also documented in painting and pho-
tography by Auden’s friends William Coldstream and Humphrey

84
Photograph perhaps by W. H. Auden, Brundholme Mine, 1921.

Spender.37 To the 1930s generation of writers and painters the indus-

trial landscape was suddenly wholly visible:

Slattern the tenements on sombre hills,

And gaunt in valleys the square-windowed mills.38

North was central to Auden’s work from the very beginning. His
north is a complex structure, made up of obsessions with mining and
geology, Icelandic sagas, Old English poetry, personal experience of
the north of England and private mythologies about it. His father was
an amateur Old Northern scholar of some distinction, who appears to
have had a reading knowledge of the Scandinavian languages and
who wrote fluently of the Viking archaeology of the Danelaw. There
is no doubt that the annual Saga Book of the Viking Society, and W. G.
Collingwood’s informed historical reconstructions of the era of the
Vikings in the Lake District, were on the shelves in the homes of
Auden’s boyhood.39 This personal mythology of north derives from
Auden’s own exploration of the Pennines and fantasies of desire
woven around two Oxford contemporaries, Bill McElwee and
Gabriel Carrit, both athletes who had attended the austere public

85
school at Sedbergh amongst the fells near Kendal. Thrillers and spy
fiction were also crucial. The essential thriller text for Auden was
John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps with the revelatory northward
journey of its mining engineer hero, its narratives of pursuit through
lonely places and its disorienting sense of a society infiltrated by an
enemy to the extent that nobody can be accepted to be what they
seem. (This last theme was very much taken up in The Orators, with
its preoccupation with the difficulty of identifying ‘The Enemy’.)
Katherine Bucknell’s edition of the Juvenilia offers impeccable
access to Auden’s earliest poems, so that it is possible to see themes
and places circling and forming until suddenly the whole complex
of enthusiasms and imaginations comes to poetic maturity with
the first verse fragments later incorporated into the Pennine saga-
charade, Paid on Both Sides (1928).40 Auden came to individuality as a
poet unusually early, and his contemporaries adopted his northern
mythologies with the enthusiasm of recognition. The geographies of
early Auden have been traced in Alan Myers’s and Robert Forsythe’s
W.H. Auden, Pennine Poet published in 1999 at Nenthead, high in the
North Pennines, lying just below Auden’s beloved ‘watershed’. This
is so exact and complete an account of Auden’s relation to northern
English place that it opens the possibility of a wider consideration of
Auden’s uses of the idea of north.
Writing in the 1970s, Christopher Isherwood thought of north-
ness and upland country as the essence of early Auden:

The scenery of Auden’s early poetry is, almost invariably, moun-

tainous. As a boy he visited Westmoreland, the Peak District of
Derbyshire and Wales. For urban scenery he preferred the indus-
trial Midlands; particularly in districts where an industry is
decaying. His romantic travel-wish was always towards the
north. He could never understand how anybody could long for
the sun, the blue sky, the palm-trees of the south. His favourite
weather was autumnal: high wind and driving rain. He loved
industrial ruins, a disused factory or an abandoned mill . . . He
has always had a special feeling for caves and mines.41

The northward orientation began early: Richard Davenport-

Hynes’s excellent biography of Auden records: ‘When he was young
his favourite tale was Hans Christian Andersen’s Ice Maiden, the
story of a lonely boy who climbs alone into the high places and is

86
overwhelmed by the glacier personified as the Ice-maiden.’42 The
boy with the glacier as lover reappears as Ransom, the mountaineer
hero of The Ascent of F6, in love with his own self-image, with the ice
world, with his devouring mother. Auden’s first apprehensions of
north, from untitled verses of 1924, are simple geographical ones:
recollections of holidays on the moors and the markers that identify
the beginning of a distinctively northern landscape: ‘No hedges
along the field, but grey/ Stone walls again.’43
By 1926 he was writing about the northernmost landscapes of
England.44 But while he had already recognized that this landscape
was one of the things that caused him to be a poet, he had as yet only
Georgian descriptive pieties to offer as a response to it. In the last
months of 1927 he broke through into his northern individuality. In
the poem that begins ‘Because sap fell away . . .’, there is a distillation
of Pennine weather and Sedbergh sport with saga overtones. Auden
first visited Sedbergh in December 1927, and the piece makes spe-
cific reference to ‘ the lower changing-room’ of Lupton House at the
school.45 In these verses so intensely reflexive of personal experience
as to be virtually encoded, there are also the first stirrings of Auden’s
superimposition of this specific English north onto the Old North of
the sagas. There is suggestion of a fight extending beyond the rugby
match that is the ostensible subject of the poem: night ‘attacks’, and
there is a clear echo of saga phrasing in the lines

Love, is this love, the notable forked one,

Riding away from the farm, the ill word said, fought at the frozen
dam?46

This poem is in itself fragmented beyond fragmentation, an incoher-

ent kaleidoscope of northern images. Public schoolboys are shad-
owed by saga heroes, and a stark northern diction opens up the
poetics of remote northern pasts.
By January 1928, in the lines that begin ‘Tonight, when a full
storm surrounds the house’, the world of the ‘Audenesque’ north is
fully in focus. Revenants of the public school athletes (Auden’s unat-
tainable objects of desire) who have failed their tests of manhood in
missions across the watershed between Alston Moor and Weardale
pause in the door of the mine-owner’s house. They seem to be alive
but, as in the Icelandic sagas, the line between the living and the
dead is indistinct. The revenants appear with weather out of the

87
north, snow and high winds. This is recognizable as the first mature
Auden poem, idiosyncratic in subject matter and diction:

To-night when a full storm surrounds the house

And the fire creaks, the many come to mind,
Sent forward in the thaw with anxious marrow;
For such might now return with a bleak face,
An image pause, half-lighted at the door . . . 47

Snow and ghosts appear together in another Pennine and

Sedberghian poem written in March 1928. ‘Taller today, we remem-
ber similar evenings’48 is one of the first to survive into the commer-
cially published collection of 1930, which is a celebration of time
passed with Gabriel Carritt in a Pennine valley overshadowed by an
imaginary ‘glacier’ out of Auden’s boyhood geological and fairytale
reading. The poem hints at fantastic narratives, quests and journeys
into the north through uplands haunted by the ghosts of those who
have failed.

Nights come bringing the snow; and the dead howl

Under the headlands in their windy dwelling . . .49

The short verse-play Paid on Both Sides of 1928 is a startlingly

northern text in plot, setting and diction: a saga-narrative like an
Icelandic blood-feud between two mine-owning families in the
Pennines, spanning two generations of Nowers and Shaws.

The saga-world is a schoolboy world, with its feuds, its practical

jokes, its dark threats conveyed in puns and riddles and under-
statements: ‘I think this day will end unluckily for some; but
chiefly for those who expect least harm.’ I once remarked to
Auden that the atmosphere of Gisli the Outlaw very much
reminded me of our schooldays. He was pleased with the idea.50

Paid on Both Sides has its origins and its quirky unforgettability in
Auden’s perception of a generic confluence of two northern genres,
saga and thriller. He conflates the Iceland of the sagas and the
Scotland of Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps into his familiar North
Pennine moors.51 The feud is played out with geographical preci-
sion: the Nowers are at Rookhope on the County Durham side of the

88
watershed, the Shaws at Garrigill on the Cumbrian side. The highest
moors and the failing lead workings are the battleground of the
young men on both sides.
The most neglected aspect of Auden’s preoccupation with north-
ern things is his interest in mining and geology. From childhood, he
had delighted in George Macdonald’s The Princess and the Goblin,
with its narrative of a castle in an imaginary northland and the
goblin-haunted mines that lie beneath it.52 The passage of autobiog-
raphy from Letter to Lord Byron, in which Auden asserts that his ado-
lescent passions were not literary but mechanical and geological, has
often been quoted. Read as a whole, it links these obsessions to an
interest in Scandinavian mythology:

With northern myths my little brain was laden,

With deeds of Thor and Loki and such scenes
My favourite tale was Andersen’s Ice Maiden;
But better far than any kings or queens
I liked to see and know about machines:
And from my sixth until my sixteenth year
I thought myself a mining engineer.

The mine I always pictured was for lead . . . 53

Following a hint in Myers and Forsyth, I have examined Auden’s

adolescent treasure, his copy of Postlethwaite’s Mines and Mining in
the English Lake District, which he had with him at the family cottage
at Threlkeld, and which is now in Carlisle Public Library.54 This
book, which bears one or two minor marginalia in Auden’s already
distinctive hand, as well as an ownership signature on the flyleaf
with the date 1921 (Auden would have been sixteen), has also two
leaves of pasted-in photographs of mines and machinery taken pos-
sibly by Auden himself. I would contend that this book is more than
a footnote: it is rather the embodiment of the northern landscape of
his adolescent imagination in a visible form. Here are the pictures
that he knew by heart, here are the names of mines and places that
were the night litanies of his adolescence.
As well as pasted-in photographs, there are also plates in the text,
all illustrating mine workings in upland country, precisely the world
of Auden’s early poetry. Postlethwaite’s plate 11 shows a quarry in
remote hill country with a track following the streams in the valley

89
bottom to a nick in the hills, beyond which is bright water and a fur-
ther range of hills. If we look at this plate and then consider Auden’s
sonnet ‘Control of the passes’ from the Poems of 1930, there is a very
strong sense of confluence. The sonnet offers an allegorical narrative
of a ‘spy’ who is also a surveyor and a mining engineer, who comes
into a new northern district as reporting agent of an undefined
organization. He is betrayed, captured, and will, the last line implies
with its quotation from the Old English ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’, be
shot. This is generally read as an allegory for the psychological damage
attendant on repression. What is specific here is the relation of the
plates of mountain workings to the primary narrative of the poem.
The places in this book, treasured and pored over, are the physical
northern locations for Auden’s metaphysical narrative of spying and
betrayal. We see literally the kind of pass that Auden meant, the kind
of valley that might have proved a good place to site a dam:

Control of the passes was, he saw, the key

To this new district, but who would get it . . .55

In this book of geology and mining, the explanation of the other-

wise mysterious glaciers that inhabit the northern England of the
early poems can also be found. This scatter of references has seemed
to complicate the otherwise specific locations of these early works.
In Paid on Both Sides the quatrains in the brief love scene end with
John Nower’s haunted anticipations of disaster:

The ice sheet moving down,

The fall of an old house.56

The mysterious threat of the permafrost moving down from the sum-
mits. Similarly, ‘Taller today . . . ’, the upland valley which is remem-
bered is positioned as ‘far from the glacier.’57 (Indeed glaciers remain
in Auden’s mind as late as the collaborative libretto of Elegy for Young
Lovers, which has a glacier and its victim as a mainspring of the plot.)58
Postlethwaite invites his reader to imagine the formation of the
Lake District strata by asking them to imagine familiar valleys,
including the Threlkeld valley, as they were during the Ice Age. This
is a passage of accidental literary power: because of the use of
familiar, modern names, there is an unavoidable suggestion of the
familiar landscape of central Cumberland overwhelmed by ice:

90
 The whole of this material has doubtless been brought down by
glaciers, or rather by a continuous ice-sheet flowing northward
from Clough Head and Wolf Crag . . . About a quarter-of-
a-mile north-west of Threlkeld Station the rivers Beur and
Glenderamakin . . . During the greatest intensity of the glacial
epoch, the pressure of the ice must have been very great in the
valley of the Greta; in addition to the sheets flowing from the
northern end of Helvellyn, and from the summit of Blencathra on
the opposite side of the valley, glaciers also flowed down the
vales of St. John and Naddle.59

This seems to explain the glaciers in Paid on Both Sides as well as

the glacier in ‘Taller today. . .’. Edward Mendelson, in his fine Early
Auden, picks up the chain of ice images (engendered by The Ice
Maiden as well as by these descriptions of the Ice Age) that runs
through Auden’s poems of the 1930s, focusing on the verse that
begins ‘The string’s excitement, the applauding drum . . . ’ and par-
ticularly on the way in which the sexual excitement with which the
poem opens freezes by the end into stasis, with no possibility of
change: ‘Massive and taciturn years, the Age of Ice’.60
In the course of the 1930s, as Auden himself attained an
extraordinary position of influence for a poet in his twenties, the
north remained the lodestone of his works. The Orators, his ‘English
Study’ written in 1931, is woven out of ideas and places taken from
thriller fiction. Its action takes place in Lowland Scotland and the
Pennines; its styles make constant reference to Old English and Old
Northern poetics. Its central figure, ‘The Airman’, a leader of impres-
sionable men, the infiltrator of a quiet resort town, is the projector of
a desperate mission (with disturbing undertones both of the Buchan
thriller and of emergent Fascism), which ends in his death or suicide.
The odes at the end of the collection refer to northern places: wintry
Germany, an unnamed hotel between the sea and the moors that is a
place of stasis, almost an otherworld.
Much of the first section of The Orators is taken up by the recollec-
tions of an anonymous and devoted follower of the operations
undertaken by the Airman, referred to only as ‘Him’ with an upper-
case initial ‘H’. Northern places (‘Dalehead’, ‘Vadill’, ‘Stubba’,
‘Smirnadale’) are explicitly mentioned. ‘The Airman’s Alphabet’, a
part of the central journal, is a transformation of Icelandic poetics, a
runic alphabet of airmanship, the world of T. E. Lawrence in his

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avatar as Aircraftman Ross rewritten into the idiom of the Runic
poems. This interpolation suggests that the Airman, in addition to
being someone (at least in his own deluded mind) who has most of the
characteristics of an undercover thriller-protagonist, is also thinking of
himself as a Norse saga hero. The poetic parallels are close: the alpha-
betic keyword is followed by a gnomic triad of kennings or poetic simi-
les for it. The Icelandic original has, for example, this definition of ice:

Ísser árbörkr
ok unnar pak
ok feigra manna fár
glacies jöfurr.

Ice – bark of rivers

and roof of the wave
and destruction of the doomed

and of hail,

Hagall er kaldakorn
ok krapadrífa
ok snáka sótt
grando hildingr

Hail – cold grain

and shower of sleet
and sickness of serpents61

Which Auden echoes precisely: ‘flying’, for example, being defined

in the rune,

Habit of hawks
and unholy hunting
and ghostly journey.

and ‘wireless’ glossed as

Sender of signal
and speaker of sorrow
and news from nowhere.

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The definition of ‘storm’ plays a game of conflation by giving a loose
translation of three lines from the Old English poem of The Wanderer as
the triad of images.62 The effect of these runes in context is to make the
Airman’s monomania more inscrutable, more disturbing. There is a
malign shadow of the use to which the National Socialists were to put
the literatures and mythologies of the north, and Auden seems already
aware of the possibility.
Otherwise, the apprehension of northness in The Orators very
much follows Auden’s formulation of north as ‘the direction for
adventures’: he develops the delinquent male poetry implicit in
the wilderness journeys of the thriller. The recollections of the
Airman’s disciple in the ‘Argument’ in the opening section are rep-
resentative:

Execution of spy in the nettled patch at the back of the byre . . .The
fatty smell of drying clothes, smell of cordite in a wood, and the
new moon seen along the barrel of a gun.63

The settings of these recollections are insistently of the north:

Daylight, striking the eye from far-off roofs, why did you blind
us, think: we who on the snow-line were in love with death,
despised vegetation, we forgot His will; who came to us in an
extraordinary dream, calming the plunging dangerous horses,
greeting our arrival on a reedy shore. His sharing from His own
provisions after the blizzard’s march.64

Thriller motifs recur in the fifth Ode, in which it is not possible to

discern absolutely if the protagonists are schoolboys, soldiers or
agents. The snowline and the death wish return to conclude the
poem in a northward journey inflected with something of the tone of
narcissistic anticipation of death that Auden found so disturbing in
the German songbook that he played through in Iceland.

All leave is cancelled to-night; we must say goodbye.

We entrain at once for the North; we shall see in the morning
The headlands we’re doomed to attack; snow down to the tide-
line . . .
We shall lie out there.65

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 The strangest northern invention of The Orators is in the third of
these concluding Odes, which is about an afterwards, almost an
otherworld, the place where the agents go to wait for death. There is
some suggestion that this assembly of men at a remote hotel may be
a last attempt to rally the followers of the dead Airman for a last
attack. If so, the attack never happens. Nothing happens. Exile is
permanent in a landscape that seems to combine elements of
Scotland and Scandinavia – ‘frozen fjord’, ‘junction on the moor’ –
with the recollected rural-industrial north of England as expressed
in the desolate lines,

Watching through windows the wastes of evening,

The flare of foundries at fall of the year . . .66

The condition of stasis, entrapment in the schoolboy discourse of

‘charades and ragging’, gradually appears, as the poem progresses,
to be one from which there is no escape: ‘these grounds are for good’,
‘this life is to last, when we leave we leave all’. This poem seems a
summary of, and a farewell to, the nexus of ideas that brought the
early poems into being: remote places, the thriller, the ancient alliter-
ative versification of the north. Like the earlier sequence of poems,
from ‘Tonight, when a full storm surrounds the house’ onwards, the
living adventurers are attended by the revenants who come with the
snow:

then riders pass

Some afternoons
In snowy lanes
Shut in by wires
Surplus from wars.67

The spectres of the fathers and elder brothers killed in the war, the
ancestors for whom no sacrifice can ever be great enough, here make
their last appearance in Auden’s poetry, although they would haunt
the collaborative play, The Ascent of F6.
By 1935 Auden had begun to reject the thriller plots and sporting
heroics of his early poetry, and came to see most forms of heroic
endeavour as neurotic, suspect, diseased. In 1936, with The Ascent of
F6 already finished, he made his celebrated journey to Iceland, the
place of origin of much of his 1930s poetic (as well as, possibly, of the

94
Auden family). In Letters from Iceland, which appeared the following
year, he expressed doubts about the social ethics of the sagas,
expressing no surprise that they appealed to the German National
Socialists. He continued to admire them as literature, and later made
translations from the Poetic Edda, a medieval compilation of the oral
literature of Iceland, but he made little further use of this Icelandic
material in his own work.
In Isherwood’s autobiographical novel of 1938, Lions and Shadows,
he explains the polar metaphor underlying much of his and Auden’s
collaborative play, The Ascent of F6. He uses the phrase ‘The North-
West Passage’ to refer to perverse action, to otiose heroics, preferring
the notoriously dangerous Arctic North-West Passage to the simple
action of crossing ‘broad America’ in the temperate zone.

But ‘America’ is just what the truly weak man, the neurotic hero,
dreads. And so, with immense daring, with an infinitely greater
expenditure of nervous energy, money, time, physical and mental
resources, he prefers to attempt the huge northern circuit, the
laborious, terrible North-West Passage, avoiding life; and his end,
if he does not turn back, is to be lost for ever in the blizzard and
the ice.68

To use the phrase ‘North-West Passage’ to signify pointless exertion

is part of Isherwood’s sustained defiance of the conventions into
which he had been born. The North-West Passage still had a talis-
manic force for the British in the 1930s, as Francis Spufford explains
in his study of polar exploration:

The North-West passage had, in fact, its own intangible magic as

an idea, in the shape of a connection to the series of Elizabethan
voyagers who had first searched for it, and who offered a national
tradition of endurance and sea-doggery the nineteenth century
English were eager to claim. But the North Pole outbid it – as an
end to the round earth, as an intelligible terminus of effort.69

Isherwood’s symbolic application of the North-West Passage is

almost a summary of the plot of The Ascent of F6, with its neurotic
protagonist, the ace climber Michael Forsyth Ransom. His name
bears examination: he is ‘Michael’ for Auden’s friend Michael
Roberts, climber and poet. His surname identifies him as a false

95
redeemer, a hero whose actions cannot help or deliver the passive
mass of newspaper readers who follow his progress. Indeed he is
himself in urgent need of ‘ransom’ or deliverance. His middle name
seems to be there to function as an echo-chamber half-rhyme to the
name of the dead polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott.
Scott’s cult was still flourishing in the 1930s. Its shrine, the Scott
Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, was built in 1933–4 by Sir
Herbert Baker. It is the fane of a secular saint, an index of the power
of Scott’s posthumous reputation. (It now functions as a progressive
and comprehensive resource for polar studies.) Within are two
domes painted with the maps of the two poles, the maps surrounded
by the gilded names of the explorers of the absolutes of north and
south. The façade has a central bust of Scott himself, below a heroic
inscription, composed by Sir Herbert Fisher, which takes up the
whole of the deep entablature with five resonant, questionable
words:

QVAESIVIT ARCANA POLI VIDET DEI

He sought the secrets of the pole so that he might see the hidden
things of God.

Secular canonization can barely go any further. Scott’s last expedi-

tion was a failure, a waste of human life: there is no reason to assume
that he died in any particular state of enlightenment or exaltation. It
is the need to believe in Scott that the inscription dramatizes, the
national need to believe in a hero who could go forth and map,
explore, in some sense, possess the snowbound formlessness of the
poles. It is precisely this need that Auden and Isherwood drama-
tized in The Ascent of F6, with its juxtaposition of the disastrous
climbing expedition with the public reception of it.
Throughout F6 there is a shadowing of Scott’s last journey in the
very nature of Ransom’s expedition – his climbing of the mountain
F6 has political backing; he is in competition with another expedi-
tion from a hostile nation. This link is also present in The Ascent of F6
as a half-buried reference. Among the motives of the various mem-
bers of the expedition, the botanist Edward Lamp is driven (eventu-
ally to his death in an avalanche) by his search for a rare plant, which
is called in Auden’s and Isherwood’s dog-beneath-the-skin-Latin
Polus naufragia. This translates as ‘polar shipwreck’, an evocation of

96
the North-West Passage, the lost Franklin expedition, and, again, of
Caspar David Friedrich’s Arctic Shipwreck in Hamburg. (Auden
could well have seen the painting in April 1929, when he was in
Hamburg with his lover, Gerhardt Meyer.)
The mountain expedition is also a polar expedition in Isherwood’s
specific sense of being a vain and wasteful expenditure of energy
and courage. Although the expedition is located in a non-place that
is a Himalayan mountain complete with Lamasery transplanted to a
coffee-growing country apparently in Africa, there is an echo of the
long English love affair with the ice. The association is also made by
the passive couple at home in England who are the following the
broadcast fortunes of the F6 expedition:

Turn off the wireless, we are tired of descriptions of travel;

We are bored by the exploits of amazing heroes;
We do not wish to be heroes, nor are we likely to travel.
We shall not penetrate the Arctic Circle
And see the Northern Lights flashing far beyond Iceland . . . 70

The situation of Ransom in the opening scene, on the summit of

Pillar Rock in the Lake District, has a specific undercurrent of refer-
ence to those who died in the First World War. Ransom shares with
the Airman of The Orators a good part of the curse of Lawrence of
Arabia, but his soliloquy on the summit of Pillar Rock is further
weighted by the proximity of the memorial to the mountaineers
killed in the war.
Ransom’s first soliloquy is about virtue and knowledge, about
himself as a moral being in the eye of eternity: but already there is a
problem with power, it is debatable whether he is exalted or merely
isolated by his elevation. The valleys with their ‘hungry and cheer-
ful’ tourists, radiate from ‘the rocky hub on which I sit’:

Beyond the Isle of Man, behind the towers of Peel Castle, the sun
slides now towards the creasing sea; and it is into a Wastwater
utterly in shadow that the screes now make their unhalting
plunge . . .71

But he sits there, accursed and cursing, despising those below him
and cursing the hour of his own birth, significantly identifying the
moment of fall with the moment when the child can cry ‘mama’,

97
cursing his own inadequacy, anticipating that one of the play’s
(numerous) alternative endings in which his body lies dead on the
summit of the mountain, potentially food for the vermin. He ends
this soliloquy with the anticipation of his own body being ‘to crows
and larvae a gracious refuge’.72 This is the extreme manifestation of
survivor guilt as motive for action.
His soliloquy seems aware of, almost a parody of, the words
inscribed upon, and spoken at the dedication of, the war memorial
placed on the summit of Great Gable by the Fell and Rock climbing
club. In 1923 they donated more than a 1,000 acres of land above
1,500 feet to the National Trust in memory of their members who
had died. Ransom is climbing on this land at the opening of the play.
At the dedication of this memorial in 1924, Geoffrey Winthrop
Young spoke idealistically of the dead climbers; his words are the
opposite of the darkness that fills Ransom’s soliloquy:

By this ceremony we consecrate a twofold remembrance; in token

that these men gave their mortality of manhood for a redemption
of earthly freedom, this rock stands, a witness, perishable also in
the onset of time, that this realm of mountain earth is, in their
honour, free . . . we commit today, not in bronze, but in unalter-
able faith, our thought of their triumph in the spirit to these
spaces of power and light.73

In this reading and in the gesture of donation, the dead, heroic

elder brothers are the good tutelars of the rocks that are given freely
to all in their memory. They are the antithesis of Auden’s hungry
ghosts above the snowline. But in Ransom’s soliloquy self-loathing
spreads out into a disdainful indifference towards the survival or
happiness of the people who fill the valleys below. A later soliloquy
(which also seems conscious of the wording of the plaque on Great
Gable) is fraught with the image of the mountains in the country of
the dead, peopled by the dead climbers (Ransom is addressing a
skull, found on the high slopes, as ‘Master’):

Imagination sees the ranges in the Country of the Dead, where

those to whom a mountain is a mother find an eternal play-
ground . . .

Then follows the litany of the names of the dead, ending with the

98
self-hating ‘in the shadow of whose achievement we pitch our mis-
erable tent’.74
In the end it is a malign ghost, his destroying mother, who awaits
Ransom in the summit of the mountain. His death is a regression, as
the phantasm sings him to sleep, a lullaby out of the world of north-
ern fairytale:

Reindeer are coming to drive you away

Over the snow on an ebony sleigh . . .

with the familiar northern stars overhead:

The pole star is shining, bright the Great Bear,

Orion is watching, high up in the air . . . 75

With Ransom’s death, the 1930s cycle of ideas of the violent north
in Auden’s work came to an end. Encouraged by Isherwood, he
moved away from the mythologies of his early maturity. Isherwood
was the first to dismiss this mythology (as in the end he dismissed
all English myths that stood in the way of his freedom). By 1940 both
Auden and Isherwood had chosen to refuse the North-West Passage.
By 1938 Auden had calmly turned his back on Europe: he and
Isherwood sailed for the United States in the first days of 1939, well
before European war became inevitable.
While he remained in England, the north remained the central
theme of Auden’s work, north the atmosphere in which it moved,
and the moors around Alston in the very north of England remained
to the end of his life the landscape of his earthly paradise: ‘One must
have a proper moral sense about the points of the compass; North
must seem the “good” direction, the way towards heroic adven-
tures, South the way to ignoble ease and decadence.’76 He wrote this
in America in the 1950s, in an article advising tourists in Britain to
spend six days exploring the Pennine massif. He elaborated the point
in another magazine article from the 1940s:

My feelings have been oriented by the compass as far back as I can

remember. Though I was brought up on both, Norse mythology
has always appealed to me infinitely more than Greek; Hans
Andersen’s The Snow Queen and George Macdonald’s The Princess
and the Goblin were my favourite fairy stories, and years before I

99
Eric Ravilious, Norway, 1940, 1940, watercolour.

ever went there, the North of England was the Never-Never land of
my dreams. Nor did those feelings finally disappear when I finally
did; to this day Crewe Junction marks the wildly exciting frontier
where the alien South ends and the North, my world, begins.
North and South are the foci of two sharply contrasted clusters
of images and emotions . . . North – cold, wind, precipices, glaci-
ers, caves, heroic conquest of dangerous obstacles, whales, hot
meat and vegetables, concentration and production, privacy . . . 77

Place was crucial to the Auden of the 1930s; the North Pennines
formed for life his idea of the paradisal landscape. (A map of Alston
Moor hung above his American worktable.) He affected the places
that he wrote about, to the extent that certain landscapes, certain kinds
of north, certain juxtapositions of townscape and water still carry the
association of ‘the Audenesque’. Limestone moors, high fields
enclosed by stone walls, lonely pubs, upland farms, isolated junction-

100
stations. All quarries and gravel pits. The mine owner’s house in wild
country, all cultivated or inhabitable land close to wild country.
All sites of decayed or moribund industry. Abandoned machinery,
dumps for wrecked vehicles. Forges, mills, industrial villages in the
Pennines. Chimneys in woods, cut-stone mine entrances, ventilation
shafts on high slopes. Gritstone arches, washing floors, waterwheels.
The public school in the market town under the fells. Playing fields,
changing rooms. Canals, aerodromes, command rooms with maps
tacked to boarded walls. Shooting lodges, remote ‘sporting’ hotels.
Piers, ferries, landing-stages. Stations, waiting-rooms, railways, all
points of departure, especially at night. Lights reflected in water,
islands of light in frosty dusk. Sailings for the northern isles.

ii

There is a sense in which, without diminishing his integrity as an

individual, the life and work of the painter Eric Ravilious (1903–1942)

Francis Towne, The Mer de Glace, 1793, watercolour. Towne’s Alpine water-
colours provided the British watercolourists of the 1920s and 1930s with a
repertory of techniques for painting snow and ice, and implanted in Ravilious
the desire to paint in the far north.

101
can be read as running in parallel to Auden’s mythologies of the
1930s. A handsome tennis player, he lived in the country throughout
the decade painting un-peopled, very English, landscapes with hints
of haunting and infiltration. When the war came, he was gazetted
as a war artist and painted airfields and control rooms, travelling
northwards, requesting his final posting to the furthest northern
sphere of operations, until his plane vanished from the air off
Iceland in September 1942. In the last two years of his life he
achieved a vision of the 73rd parallel; he broke through imagina-
tively into a northern otherworld; and he would have gone further
north yet, prevented only by his untimely death.78
Like Auden, Ravilious had an idea of north that he carried with
him all his adult life. This idea of north was fostered by books on the
Arctic and on polar explorers, as might be expected in an Englishman
of his generation, but also by active collecting of nineteenth-century
and earlier material on polar exploration. Among his books, possibly
bought as a young adult when he had begun himself to work as
an engraver, were a volume of copperplate engravings of the early
modern voyages of Jacob van Heemskerk and Willem Barents, Sir
John Ross’s Arctic voyages from the 1820s and ’30s. Among the more
general collections that Ravilious and his wife Tirzah Garwood made
were Arctic images of Inuit people and whale hunts.79
Ravilious’s idea of the north was also fostered by admiration for
the Alpine watercolours of Francis Towne (1739–1816). Towne was a
topographic painter whose subjects included the glaciers of the high
Alps, desolate and precise compositions, the flexible line of the pen
outlining boldly designed blocks of monochrome ice and coloured
mountainside.80 It is not hard to trace his influence on Ravilious: the
sense of pattern perceived in landscape, mountains expressed as
starkly modelled recessive planes. The austere restrictions of palette
in Towne’s views above the snowline offer a precedent for
Ravilious’s wintry colours. Ravilious’s scrapbooks included a black-
and-white photograph of Towne’s The Source of the Arviron, 1781, a
painting whose icy foreground, boldly schematic middle distance of
mountain flanks and otherworldly distance of a snow-lit peak, was
particularly influential on his own watercolours painted in the
Arctic in 1940.81 His preoccupation with Towne is remembered by
Helen Binyon, in her memoir of him, as one of the reasons why he
sought his final posting to Iceland:

102
 Since student days Eric had loved the watercolours of Francis
Towne, that eighteenth-century artist who had painted glaciers and
snow-peaks in Switzerland. This was one of the reasons why his
imagination was so taken with the idea of painting in Iceland.82

As well as the northern experiences recorded by these books and

images, the Raviliouses numbered the Arctic explorer August
Courtauld and his wife among their friends, and thus had access to
first-hand accounts of the Arctic.83 Courtauld (1904–1959) was a man
of action in the highest British tradition, awarded the Polar Medal in
1932. He had been on four Greenland expeditions in the 1920s and
’30s, and had spent a winter alone at a Greenland weather station. In
the summer of 1939 he carried out a solo survey of the Norwegian
coast, which ended with a fog-bound voyage to Shetland, a piece of
virtuoso navigation to match any spy feat in Buchan. References in
Ravilious’s wartime letters to encounters with Courtauld (games of
billiards in the mess, an expedition together in a motorized torpedo
boat) suggest warm and long-standing friendship.
Brian Sewell writes of the remote mood that dominated
Ravilious’s latest paintings as a product of the north itself:

As all who have seen the silvered bleakness of the arctic know, it
can have a strange effect on men and detach them from the need
for company and war gave license to this bent. Had Ravilious not
died in the north Atlantic, he would, having exhausted the pictor-
ial nourishments of Iceland, gone still further north, to the soli-
tary wastes of Greenland.84

Sewell argues that Ravilious’s painting reached maturity through

his Arctic experiences and that, like Auden, he found his individual-
ity in the contemplation of the north:

Strangeness, eerie and evocative, informed his late work, the gen-
eralised, almost bland surface appearances suddenly sparkled
into life by the particular and given heightened and surreal signif-
icance, dramatic threats always lurking like Harpies in the sea-
washed air. He was half-way through the Eye.85

Auden and Ravilious were both formed as artists by place: place

is Auden’s chief subject, almost Ravilious’s only subject. Until the

103
outbreak of war, Ravilous’s topographic painting is almost entirely
un-peopled, like Auden’s solitary topographies of Weardale and
Alston Moor. Many of Ravilious’s landscapes have a sense of
haunted emptiness: suggestions of events transacting themselves
just out of sight. There are implied presences in his emptiness, per-
ceived by the contemporary poet Pauline Stainer as

. . . bright displacement:
The unquiet radiance of empty rooms. . .86

There is less menace in Ravilious than there is in Auden, although,

in retrospect, a great deal of English melancholy can be read into his
images, depictions of a world that we have lost, images from before
the disaster. Like Auden, he was interested in revisiting remote ances-
tors: Ravilious’s chalk figures offer a correspondence to Auden’s uses
of Norse and Old English. For Ravilious, Cerne Abbas and Uffington
are places visibly preserving the remote past in the present; Auden’s
imaginative handling of place renders Weardale and Alston into
remote territories where the blood feuds of the saga are re-enacted.
Ravilious shared Auden’s preoccupations with austere uplands
(though his subjects were mostly southern), with industrial land-
scape, and with abandoned machinery. From 1939 he was a war
artist, painting what seem in retrospect intensely Audenesque
watercolours of command rooms and aerodromes. His Ship’s Screw
on a Railway Truck (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), a landscape of
machinery and huts seen by the last light of a snowy dusk, is fore-
shadowed by Auden’s juvenile snow poem which begins ‘Across the
Waste to Northward’, with its ‘corrugated iron shed’ and ‘aban-
doned road’.87 Snow is a constant element in Ravilious’s pictures.
His letters describe and remember a day in the early months of the
war climbing on the vicarage roof in Castle Headingham, sweeping
away the prodigious snowfall of January 1940 and throwing ‘an
occasional snowball like a bomb’ at people in the road.88 A haunting
photograph survives of him standing in his new Marine captain’s
uniform, in a snowy garden, the box hedge behind him ridged with
the snows of that same January, the tree branches borne down with
the drifts.89 In the last two years of his life, the snow and the snow
light on bare hills drew him steadily northwards.90
On the outbreak of war, Ravilious was at first an observer in an
anti-aircraft post. His responses to the war in the winter of 1939–40

104
were those of a topographer who could not leave England, had
hardly left England, had no reason, except the thread of his continu-
ing interest in the snows of the north, to leave England. He made a
series of pictures of chalk-cut figures; the oldest prehistoric, the most
recent eighteenth century. After he became a war artist, he travelled
widely, painting the transfigured home front as well as the opera-
tions rooms, sick bays and aerodromes of the military. In 1940 he
sailed into the far north. There he painted the classically skilful
watercolours that he titled simply with place and date, with so much
white paper, such dryness and assurance in the use of colour, that it
is as though the northern journey has worked in him a distillation of
the skill that set him apart from his contemporaries. His letters
describing the expedition are strange: he recognized that the experi-
ence of the north had set him apart, that he wouldn’t be the same
when he came home, that it had been a kind of otherworld journey:

We are in port again but a very remote port – for an hour or so –

and then back where we came from, at least that coast.
We have been in the Arctic as high as 70˚ 30’, which I looked up
and was delighted to see how far north it was. So I’ve done draw-
ings of the midnight sun and the hills of the Chankly Bore. I simply
loved it, especially the sun. It was so nice working on deck long
past midnight in bright sunshine . . . I do like the life and the
people, in fact it is about the first time since the war I’ve felt any
peace of mind or desire to work. It is so remote and lovely in these
parts . . . 91

The latitude given would suggest that HMS Highlander had been off
Finnmark, the northernmost coast of Norway. So it is possible that
the inlet and the hills in his drawing, with veins of snow lying like
white quartz, are the inlets around Hammerfest, the very north of
inhabited Europe. His reference to the hills of the Chankly Bore is to
a nonsense poem by Edward Lear, ‘The Jumblies’, a poem shot
through with seriousness and sadness, a recollection of a 20-year
journey from which no one has returned unchanged. The more that
the reference is explored, the clearer it is that Ravilious thought of
himself as having crossed into another existence:

They’ve been to the Lakes; and the Torrible Zone,

And the hills of the Chankly Bore.92

105
‘Torrible’ is a portmanteau word with an element of ‘torrid’, but it is
formed much more of negative adjectives: ‘terrible’, ‘horrible’.
‘Chankly’ is a dream formation out of ‘chalk’ and ‘lank’ and Bore is
not only a small tidal wave, but also a frontier, a ‘bourne’. Lear’s
poem connects the seeing of these landscapes with the response of
those who have stayed at home to the travellers who return trans-
formed by their experiences. In another sense, Ravilious’s reference
implies that the otherworldly landscape of Finnmark corresponded
to his existing imaginations of the landscapes in Lear’s poem, imag-
inations fed by the plates in the books of Arctic travels that he
owned.
There is another letter, which must have been written in the same
couple of hours, hurriedly, before they put to sea again and turned to
the north:

The grand thing was going up into the Arctic Circle with a bril-
liant sun shining all night, Arctic terns flying by the ship – I
simply loved it and haven’t enjoyed anything so much since the
war . . . Now at last having got into harbour out of the fog we are
to sail first thing in the morning. There will be some excitement
this time I think . . . it is strange not seeing land, or women or
darkness for so long. It is like some unearthly existence.93

And from the same port, he wrote to his wife about the colours of the
northern sea : ‘The seas in the arctic circle are the finest blue you can
imagine, an intense cerulean and sometimes almost black . . . ’.94 In the
autumn of the same year, he wrote of his desire to return to the north:

I’ve suggested a trip to Iceland to draw the Royal Marines in

hibernas [in their winter quarters], with Duffel coats and perhaps
those splendid plum skies. There are the most beautiful women
with fair hair in Iceland so they say: it is pitch dark all day and the
snow falls and the wind howls and you stay in bed for twenty-
four hours.95

The juxtaposition of beautiful Icelandic women and staying in bed

for 24 hours is a recollection of a song in John Gay’s The Beggar’s
Opera. Ravilious had been a great enthusiast for the revival of 1921,
and had sung and whistled the tunes from it through the early years
of the 1920s.96 He is remembering here the moment of genuine

106
melancholy at the end of the first act, where Macheath and Polly
declare their love and lament their enforced parting in songs full of
birds flying to the distance, of images of remoteness:

Were I laid on Greenland’s coast,

And in my arms embraced my lass;
Warm amidst eternal frost,
Too soon the half year’s night would pass.97

Ravilious, still drawn by the north, hoped to go to Russia early in

1942, but the attempt came to nothing.98 By August in that year it had
been decided that he was to go to Iceland, and Kenneth Clark had
praised the paintings from his first voyage into the Arctic:

Clark wanted to know when I was off again and said he was par-
ticularly glad I was going to the Northern parts again, as that was
my line and he thought highly of the Norwegian pictures.99

Helen Binyon recalls that this northern voyage was encouraged not
only by Ravilious’s fascination with the topographer Francis Towne,
but also by his recollections of the Arctic voyage of 1940:

It was that magical experience of sailing up into the Arctic Circle

and seeing the midnight sun that had left him feeling that for him
the North was the Promised Land. So he reminded the authorities
of his suggestion of going to paint in Iceland.100

This is confirmed in Tirzah Ravilious’s notes for a life of her hus-

band:

He was planning before the war to go to Greenland to paint snow

and mountain landscape. It was this wish to paint similar scenes
in his war pictures which took him to Iceland.101

And Ravilious himself anticipated the whiteness of his projected

paintings by leaving his canvas bag uncoloured: ‘This new drawing
bag is a beauty. I shan’t paint it. White canvas is just the thing for
Iceland.’102
His last sight of Britain was the airfield at Prestwick in
Ayrshire. His letter to his wife of 26 August 1942, postmarked the

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next day, opens ‘It is calm and fine here with no wind and I hope
very much we go tomorrow.’ It is the observation made by a man
who had become by habituation an airman, a reader of the
weather. He wrote these words on the day before his last sight of
the Island of Britain (he is one of its great witnesses, its great
memorialists). By the time of his arrival in Iceland on 30 August
he remembered the scene on the beaches of southern Scotland as
reflecting back to the places of his childhood: ‘the beach scene like
pre-war Eastbourne’.
In his first days in Iceland he saw the otherworld landscape that
he had hoped for – ‘We flew over that mountain country that looks
like craters on the moon . . . with shadows very dark and shaped like
leaves’103 – and held in his hand at last one of the wonders of the
north for which the first traders had opened the Arctic seaways: a
narwhal horn, like the unicorns’ horns that made up the ceremonial
thrones of the kings of Denmark and Greenland.

A splendid Narwhal horn yesterday, delicately spiralled and

about six foot high. Perhaps if I go to Greenland, it may be possi-
ble to find one. It is a beautiful thing . . .104

This was to be his last letter.

The poet Pauline Stainer invents for him a week’s grace, in which
he makes a last painting distilling his experiences as airman and
northward traveller (or perhaps only observes the scene preparatory
to painting it). It is the imaginary last of his runways – aircraft being
de-iced under the unearthly light of the midnight sun – it is high
summer and mid-winter all at once. Ravilious has entered into the
essence of the north and his death is very close.

This is the blue hour . . .

illumining water-worn ammonites
in the glacier,
bluish, luminous,

and beyond,
more terrible than ice.
radials blading the wingspan
propellors of spun-blood.105

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 The Hudson Mark III in which Ravilious was travelling disap-
peared in the course of an air-sea rescue patrol on 2 September.
Wireless contact was lost and the weather turned too stormy to
permit any search to be made until the following day. There is no sug-
gestion that the plane was lost through enemy action, but the weather
of the north was enemy enough. It is almost as though Ravilious had
taken a destiny from the decade that is often given Auden’s name: the
handsome topographer lost on the rising autumn wind that was
Auden’s loved weather, and having for his grave the Arctic sea and
the polar night, as in Auden’s rune of airmanship and disaster:

Night from the north

and numbness nearing
and hail ahead106

imagined northern territories

There are many invented and imaginary northern territories. Two of

them are unusually complete imaginations, one – Zembla – is celeb-
rated wherever there are devotees of wordgames and mirrors; the
other – Naboland, no less complete an invention – is becoming better
known outside Scotland. These invented territories embody two
opposed imaginations of north and northness. Zembla is a ‘distant
land’ in northern Europe in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel of 1962, Pale
Fire.107 It lies to the north of Russia where no country enjoying a rela-
tively mild climate could possibly lie. It is represented as the lost
kingdom of the delusional narrator and annotator who claims to be
its king, deposed when Zembla falls to a Communist revolution. Yet
this fiction is imagined in terms so detailed that it is hard for the
reader to accept the fictionality of his recollections. If he is mad, he
has constructed a vastly detailed stage set for his delusions, full of
nostalgia for a complex and civilized small state that appears to
combine elements of all the Scandinavian countries while remaining
essentially a mirror-image of Nabokov’s own lost Russia (Zembla
means ‘land’ in Russian). Naboland is an unknown Arctic continent,
the creation, over the last 25 years, of the German-Scottish visual
artist Reinhard Behrens.108 It has manifested itself in exhibitions,
installations, etchings, paintings and the publication of ‘expedition
reports’. It is a territory combining features of northern Scotland
with those of the polar regions and the Himalayas. It is cold and

109
empty, and the evidences for its very existence take the form of
ambiguous found objects, damaged and illegible dispatches.
Nabokov’s lost land is the distillation of northernmost Europe
before the revolutions, the same way that Naboland is made of all
the Arctic and Alpine expeditions before the wars. The only mode in
which Zembla can exist is nostalgic regret. Its defining factor is lost-
ness. From the smell of heliotrope :

(Heliotropium turgenevi) . . . This is the flower whose odor evokes

with timeless intensity the dusk, and the garden bench, and a
house of painted wood in a distant northern land, 109

to the final hopeless imagination of a return,

Oh I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to

my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coast-
line and the gleam of a roof in the rain,

Zembla is defined by sadness and distance. (Incidentally, there is no

such plant as Heliotropium turgenevi, but the novelist Turgenev uses
heliotrope as the symbol of the relationship of Livitnov and Irina,
exiled in Baden-Baden, in his Smoke, focusing on its nostalgic scent.)
Even the last entry in the digressive, unreliable index with which the
novel ends is a reduction, the imagined kingdom fading and reced-
ing into no more than a definition.
Zembla is a place of ice and glass, a place of illusions, a place that
quite probably exists only on the other side of the mirror. In the
novel it exists as much as a feeling as a place. The paranoid annota-
tor of Pale Fire creates a sweeping category of anti-Zemblan to com-
prehend all his antipathies:

Banalities circulated by the scurrilous and the heartless – by all

those for whom romance, remoteness, sealskin-lined scarlet skies,
the darkening dunes of a fabulous kingdom, simply do not exist.110

There are some ways in which Zembla resembles the

Scandinavian countries, being an urbane constitutional monarchy
with a distant violent past. It has inherited a comparatively low-key
Protestant Reformation that has spared its ecclesiastical buildings
and left it with a fine tradition of church music and secular theatre.

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As with the real royal family of Sweden in the eighteenth century,
more than one king of Zembla (including the exile of the 1950s) has
been gay, cultivated and a practitioner of the arts. Like the royal fam-
ilies of Denmark and Sweden, the line of Zembla has produced
scholars, painters, dramatists. The heavy winter snows are counter-
poised by the shadowless nights of summer. The aristocracy inhabits
neo-Classical palaces, although the royal palace in the capital is built
round the nucleus of an ancient castle. The capital, Onhava, has neo-
Classical squares and royal statues, and, from the 1930s, a modern
movement parallel to the architectural development of Scandinavia
has diversified the skyline of Onhava with ‘a small skyscraper of
ultramarine glass’. The chief industry would appear to be the manu-
facture of glass and mirrors: the revolutionaries who depose the king
are glassworkers, makers of Diaboli in vitro, Cartesian imps. This also
rings true: the countries of the north, especially the Scandinavian
countries, all excelled in the twentieth century in the manufacture of
glass. In so far as the Zemblan language is quoted (the mis-en-scène
for this fantasy is appalling in its attention to detail), it is Nordic and
Germanic rather than Slavic. On the sea coast are sedate resorts, their
geranium-lined wooden verandas facing ‘a western horizon like a
luminous vacuum that sucked in one’s eager heart’.111
The centre of the country is a spine of frosted mountains, which
the king crosses in his escape from the revolutionaries, and again
this imaginary geography is realized with disquieting lucidity:

Northward melted the green, gray, bluish mountains – Falkberg

with its hood of snow, Mutraberg with the fan of its avalanche,
Paberg (Mt Peacock), and others – separated by narrow dim valleys
with intercalated cotton-wool bits of cloud that seemed placed
between the receding sets of ridges to prevent their flanks from
scraping against one another. Beyond them, in the final blue,
loomed Mt Glitterntin, a serrated edge of bright foil; and south-
ward, a tender haze enveloped more distant ridges which led one to
another in endless array, through every grade of soft evanescence.112

These lucid recollections are the elements of the Zemblan poem that
the narrator has tried to will his poet-neighbour to write, but the
poet has been shot, leaving only a precise, North American autobi-
ography in rhymed couplets. So the annotator must rage at his
Zembla being, in yet another context, an absence:

111
 I started to read the poem . . . I sped through it, snarling, as a furi-
ous young heir through an old deceiver’s testament. Where were
the battlements of my sunset castle? Where was Zembla the fair?
Where her spine of mountains? Where her long thrill through the
mist? And my lovely flower boys, and the spectrum of the stained
windows, and the Black Rose Paladins, and the whole marvellous
tale?113

Deranged by disappointment, the annotator completes his anti-

index, a last attempt to write Zembla over the text that ignores it, an
index to the lost northern kingdom of his imagination. The entries
include places (with little prose poems about those places) barely
mentioned in the commentary, none of them mentioned in the
American verses:

Embla, a small old town with a wooden church surrounded by

sphagnum bogs at the saddest, loneliest, northmost point of the
misty peninsula.114

And, once, even the pretence of elucidation is abandoned in home-

sickness and regret:

Koboltana, a once fashionable mountain resort near the ruins of

some old barracks now a cold and desolate spot of difficult access
and no importance but still remembered in military families and
forest castles, not in the text.115

Zembla as a distillation of northern Europe is defined by exile, past-

ness and remoteness, its essence being its absence from the atlases.
Like Nabokov’s lost Russia, its only possible tense is preterite.
In comparison with the sustained fantasy of Zembla, the north pre-
sented in Philip Pullman’s popular novel Northern Lights is a realign-
ment of an England before the wars, where science and religion are
equally malign. In the imagined world of the novel, England (in a time
period with aspects of the late nineteenth century and the inter-war
years) is obsessed with Arctic exploration (as it was in reality), but the
very north of Europe also occupies the unique importance that was
attached by the Victorians to India. One of the early chapters (titled,
indeed, ‘The Idea of North’) plays with the poetic potential of those
elements of the Arctic exploration societies that feed the rich fantasy

112
of Naboland, with an after-dinner magic lantern lecture in a College
common room on recent scientific discoveries in the north.
The plot of the book hinges on a northward journey undertaken
by the child protagonist Lyra, an expedition to rescue children kid-
napped by English scientists at their research stations in the Arctic.
The book’s uncomplicated relation to the north is summarized in its
description of her reactions:

And Lyra thrilled at those times with the same deep thrill she’d
felt all her life on hearing the word North.116

The northward journey is, as so often, a journey into a kind of truth.

At least the protagonist discovers her parentage, and visits her mon-
strous father’s laboratory at the northernmost tip of Norway, a place
prodigally wasteful of heat and energy, an unnatural place for
unnatural experiments. The furthest north, as in many systems of
mythology, is a point of access to the otherworld, with the aurora
offering the power for the transition. In the fiction, the regions corre-
sponding to the Finnmark of reality are the territories of preternatural
armoured bears, rescued from a period of decadence during which
they have tried to live in a castle as if at the court of a human monarch.
This motif, consciously or unconsciously, echoes the plot of a
children’s book by the Italian painter and writer Dino Buzzati
(1906–1972). In his works, virtue attends the northern mountains in a
much more complex sense than in any other Italian writer of the
twentieth century, in that he identifies the life of the plains with
conformity to an increasingly inimical succession of regimes. His
children’s fable The Famous Invasion of the Bears in Sicily (1945) seems
a comprehensible allegory of recent events, with the virtuous bears
of the mountains descending to the plains to banish a cruel and
corrupt usurper. Except that the ending breaks away from the alle-
gory, with the bears growing corrupt themselves the longer that
they remain in the flat land, so that they are compelled in the end to
return to the mountains to preserve their own social virtues.117
Buzzati’s greatest imaginary and mountainous north is in his
poetic novel of the permeable northern frontier of Italy, Il deserto dei
Tartari / The Tartar Steppe), finished by 1939, but not published until
1945.118 All the southerly frontiers of Italy are defined without ambi-
guity by the sea, but the northern frontiers, which are also frontiers
of the Latin and Germanic worlds, are shifting, shift, have shifted.

113
This intricate geography has been defined for our time by the
Triestino Claudio Magris, who has negotiated for himself a stand-
point on a crux, like the cross in the sights of a rifle, not only on the
frontier of Cold War east and west, but on the very line of division
between the last of the Latin world – the Adriatic of the old Venetian
empire – and the German-speaking world stretching away into the
north towards the remote snowbound cities.

There are borders running everywhere and one crosses them

without realizing: the ancient one between Rhaetia and Noricum,
the frontier between Bavarians and Allemani, between Germans
and Latins . . . Adriatic and Danube, the sea and continental
Mitteleuropa, life’s two opposing and complementary scenarios;
the border that separates them, and which in the course of a day
trip one crosses without realizing it, is a small black hole leading
from one universe to another.119

Buzzati’s novel The Tartar Steppe uses these ambiguities to the full
to create an imaginary north of the frontiers. Its hero is a common-
place, diffident young officer, who dreams of military glory. As the
novel begins, he is leaving a life of tinkling pianos and innocent flir-
tations with his school-friends’ sisters, in order to take up his first
posting as lieutenant. After a dreamlike journey, which takes him
north out of the city through fields of maize and red, autumnal
woods, and then out of civilization entirely into uninhabited, deso-
late mountains, he finds himself at Fort Bastiani, an immense struc-
ture poised on the edge of a crag in the final scarp of this
otherworldly mountain range, looking down over an alien plain,
the desert of the Tartars. The journey takes only two days, but it is a
journey from one world to another. Drogo is at the fort as part of the
frontier guard, watching and waiting for the enemy to arrive. Years
and years go by; Drogo goes from youth to middle age, and the
Tartars do not come. His days have the texture of dreams. He hardly
notices the time passing, so much is he caught up in the ‘desolate
elegances’ of military routine. It is only when he is being carried
down the mountain for the last time, dying, that at last the Tartars
prove to be real, and strike at the guarded frontier.
In its own time, this story was directly intended as a metaphor
for the state of Italy in the 1930s. A divided nation of the powerless,
a ruined country with its pride lost, and only a heritage and the

114
courtesies of daily life to set against economic disaster, the night-
mare of civil war, the revenants of the Austrian occupation. At the
same time, the novel draws on ancient ideas: the journey out of
civilization to an ambiguous and uncanny alternative, the barbarians
at the edge of the world. The northern frontier of Italy is so much
perceived as shifting and permeable that Buzzati’s hero can go from,
as it were, Milan to the Steppes: the northern frontier will stretch out
in metaphor as far as Asia, as far as the limits of the world.
Two writers of genre fiction have also recently offered powerful
imaginations of the north. M. John Harrison’s The Course of the Heart
(1992) offers an imagination of a northern England vulnerable to
uncontrollable otherworldly incursions. Ursula le Guin’s The Left
Hand of Darkness (1969) imagines literally an otherworld – a planet
called Winter that is a distilled place of cold, a fictional refraction of
the frozen worlds of the polar explorers.
The Course of the Heart is an ambitious, unclassifiable fiction, not
wholly realized, but possessed by an extraordinary imagination of
the north. A group of student friends, one summer morning, take
part in an undefined magical experiment fraught with danger: for
the rest of their lives they are shadowed, visited, spoiled. The decline
is traced against the landscape and townscape of the Pennines
between Huddersfield and Manchester – places represented as vul-
nerable to hostile spirit messengers, unsought familiars, malign
enlightenments. Out of three friends, two are destroyed by illness
and madness, a process traced in the narrator’s visits from the south
to a stark English north of low light and harsh weather. It is only the
narrator (he pays in full later) who appears at first to benefit from the
opening of portals better left closed: he passes the night with a
revenant who is the gnostic embodiment of wisdom, met on a snowy
doorstep in a Pennine village. It is for the narrator that the north
manifests its most extraordinary transformation: December snow in
the square at Settle becomes the petals of white roses; the whirling
air is full of the ‘Byzantine’ scent of attar; the lost kingdom of the
Heart (glimpsed only in imaginations, recessive fictions within the
narrative) is present as ‘someone’

walked out of the great soft storm of rose petals . . . the woman
made of flowers. She was like a window opened on to a mass of
leafage after rain,120

115
and offers a glimpse of the otherworld of formal gardens with
hawthorn hedges and white beasts in the greenness beyond. The open-
ing is momentary and, as the novel hurries to its bleak conclusion, the
narrator too is destroyed – his family killed, his house abandoned.
Like many imaginary kingdoms, Ursula le Guin’s planet of
Winter had its origin in a dream. In her Dancing at the Edge of the
World she explains the dream’s origin in her reading about polar
expeditions, narratives that as an American she could read without
irony, carrying none of the cultural baggage that the icefields bore in
the English imagination, none of ‘the British idolization of Scott
which now makes it so chic to sneer at him’. Instead, the expeditions
offered her a secondary world of her own,

As I followed them step by frost-bitten-toed step across the Ross

Ice Barrier and up the Beardmore Glacier to the awful place, the
white plateau, and back again, many times, they got into my toes
and my bones and my books and I wrote The Left Hand of Darkness
in which a Black man from earth and an androgynous extraterres-
trial pull Scott’s sledge through Shackleton’s blizzards across a
planet called Winter.121

Winter is an oligarchy of androgynes, living in tower houses and

citadels overborne with snow, like the wintry city imagined by the
English printmaker F. L. Griggs. The great fires in the hearths barely
warm stone rooms that to a man from Earth are still appallingly cold.
The bulk of the narrative is an ice journey, in which the disgraced
Ambassador from earth and a native of Winter, a disgraced politi-
cian, achieve a kind of mutual understanding and recognition in the
course of their journey over snowfields and glaciers.
The scientific exploitation of the north in Pullman is malevolent;
winter journeys in Ursula le Guin are sombre explorations of an
invented world without summer: by contrast, exploration in
Reinhard Behrens’s invented continent, Naboland, is surreally
benign, if frequently touched by melancholy and a sense of the
fragility of any human hold on northern territory.
Naboland seems to have no settled population, outside one or
two very isolated Lamaseries, although there are resourceful
Sami-like people travelling across the pack ice. There are no cities,
although there may once have been cities. Only barrows and grave
mounds remain as traces of former civilizations. There are, in an

116
amalgamation of the fauna of the two poles, intelligent and ubiqui-
tous penguins. There are stone circles, one of which appears to have
grown up overnight to entrap the van of an early Naboland expedi-
tion, compilers of an ‘interim report’ on the continent.122 The polar
winters of Naboland are absolute: with infinite snow and frozen seas
thawing only to admit of a scuffed summer tundra near the shore-
line in a very few of the images.
Naboland is the goal of expeditions setting out from an eternally
pre-1939 Europe. It is a composite of all those snowy places (the
poles, the north-west passage, the roof of the world) that those pre-
war adventurers, like Ravilious’s friend August Courtauld,
explored. (Before all the wars – pastness and nostalgia are essential
to the aesthetic of the whole enterprise.) The geography of Europe is
altered in the parallel world where Naboland is found. Venice is on
the latitude of St Petersburg and the canals are often frozen, with
heavy snowfall over the ice, and ice mist hanging over the Piazzetta
where Behrens’s talismanic submarine has taken up winter quarters
among the moored gondolas. Green icebergs drift in the Giudecca
canal, glimmering above the dome of the Salute. The only territories
of the veridical world with which Naboland would need to maintain
diplomatic relations would be Tibet-in-Exile and Iceland.123
The invention of this parallel world began with Behrens finding a
Chinese metal toy on the shores of the Baltic islands: a submarine,
labelled ‘Torpedo Boat’ and manned by a single, grinning pilot. The
little submarine comes to represent an innocent kind of adventurer
or explorer out of the whole exotic world of pre-war British fiction
for boys. This talisman offered a point of entry into imaginary frozen
and mountainous territories, present in the artist’s mind since he
first saw Caspar David Friedrich’s Arctic Shipwreck in the Kunsthalle
in his native Hamburg. In the same way that Friedrich studied the
movement and packing of ice on the river Elbe as the material for his
grand imagination of the remotest north, Behrens has constructed a
continent from winter climbing in Scotland, from found objects, and
from archaic fictions of empire and adventure.
His coloured drawing Forth Clipper, Winter Voyage is typical of the
cryptic despatches from the Naboland expeditions. The desolate
snowy landscape, the broken boat (it could almost be the model
from which Friedrich painted his Arctic Shipwreck), the random arte-
facts, all hint at a narrative of far distance and transience. This is
deepened in that the ‘Arctic’ landscape is in fact a familiar place, the

117
Lothian shore of the Forth in Scotland, but with all trace of human
habitation removed.
This imaginary continent acquired its name Naboland (‘Neigh-
bouring land’ in Norwegian) from the name of a ship, an accident of
collision with a submarine in a report read by chance in a Turkish
newspaper, when Behrens was working as an archaeological
draughtsman. Stylistically, his works depend to a considerable
degree on his training in the meticulous accuracy of archaeological
drawing, and on his related Viennese studies of ‘fantastic hyper-
realist’ painting techniques.
When he began to travel as a student he first went to Iceland and
Norway – distant northern lands, places with icy and volcanic land-
scapes – but he felt isolated by language, and they did not answer
precisely his imagination of northness. In contrast, Scotland offered
the first real places to correspond to his interior world. Minutes
after his arrival in 1979 on the Hamburg to Newcastle ferry, he saw
his first British road sign reading simply ‘The North’. This general-
ization, as opposed to the precise reckoning of kilometres on
Continental signs, struck him as transformational, poetic.
Soon after, he found the physical equivalent for his imaginary
arctic land in Scotland, on the snowy plateau of the Cairngorms. In
1979–80 he travelled and climbed in the Scottish hills, playing with
an echo of extreme explorations, imagining the wintry Cairngorms
into the Himalayas and the Arctic. His companions in the Edinburgh
University Mountaineering Club ‘Monroe-bashing on Mars Bars’,
with their intrepidity and self-sufficiency, their reluctance to stop
for a second to look at a view, became in his imagination the descen-
dents of Victorian explorers, the heroes of such boy’s books as Ice
World Adventures or Adventures in the Arctic Regions: Romantic Incidents
and Perils of Travel, Sport and Exploration around the Poles.
The manifestations of Naboland in Behrens’s art, almost always
taking the form of carefully detailed ‘Expedition Reports’ with docu-
mentary drawings and installations, are often derived from objects
found in distant places: screes, remote glens, beaches. These found
objects are drawn with the clarity and accuracy of an archaeological
or scientific survey, painstaking plates from the report, as it were, of
the Naboland Exploration Society. When they are made into part of a
Behrens installation they often acquire deadpan labels, misleading,
impeccably realized documentation. As with the creation of Zembla
within Nabokov’s Pale Fire, the sheer skill and effort that have gone

118
into the production of artefacts to sustain the fiction argue power-
fully, momentarily, for its reality.
Found objects play a crucial part in Behrens’s installations of
explorers’ huts: interiors of masculine clutter and masculine tidiness,
list-making order, inchoate classification. These installations convey
the fragility of a dwelling in the solitudes of the icefields. Around
the huts are drifts of simulated snow; the radio relays Morse code,
bursts of static, noises of the wind, sounds of isolation. The accumu-
lated found objects, specimens, bones in pigeonholes, have in their
installed juxtaposition a richness: they become ‘marvellous things’.
These are from ‘altogether elsewhere’: the collections of beach finds
and hill finds become archaeological and geological treasures collected
in inconceivably difficult circumstances on the ice plain and the high
plateau, assembled ready for study near the drawing board under
the lamp that is a constant feature of all these installations.
The layout of many of Behrens’s drawings is like a plate in an
archaeological or scientific treatise. Arrangements of objects found in
wild country are often accompanied by a meticulous drawing of a
snowy landscape, or of the misted croft ruin where they were collected.
The division between natural and artificial objects is deliberately
confounded. Responding to the cue of the scientific or documentary

Reinhard Behrens, Winter Night, 1985, etching.

119
arrangement of these things, the temptation is to try to make sense of
the relations between them and then of the relation between the objects
and the remote, cold landscape with which they are juxtaposed. In this
effort to make sense of the juxtapositions, a Naboland narrative starts
to form. This plate is part of a report (such is its appearance); therefore
the things must associate with (or originate from) the place. The level
of attention with which they are drawn suggests that they are things of
value and significance. So the idea forms that this plate is unavoidably
a part of a narrative of an exploration, an attempt by a returning
traveller to explain the significances of an unknown region.
In one aspect these things (blades, keys, rusted lids) are the archae-
ology of the real world, testimonies to the fact that the ‘wildest’ country
in Britain was once inhabited, until it was, often forcibly, depopulated.
Behrens once described himself as ‘the caretaker of lost objects, the one
who gives them their final destination’. The other aspect of these shoes,
rusted blades and flakes of sea-worn glass is unearthly: they are apports
from Naboland, things generated or left behind by the momentary
coincidence of the primary and secondary worlds. They are traces of
Naboland, proofs of its existence, its messengers.
An early exhibition, Further Travels to Naboland (The North), in
Edinburgh in 1982 included within the explorer’s hut an extraordi-
nary poetic object: a wooden casket with a mirror in the lid, containing
what looked like a cylinder of snow packed carefully in beech-mast.
This invented thing compels the creation of a secondary world to
accommodate it, one in which snow can be packed like glass, in which
snow can be transported to a metropolitan headquarters for analysis,
in which different types and qualities of snow are the subjects of
learned monographs with meticulous engraved plates.
For all the playfulness, all the ingenious deceptions of the instal-
lations, the underlying theme of Behrens’s work is fragility and
transience. The ancient civilization of Naboland is traceable only in
remains; the huts of the explorers for all their moments of gentle-
manly grandeur (college photographs, Persian rugs) are fragile
and permeable structures. The etching Winter Night emphasizes this
loneliness and vulnerability. The way in which the side of the hut is
cut away to show the delusively ordered, cabin-like interior (with its
light over the drawing board on which the wonderful things on their
rudimentary shelves are to be recorded for future publication)
emphasizes the smallness of this structure compared to the vastness
of the icy night. The surveying instrument still stands on its tripod

120
outside; the light from the hut spills onto the snow. The builder of
the hut has become invisible, has left the hut standing open to the
bitter air. Whether he will return to the completion of the task on the
improvised drawing board seems un-guessable. Should his work be
recovered by a future expedition it will seem only the inexplicable
juxtaposition of random found objects.
The apprehension of the meaning of these things depends on the
survival of the solitary explorer who has still infinite miles of icepack
to traverse before explanations can be offered. The expedition jour-
nal Latest Discoveries in Naboland (1986) is unreadable; only a very
few of the words of the handwritten text struggle into legibility to
offer any explication of the meticulous drawings of expedition ships,
nomads, intelligent penguins. Naboland continually plays around
the idea of Empire, of cultures devoid of people, of empty places that
have in them no relics of past activities. In this respect Naboland is a
translation of the prehistoric landscape of Iceland, the thin crust of
rock over the volcano, the thin layer of human settlement over the
wilderness. However innocent the world of Naboland may seem,
there is always an undertow of regret, a feeling that no explorer can
truly convey, however lucid their draughtsmanship, however metic-
ulous their ‘documentation’, the realities of the northern territories
that they have visited. Not everyone returns from their explorations.
And without their custodian, objects revert to disorder, randomness.

northern summer

It is possible to think of the summer of the north only in terms of its

brevity and uncertainty. Temperate winds circulate through open,
curtainless windows, bringing the scents – pine, standing lake water,
gorse, heather, the sea shore – across white-painted verandas. You
arrive at a palpable north when the months of darkness and closed
houses outnumber the months of clement days.
Northern summer is as prodigal of light as the winter is starved of
it. Much of the melancholy of the north arises from the impossibility
of saving one minute from the long light against the approaching
darkness. Another invisible line marking north could be drawn
across the map of the world at the latitude where for at least a month
of high summer the northern sky is never wholly dark. Absolutes of
light and darkness define the Arctic Circle. For many, true north is
defined by white nights, the ‘summer dim’, the extravagance of light

121
all night through, celebrated in the haiku by Alan Spence:

midsummer midnight
full moon in the pale sky
over the north sea124

On such nights, minute feathery moths, animate thistledown, move

among the reeds and bog-myrtle at the foots of the hills. Even at
midnight the torn sky shows streaks and gashes of daylight – a 1930s
watercolour sky in the twilight beyond the pine trees to the north.
This is a reflection of the persistent light now over Caithness, of the
dimmed but not darkened sky over Birsay, of the brightness over
Shetland. On the north coast of Aberdeenshire and Moray, at ten
o’clock of a light summer evening, a trick of the northward light
reveals the mountains of Caithness in full sunshine, apparently hov-
ering above the empty sea – far away, far north, an otherworld risen
from still water.
For a moment it offers an apparition of unnatural clarity, super-
natural vision, as if the northern isles and the remotest regions of the
Norwegian sea might be revealed through the dry, pellucid air.
Within the Arctic Circle such illusions grow absolute – appearance
and disappearance of illusory territories to the snow-blinded eyes of
explorers, fictive, glacial mountains to be named for monarchs far
away to the south.
Few northern writers find the summer tedious; none finds it over-
long. None writes of heat, drought, accidie. Ancient northern customs
of transhumance, of moving farm animals to summer pastures, lie
not too distantly behind the Canadian and Scandinavian custom of
moving northward to a summer cottage or cabin situated in territo-
ries too northerly for winter inhabitation, or onto the little islands of
the Baltic, too exposed to storms except in summer. The shorelines of
Scandinavia’s lakes and fjords are punctuated by these summer cot-
tages. This summer retreat is a central part of northern custom,
almost of identity, an important part of the specifically northern rela-
tions between the country and the city. In Scandinavia, the oxide-red
wooden house on the granite rocks by the lake, or remote cabin by the
inlet of the sea on the Norwegian coast, is a comprehensive image of
summer. Holiday transhumance, heading for the wilder parts of the
lands, echoes the idea that closes Glenn Gould’s Idea of North, that the
northern countries are formed by the wilderness still enclosed within

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Harald Sohlberg, Summer Night, 1899, oil on canvas.

their borders. The frost giants never depart, but they retreat far
enough to allow for these summer encampments by the water, like
the cabin in Julio Medem’s vehement, inchoate film of 1998, The
Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Los Amantes del Circulo Polar), from which
his protagonist Ana watches the sun dancing along the horizon all
night through, above a landscape of lakes and evergreen forests. This
interlude of the summer night is brief: throughout the film, the idea
of north is deadly, a shared obsession – and part of a sequence of
absurd, belief-defying coincidences – which causes the lovers to lose,
not find, each other in the midsummer of northern Finland.
The lateness of the northern spring, the slow retreat of the winter,
is expressed precisely by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his unfinished
vampire narrative Christabel, a poem set in an imagined north, a
north invented before Coleridge himself moved to Cumberland. The

123
poem opens with the lengthening light of the cold spring evening, as
Christabel leaves the tower house to pray in the wood:

The night is chilly, but not dark.

The thin gray cloud is spread on high,
It covers but not hides the sky . . .
The night is chill, the cloud is gray:
’Tis a month before the month of May
And the Spring comes slowly up this way.125

The sense here is that spring has little positive force: the powerful
and reluctant winter is giving ground resentfully. Spring is incom-
plete; movements of the light and the climate are at variance. An
atmosphere of dream and misfortune is created by the hesitations in
the narrating voice, already a shaken voice, one reluctant to re-imag-
ine the horrors that it is committed to telling. The cold will hardly
give up, wintry horrors defy the season.
In the generation before Coleridge, the eighteenth-century
Scots-Gaelic poet Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair (Alastair
Macdonald) (c.1695–1770) wrote in his Oran an t-Samhraidh (‘The
Song of Summer’) of the late Highland spring as active movement
after the white stasis of the winter. Release from the house, spend-
ing the whole of the day out of doors is at the centre of his pleasure:
the fruit of the monotony of the long winter indoors. After the
stasis of winter everything is in movement – the birch tree wet with
dew; the sound of the chanter played out of doors; honey, rushes,
bees, berries, wild garlic, soft showers, milk in the pail, the winter
snows retreating to the tops of the hills, and the mountain-tops
bright in the early sun.

Am mìos ceutach a’ Mhàigh:

Am mìos breac-laoghach, buailteach,
Bainneach, buadhach gu dàir.126

This lovely month, May

month of the folded dappled calves,
month for mating and milk.

Everything is swarming into place for summer,

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 Na bhuidhnean tàrr-ghealach, lannach;
Gu h-iteach, dearg-bhallach, earrach . . .

The salmon leaping up the river

Bunched, white-bellied, scaly, fin-tail-flashing, red spot . . .

All of Macdonald’s sense of the spring is stirring and dappled:

speckled eggs, leaves flickering, brindled animals, the fish in the
river, the grass moving in the fields after the dun months of stillness.
The snow has retreated to the summits, melting completely only in
the warmest of Highland summers, so that the summers of upland
Scotland are shot through with this sense that the winter has only
retreated, not departed.
This is an essential perception of summer in the north. Flying
once over Norway in June, from Oslo to Karmøy, the plane passed
over the inland mountains, over valleys dully frozen in white and
grey-green. It was impossible to forget them after arrival at the coast,
with the flicker of birch leaves and bright sea moving behind the
volcanic boulders. The summer was shadowed and qualified by the
winter in the mountains.
This sense of the undertow of melancholy in the northern
summer is expressed precisely in the short story by the Finnish
writer Joel Lehtonen called ‘A Happy Day’, which comes from his
collection of 1918, Kuolleet Omenapuut / Dead Apple Trees.127 It contains
many of the images of the prosperous Scandinavian enjoying
summer leisure. The hero, Aapeli Muttinen, a prosperous bookseller,
has retired to his lakeside villa with his wife. It is early summer still,
with fine weather, but also with a sense of infinite time stretching out
before the first threat of the autumn to come:

The most beautiful days, the ones with the fewest thoughts and
memories, are those very first days of summer: and the nights of
clear golden light, enfolding him in a warm and wordless happi-
ness . . . he gets lazily to his feet and opens the door to his balcony
. . . straight in front of him, just below the railing, into which
designs have been cut in the old country fashion, there are bird-
cherry trees, white with blossom, the spreading branches exhal-
ing a sweet fragrance. Each side of the cherry trees, the summer
morning sparkles in bright warm light.128

125
Lilac and spiraea have bloomed in the garden through which they
walk to the lake and their boat:

Out onto the open waters of Lake Saimaa, and dawdle across to
the mainland opposite, which shows as a pale bluish smudge in
the distance. The birches on the shore have just come into leaf:
their long drooping branches are soft in outline, like green ostrich
feathers. From the mouth of the bay more distant landscapes can
be seen: in the summer haze no details or colours are distinguish-
able, all is indefinite, bluish and misty – like a dream.129

They pass on, they picnic, they lie in the sun, and there is suddenly
an intimation that the day is passing, for all the slowness of the
progress of the light.

In silence across the meadows, up slopes and down the other

side, to the music of the cowbells and the cuckoo’s call. Now and
then they pause on the hot granite of the cape, where the reflec-
tion from the water dazzles the eye, to linger idly for a while and
take a rest. And they fall into a yet deeper silence, engulfed in a
contentment vaster and vaguer than before. The sprigs of lilac on
Lygia’s warm bosom have withered.130

The boat journey homewards is shadowed by passing the church

and the graveyard, then, as they cross the water, by coming upon a
sheer rocky island, which reminds them of Arnold Böcklin’s paint-
ing of 1880 of the rocky island of the dead. And the undertow of
sadness returns to end the narrative, with Muttinen contemplating
the sunlight through the flowering trees after the momentary night
has passed and hearing his wife crying in her room because they
have no child with whom to share the happiness of the day. The
last reflection, like the permanent frost in the mountain valleys, is a
reminder of adversity:

‘the days of deepest bliss pass like a day of early summer.

Ripeness, decay . . .’ Muttinen, whose moments of happiness are
so few, feels that he has no right to pass on to others, to another
generation, the burden of life, which after all is mostly evil,
mostly pain.131

126
 The season is more benign in Ingmar Bergman’s two classic films
of the Scandinavian summer, Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) and
Wild Strawberries (1957). The northern summer night itself is the ful-
crum of the plot in Smiles of a Summer Night. The endless light after
dinner at the castle gives time for the Shakespearean revolutions of
the unhappily paired couples (lawyer and child bride, lawyer’s son,
estranged count and countess), the comedy being directed by the
chatelaine and her actress daughter. By morning, when the maidser-
vant and coachman go happily to drink their coffee in the kitchen,
the count and countess are reconciled, the child-wife has eloped
with the son and the lawyer returns to the actress. The endless pro-
traction of the light gives scope for the comedy to develop in the
park and garden and in the panelled bedrooms, after the state dinner
has been eaten under the most splendid chandelier ever to appear on
film – a whole Swedish forest of leaves frosted to refractive crystal.
Dawn follows immediately on the dusk in this shadowless night –
there is only one twilit moment in the film, the long view of the little
wooden pavilion in the castle grounds – light spilling from its win-
dows into the shade of great trees. The suspension of time, the long
night that is never dark, which is and is not a night, gives the plots
and counter-plots time to wind and entwine, for coffee to be drunk
in the yellow pavilion, for lieder to be sung and games of Russian
roulette to be played. No one sleeps, hardly anyone even goes to
bed. The young people escape in their horse-cart down an avenue of
lindens whose shadows are already flickering in the sun a few hours
after midnight. The servants roam the park and reaped fields, prais-
ing the freedom of the northern summer, the white night that is the
central character as well as the medium of the comedy.
In the more sombre Wild Strawberries, the Swedish summer, and
the summer life of the elite, recurs as a central motif. The film’s
protagonist, Isak Borg, driving from Stockholm to Lund in high
summer to receive an honorary degree, comes to reconciliation
with himself as the film progresses, which is partly a reconciliation
with, and alteration of, his summer memories. At the beginning of
the film the summer city is eerie, first in a dream of empty streets
outside time, where the clock has no hands, and then equally
empty streets as Borg’s car leaves Stockholm in the early hours of
the morning. Outside the city he revisits in memory the summer
house of his young manhood, invisible, shabby in his dark clothes
where everyone else is in white. The more beautiful the scenes in

127
the painted wooden house – the white-painted furniture and
ample provision of the breakfast-table, the pale clothes, the young
men in their students’ caps, piano music, children singing – the
sadder they grow as Isak wanders shabbily through it all, an
unwelcome ghost. His childhood love married his brother; his
marriage was unhappy; his son and his wife are estranged. We
gather this in dreams, flashbacks and recollections as the long
summer day progresses. But resolution comes in the end, after the
ceremonies in Lund, with young people (led by the same actress
who plays the lost love in the dream sequences) serenading Borg
from the shadowy garden, with the reconciliation of his son and
wife. At the last Borg falls to a contented sleep and his paradisal
dream of summer restored brings the film to an end. His lost love
leads him by the hand to the water. He is no longer the shabby
ghost of himself; we are seeing through his eyes, not watching his
exclusion. After a moment of hesitation his parents, fishing and
reading by the shore, see him, recognize him, greet him. The family
yacht lifts its red sails on the brilliant water.132
In Bergman’s films the northern summer often functions as a time
of healing and resolution, but for the hero of the Henrik Ibsen’s Peer
Gynt (1867) northern summer is an image of all that he has lost, all
that he has left behind. In the course of Peer’s Mediterranean travels,
there is one dreamlike interpolation set in his native Norway.
Amidst heat and desert sand, the home remembered in exile is not
the snowy north, but the north in its brief, temperate summer. His
deserted beloved, Solveig, is spinning at the door of the saeter, the
summer farmstead, singing of the passage of the years and of her
unshaken fidelity.133 The faithful north (the unavoidable pun, the
‘true’ north comes forward again) is shown distilled, in his idealized
recollection, to a moment of summer in the mountain fields.
There is a dark exception to the Scandinavian celebration of the
northern summer: in Erik Skjoldbjaerg’s film of 1997, Insomnia, the
high summer of the far north is destructive, invasive, unnatural.
From the moment when the Swedish policeman, seconded to Tromsø
in the far north of Norway to assist with a murder enquiry, falls
victim to the sea fog, the northern summer turns against him. In the
fog, the troubled protagonist shoots his comrade, apparently in error.
He cannot sleep in the endless day: the intrusion of the merciless light
works as a metaphor for the futility of his attempts to obscure the
truth. He solves the crime, only to be blackmailed by the murderer.

128
 Night after night, he tries to cover the bright windows, tries to
get a few hours of sleep, but the midsummer light is implacable.
Sleepless, compromised, haunted, more than a little mad, he turns
brutal. The murderer dies in his proximity, if not precisely in his
custody. The man he shot begins to appear to him in the shadowless
midnights. The ordeal comes to an end and he prepares to return
southwards to Sweden, apparently having succeeded in covering his
tracks and closing the murder case. In the last few minutes of the
film the most senior woman detective in the local police presents
him with the police-issue bullet that he fired. His deceptions have
been ineffectual; her compassionate hiding of the truth has suc-
ceeded. The midsummer night, literal and metaphorical clarity, is on
her side, it has turned against him. It is a strikingly malign reading of
the northern summer, an exception to the films in which the summer
pleasures of the north embody passing happiness.
In the very north of the Netherlands, within a half-hour’s drive of
the coast and the German border, there is a deep, long-settled land-
scape of farms, great trees, prehistoric tombs constructed laboriously
from glacial boulders, almost the only structures of native stone in
all the Low Countries. It is a landscape of extraordinary innocence
when the summer has flowed over it in the deep verges of August, in
the tremendous shadows of the birch trees over the dolmens.
Cyclists pass on the deep paths between the fields; in the little park
in the village a choir of elderly people sing in a pavilion for the plea-
sure of it, for anyone who cares to hear. Each prehistoric site among
the birches and the small streams has around it, as if in worship, a
few offerings of neatly stacked bicycles.
In the deep contentment of that August it seemed impossible to
stir, day by day an excursion to the robust Baroque buildings of
Groningen was discussed and postponed. It seemed wasteful to go
any further from the farmhouse than the distance that could be
walked or cycled easily. The northern summer held us, with its table
set for dinner in each warm evening under the birch trees. Smoked
fish, salad, the fierce pickles of the Dutch East Indies. There was
not a breath of wind, no stir in the air, no sound from the leaves.
Luminous dusk intensified only slowly, and each night we were
drawn to the small rise of land behind the house, to watch the moon
rising over the deep fields. It sailed quickly up the sky, the big moon
of August over unmoving grain, prodigiously bright, compelling
stillness.

129
 Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Moonwatchers’, in all its versions,
fixes such a moment of stillness in the contemplation of the rising
moon.134 What is crucial to his image is this contemplation, the sus-
pension or slowing of time in the quiet compelled by the moon.
The peace in his picture is expressed by the figures posed almost as
if the moonlight had frozen them in mid-gesture. (In the versions
in the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York, there are two men, in the version in the
Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Dresden, a man and a woman.) The
woman rests her hand on her husband’s shoulder in a gesture that
is almost a declaration of their unity; they are posed formally as
they look up at the moon, passing together through life as they
pause together on the path through the woods. The two versions
that show two men have more of a sense of a gesture arrested: the
younger man is half-turning anecdotally to the cloaked figure,
elbow on shoulder, and the gesture is frozen by the rising of the
moon. Their stillness is a hieroglyphic of friendship. The seasons in
Friedrich’s versions of this picture are not realistic: they combine
autumn vegetation with spring moonlight. But the stillness of the
picture is that of the northern summer under the full moon as
August moves to its end.
Awareness of passing time haunts the Finnish writer Tove
Jansson’s best-known book for adults, Sommerboken / The Summer Book
(1972) as the health of the grandmother, the central figure in the book,
declines with the months – June, July, August.135 The setting is the
classic Scandinavian summer house with its veranda on the island of
Åland in the Gulf of Finland. As in Bergman’s films, the summer
carries hints and reminiscences of summers past. The grandmother
explains time and the island to her granddaughter. An anxious
widower father writes and works all through the long days, allowing
himself the leisure only to plant and irrigate a garden. The child and
her grandmother explore the island in minute detail, the child merci-
less in her health and curiosity, the grandmother increasingly slow
and limited in her movements. A great summer storm sweeps across
the islands. Nothing much happens. The sense of northern place is at
the centre of the book, each little island the preserve of one family, one
house, one boat. All communication with the mainland begins with a
boat journey; each day is a triumph of ingenuity and self-reliance,
very much a return to the independent freedoms of transhumance, of
the annual migration to the summer pastures.

130
 The hottest weather brings one day of menace, in which isolation
and the heat turn against the three inhabitants of the island. Insects
swarm, milk turns sour and there is a sense of unfocused menace
born simply of isolation and stillness:

It was on days just like this – dog days – that boats went sailing off
all by themselves. Large, alien objects made their way in from the
sea, certain things sank and others rose, milk soured, and dragon-
flies danced in desperation. Lizards were not afraid. When the
moon came up, red spiders mated on uninhabited skerries, where
the rock became an unbroken carpet of tiny, ecstatic spiders.136

The chapter is told partly from within the increasingly hysterical

consciousness of the child Sophia, her feeling of threat and helpless-
ness. As night falls the sense of the whole summer island turning
against the humans grows more intense in Sophia’s perception:

The forest was full of signs and portents, its own secret written
language . . . There were footprints where no-one could have
stepped, crossed branches . . . The full moon rose and balanced on
top of a juniper bush. Now was the time for unmanned boats to
glide out from their shores.137

The book ends with a sombre chapter fixing the point in the northern
August when it is no longer possibly to pretend that the summer will
last and the first intimations of the winter are beginning to appear.

Every year, the bright Scandinavian summer nights fade away

without anyone’s noticing. One evening in August you have an
errand outdoors and all of a sudden it’s pitch black . . . It is still
summer but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a stand-
still; nothing withers and the autumn is not yet ready to begin . . .
The can of paraffin is brought up from the cellar and left in the
hall, and the torch is hung up on its peg by the door . . . Not right
away, but little by little and incidentally. Things begin to shift
position in order to follow the progress of the seasons. Day by
day, everything moves closer to the house.138

Then begins the process of closing the summer house for the
winter: the oiling of wood, the beaching of the pleasure boats, the

131
digging and storing of potatoes, the covering of all flowerbeds with
seaweed. The island must be left ready for any storm-driven winter
traveller. Nothing is locked; fuel and salt are left ready in the kitchen.
These are the attitudes of a society forged by the northern climate –
no fellow-citizen is more an enemy than the weather. Paper covers
the windows, to save migrating birds from hurling themselves at the
panes. It is hardly surprising that the grandmother in the book gets
up in the night, makes her way unsteadily outside, and then sits lis-
tening, not without contentment, to the boats in the late August
night as her death begins.
The summer house is the setting also for those children’s stories
for which Tove Jansson is best known (inevitably so as the small
creatures who are her characters sleep out the winter). Many of her
stories begin on the wooden veranda with its white-painted furni-
ture and its hanging oil lamp; fringed with lustres, the scene is very
like the scene of Isak’s summer memories in Wild Strawberries.
Between the house and the forests, in the long indeterminate dusk,
anyone can come out of the twilight to begin another episode in the
gentle narratives of her invented creatures. The time for mushroom
gathering hints at the end of the summer, the end of the season of the
veranda and the easy movement between inside and outside. Her
books are northern in their intense awareness of seasons and their
passing: while her Moomintrolls hibernate, other characters migrate.
Only the obtuse, rule enforcers stay awake throughout the winter,
organize winter sports and disturb the silence with post horns.
She writes wonderfully in Moominsummer Madness about strings
of coloured lights in trees against a sky that is never truly dark.139
The last scene has a performance on a floating theatre moored to a
lake shore, with an audience gathering in small pleasure boats,
walking to the shore over thick moss under pine branches, the plea-
sures of the lake region of Finland.
Her imaginary high-summer place has a real counterpart in the
country house of Lidingsberg near Stockholm.140 Shade from a grove
of oaks falls across ochre-painted timber buildings and white
painted windows. Shadow on an armillary sundial counts off long
hours of daylight. The summer pleasures are epitomized by the pri-
vate theatre, dating from 1841. The scale is minute: there is room
only for four or five seats in each row, but the proscenium and the
scenery survive from the nineteenth century, grandeur on a minia-
ture scale. They are painted in a style that looks back still further to

132
the grey-green forests of eighteenth-century watercolours or to the
foliage of Renaissance tapestry. This theatre is only part of a complex
of buildings for pleasure and entertainment, in this summerhouse
on a large scale. There is also a ballroom with a full set of Empire fur-
niture, brilliant with chandelier and girandoles. There is a square
piano to provide the music for the quadrilles. And yet everything is
made of humble materials: painted softwood, canvas and paint.
There is no ostentation, but rather a sense of a sophisticated simplic-
ity, again almost of innocence. The whole complex, within reach of
the city by water, is a distillation of the pleasures of the Baltic
summer, an epitome of the comfortable painted wooden houses,
with one room large enough for summer entertainments. It is in
a house like this that the breakfast party in Bergman’s Wild
Strawberries assembles, and a scene like this is a constant element in
the recollections of Vladimir Nabokov’s protagonists, many of
whom are northern European exiles in distant America. The details
vary, but there is always a castle, palace or villa of this kind, among
trees and within reach of water, distant and ideal in recollection.
In Jansson’s Finn Family Moomintroll there is a disquieting scene in
the August garden, where the summer is invaded by the figure from
the edges of her fantasy world who represents the negative force of
winter. If one of her small characters feels moved to swear, it is this
creature that is invoked, ‘By the Groke’, ‘this Grokey mess’. The
outlandish Groke (the avatar of the frost giants of old Northern
mythology) appears in person to reclaim her great ruby, which has
come into the valley of the accepting Moomins, and in that instant
the safe world of the story seems permeable, vulnerable, even
broken. The Groke is everything that is the enemy of the sociable
summer happiness of the northern valley: she is winter, she is mis-
anthropic loneliness, she is uncontainable sadness:

Suddenly a cold draught swept over the grass. The sun went
behind a cloud and the garden looked dull . . . In the frozen grass
sat the Groke glaring at them.
She . . . began growling and shambled slowly nearer.141

Eventually the Groke is bought off with a magical hat, capable of

working transformations: it is the transformation of fruit to rubies
that convinces the Groke to take the hat and depart. The summer
berries are transformed to inert coloured ice, the only type of thing

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for which the Groke can feel any affinity, living to dead, warm to
frozen, pleasurable transitoriness to lifeless permanency.

Then suddenly she snatched the hat and, without a word, slith-
ered like an icy grey shadow into the forest. It was the last time
she was seen in the valley of the Moomins . . . At once the colours
became warmer again and the garden was filled with the sounds
and the scents of summer.142

Once this visitation from the kingdom of the winter has taken place,
the rest of the book is shadowed by it. Even the concluding scene of
an outdoor August party has an undertow of melancholy extraordi-
nary in a children’s book of the late 1940s. The sense of the summer
moving to an end is everywhere present – ‘He made some remarks
about the short August nights and how everyone should be as
happy as possible, and then he began to talk about what it was like
in his youth . . .’143 – and it is dark enough for fireworks to be prop-
erly visible against the sky, and already the migrant characters have
left for the south and the season of partings has begun.
Tove Jansson also catches the precise moment of the death of
summer in another of her children’s books, Moominpappa at Sea.
When Moominmamma brings the lamp onto the veranda, the
summer is over. August is at its end, the summer is exhausted; it is
the season of shortening evenings, ill temper, forest fires. Although
this is a book for children, the emotions and the melancholy that
attend the change of season are neither softened nor explained
away.

‘I thought it was about time we started having a lamp now that

the evenings are drawing in. At least I felt so this evening,’ said
Moominmamma.
Moominpappa said: ‘You’ve put an end to the summer. No
lamps should be lit until summer is really over.’
‘Well, it’ll have to be autumn then,’ said Moominmamma in
her quiet way.
The lamp sizzled as it burned. It made everything seem close
and safe, a little family circle they all knew and trusted. Outside
this circle lay everything that was strange and frightening, and
the darkness seemed to reach higher and higher and further and
further away, right to the end of the world.

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 ‘In some families, it’s the father who decides when it’s time to
light the lamp,’ muttered Moominpappa into his tea.144

The father in Emma Tennant’s Scottish fantasy Wild Nights (1981)

does precisely that:

He had had to put on the light, and by doing so he had ended the
summer. He had bundled the long days, the dog days when the
grass begins to show yellow and the haystacks slip over to one
side, into one of the drawers of his enormous desk.145

Again in Jansson’s book, as in the earlier Finn Family Moomintroll,

both the change of season and the discord within the household bring
the embodiment of winter, solitariness and negation, the Groke,
shuffling into the garden just beyond the circle of the lamplight, freez-
ing the ground wherever she rests. In Tennant’s novel, it brings a pair
of winter witches, Aunt Zita, the embodiment of the amoral yet driven
desire for pleasure that lights the great chandeliers to defy the dark
of winter, and Aunt Thelma, who is winter austerity, submission to a
castigating religion and a frozen landscape.146
The Gaelic calendar places summer early in the sequence of months;
the flickering summer poem of Alastair MacMhaighstir Alastair identi-
fies the summer months as May and June. The Celtic festival of
Lugnasa (roughly corresponding to the month of August) was held to
mark the end of summer and the time of harvest and shearing. The
Scots language recognizes this in five seasons: Lent, Simmer, Hairst,
the Back-End, Winter. The shortening days in August and the first chill
mark the point where summer goes over into harvest.
Douglas Dunn’s Northlight (1988) includes a sequence that traces
this progression. A sense of caducity, of the passing nature of things,
is certainly present in Dunn’s ‘75º’, but they are tempered by wit and
resignation, as in the opening scene of embraces and greetings as the
visitors from the south (who venture so far north only in summer, of
course) offer their excuses for their tardy arrival. They offer a finely
miscellaneous catalogue of the allurements of the south, ranging
from ‘Bavarian asparagus’ to ‘Devonian nativities’. In the third part
of the sequence the italic type signifies an intruding voice not that of
the poet’s family or their visitors, but a magician’s invitation into the
brightness of the northern midnight:

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 Eat fern seed, walk invisible . . .
. . . watch a birch
Assume serenity and search
For its perfection, northern
On its grass sofa, turf and moon-fern . . .147

And then the next section broadens out into the circumscribed joy of
the white nights:

The heart stays out all night. Each house

A variant of moonlit slates
And flightpaths of the flittermouse,
Sleeps in the dream it illustrates . . . 148

But the winter has only been biding its time, and the last poem has
the inevitable dimming and loss, the early autumn of the northlands,
summer going over into harvest, expressed in a fusion of the ancient
images of the frost giants leaving Jötunheim above the snowline, and
of the cailleach breathing on the crops to bring the summer to an end:

. . . the north returns

A furred, Icelandic anchorite
Travelling south by landmarked cairns . . .
rumoured by clouds and sudden chills,
By falls of apple, plum and pear.149

Dunn ends with a nicely ambiguous mood: going home to chop

wood for the domesticity of winter, but aware as he does so that
there is a melancholy in the last days of the northern summer, res-
onating across to the other sadnesses even of a grateful life.
Dunn is not the only northern writer to focus on the turn of the
summer to autumn, the first yellow leaves on the alders as early as
July, the August flowering of mallows, montbretia and wind-flowers
(Japanese anemone), the abrupt shortening of the evening light. The
moment when there is no longer light in the northern sky in the
evening, when the weather hints of turning in breaths of cold, when
August afternoons turn grey with mists moving through the fields of
barley just before harvest. All these things have their memorials in
the writers of the north, as they have their record in popular verse
and song.

136
 Scottish traditional song celebrates the high summer in the shiel-
ings – summer lodgings – of the farm workers in the mountains.
Their summer pleasures are intensified by brevity, coming to an end
in the shearing and the resumption of the work of the lowland farm-
touns and the infields.

And with autumn comes the shearing.150

These songs express the grief of the seasonal migrant, at the mercy of
a short-term employment market, unable to stay at will in any place,
however congenial. Harvest brings the return to the valleys and the
autumn hiring fairs. Thus the articulate regrets of the song of parting
at harvest time:

And see you yon high hills all covered with snaw
They have pairted mony a true love and will soon pairt us twa151

– the restrictive power of the winter, the inexorable movement of

the snowline down over the summer pastures, the lovers parted to
circumscribed existences in farmhouse and bothy. Consciously or
unconsciously, the first line echoes the first sight of the wintry hell to
which the devil sails with his lover in the ballad of ‘The Demon
Lover’.152
The same sense of partings enforced by economic need and
adverse weather attends the English capstan-shanty ‘Bold Riley’.153
This passionate expression of the feelings of those supposed by their
employers to have no feelings is sombre and desolate. Workers’ and
soldiers’ songs include a whole sub-genre of this kind of lyric of
enforced migration, the ‘loath-to-depart’.
‘Bold Riley’ implies that the turning year and enforced departure
(the autumn weather and the north wind bear the reluctant crew
outward from the north-west of England) are the manifestations of a
fallen condition. The power of the song comes from a refrain that
reiterates the name of a lost leader, the last just man, the last fair
captain. Bold Riley, oh bold Riley is the second line of every verse, and
every verse ends with Bold Riley, he has gone away. The effect of these
repeating lines, punctuating a narrative of hardship and departure,
is one of supplication, the summoning of a protector or guardian
who is indifferent, dead or absent.

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 The rain it rains all the day long
Bold Riley, oh bold Riley
And the northern wind it blows so strong
Bold Riley, he has gone away.

The identity of Riley is irrecoverable. The name ‘John Riley’ recurs

often, mysteriously, in traditional songs of the departures and
returns of sailors. The lover who dies on the shore or returns after he
has been given up for dead is often ‘John Rally’ or ‘John Riley’.154
The Riley of the shanty hears no supplications and answers no
prayers: he is out of reach and powerless now to redress the griefs of
the singers. The condition of things is grievous; the season has turned
and the wind has swung into the north because of Riley’s departure.
With repetition, this feeling deepens and the shanty ends on a note of
reluctant acceptance of a fallen world and the falling year. The absent
guardian has taken with him the freedom of the northern summer, as
the ship sets forth into the high winds of the equinox, the weather that
killed Ravilious, far to the north, lost in the ocean off Iceland.

northern exile

The cold and low light of the north strike hardest at those who are
brought there against their will.

At cum tristis hiems squalentia protulit ora,

Terraque marmoreae est candida facta gelu.

But when sad winter bestirs itself, the earth is made white marble
by the frost.

These are the words of the poet Ovid, the flâneur of Augustan Rome,
who wrote one despairing poem after another from his northern
exile, at the world’s end, on the shores of the Black Sea. His book of
his sadness, his Tristia – these lines are from the tenth elegy of book
Three – was for many centuries the classical account of exile for west-
ern writers, in a tradition to parallel the Chinese mandarin tradition
of the lament for the distant posting in the Imperial service. Ovid’s
place of exile, the ancient Tomis, is comparatively southerly on the
map of Europe, but to Ovid, whose world was centred on Rome and
the Mediterranean, it was the destroying north.

138
 And northerners are always anfractuous. Ovid in his exile
imagines a correspondent asking how he fares at Tomis, what it is
the place of exile like? And, in David Slavitt’s free imitation of the
Latin, the answer is:

The country here is grotesque, the people savage

the weather awful, the customs crude, and the language a garble
that more or less resembles intestinal sounds
of an ailing goat . . . 155

Northern exile is expressed by the pathetic fallacy: cold rain, slate-

grey seas and weeping skies mirror the exile’s loneliness. The ice of
the north freezes hope, kills happiness, locks up the real self who can
only flourish in the south. To Ovid, for whom the centre of things
was axiomatically the Mediterranean, modern Bulgaria is the
world’s end, ultima Thule, contiguous to the pole:

Proxima sideribus tellus Erymanthidos Ursae

Me tenet, adstricto terra perusta gelu . . .

My heart is with you. Only my husk is here.

The skies above me are frost. Even the stars here
shrivel with cold. Beyond, there’s the Bosporus,
the Don, the Scythian marshes, and then nothing but ice,
empty uninhabited wastes, the world’s
dizzying edges . . . 156

He saw himself as being on a frontier, among barbarous people,

themselves under threat from barbarians yet more outlandish,

Hostis equo pollens longeque volante sagitta

Vicinam late depopulantur humum . . .

. . . the predatory
tribes from the northern wastes, scarecrows on gaunt horses
who cross the empty landscape with empty bellies
and quivers full, and their eyes full of envy and hate.157

In 105 bc an unfortunate, well-born Chinese woman called Hsi-

Chün was married off to the king of just such a tribe, an elderly man

139
who spoke no Chinese. Like Ovid, she found her new life a waking
nightmare, and for a similar reason: every point of orientation had
been removed.

My people have married me

In a far corner of Earth;
Sent me away to a strange land,
To the king of the Wu-sun.
A tent is my house,
Of felt are my walls;
Raw flesh my food
With mare’s milk to drink . . .
Would I were a yellow stork,
And could fly to my old home!158

This is an unconsoled voice – deprived, lost and in despair – not an

exercise in the Chinese classical tradition of writing about northern
places that I will consider more fully in the topographies at the end of
this book.
Northern exile looks different when it is not permanent – to both
Ovid and Hsi-Chün, the focus of grief is the impossibility of a return
to the known world. When a limit can be set to the sojourn in the
north, the malignant prison of ice and darkness abruptly melts into a
place of testing and renewal. Glenn Gould’s Idea of North focuses
on individuals for whom their time in the north may be difficult, but
is intrinsically purposeful and temporary: the people on the Muskeg
Express whom he chose to speak with all had return tickets. They
might find themselves saying, with Jack London:

When a man journeys into a far country, he must be prepared to

forget many of the things he has learned, and to acquire such cus-
toms as are inherent with existence in the new land; he must aban-
don the old ideals and the old gods, and oftentimes he must reverse
the very codes by which his conduct has hitherto been shaped . . . It
were better for the man who cannot fit himself to the new groove to
return to his own country; if he delay too long, he will surely die.159

For Gould’s travellers, and most of London’s, return is an option.

The real stories of despair in the north belong to those for whom no
return is possible, the exiles and prisoners, and the Wendigos, that is,

140
those who have gone over one of the north’s invisible boundaries
between the human and the anti-human. To be exiled without hope
of return is analogous to the crossing of that frontier.
Yet the experience even of temporary and purposeful exile in the
north can be intensely traumatic. In the seventeenth century the Jesuit
fathers in Canada, those who survived the climate and the hostility of
the First Peoples, underwent agonies of displacement in the alien world
of the Northern Territories. Paul le Jeune, who spent the winter of 1634
with the Hurons and almost died of cold and malnutrition, wrote:
‘When you go out, the cold, the snow, and the danger of getting lost in
these great woods drive you in again more quickly than the wind, and
keep you a prisoner in a dungeon which has neither lock nor key.’160
The internal exiles of twentieth-century Russia, the victims of
Stalin’s war on his own people, included the poet Osip Mandelstam,
who was very conscious of himself as the heir of Ovid. His poems in
Tristia (1922) evoke Ovid, in the title alone, yet the city for which he
yearns and mourns, his personal Rome, is one of the most northerly in
Europe, St Petersburg. His title poem is a transposition of Ovid’s verses
about his last night in Rome before leaving the city: ‘I’ve learned the
science of parting . . . ’.161
Other poems in his Tristia evoke St Petersburg and its glamour, its
green spring weather, the lustres and velvet of its magnificent theatre,

I hear the theater’s light rustling,

A young girl’s ‘Oh –’
In Kypris’ arms, a huge bunch
Of immortal roses . . . 162

Mandelstam’s later exile has been wonderfully re-imagined by the

contemporary English poet David Morley in his sequence Mandelstam
Variations. In ‘The First Exile of Mandelstam to Voronezh’, the Russian
poet finds points of resemblance and hope:

It isn’t always winter here:

the small fields are shaping themselves
through the thaw. I could describe so much:
how the trees are a dark coral.163

By the end of the sequence, Morley has imagined a degree of accep-

tance of the experience of northern exile. The culminating poem,

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‘White, White’, imagines Mandelstam’s death as his entering a city
that is the capital of winter. It is the epicentre of the snows of northern
exile, a city where the governor is like the Snow Queen, under whose
rule nothing will grow:

As if the snow itself were a country . . .

. . . when she invites you to her Ice Festival
you will learn to love Slowfreeze and Nightflake,
her daughters by sunless adoption.164

This dream poem also hints at a place filled with whispers and
informers, with secret police who come to torture the speaker with
warmth, but succeed only in freeing him into a dream of snow, and
the release of death:

. . . cold hands holding you,

which you love; that lift you to where water
rushes over your face. Will you dance, dance?
Only so slowly. Melting, melting.165

During the Second World War, Orkney was a place of northern exile
for the Italian prisoners of war who were detained on Lambholm as
labourers on the Churchill barriers. (It was also – proverbially, pro-
fanely – considered a hardship posting by the English forces.) To
the Italians, it must have seemed northern beyond imagination or
endurance, but the commandant was humane, even imaginative, and
the Orcadians were kind. The memorial that the Italians left to their
exile is a Catholic chapel (all that now remains of the camp) improvised
out of Nissen huts, plasterboard and scrap metal, made by the prison-
ers under the direction of one of their number with some formal artistic
training. Unpromising salvaged materials were transformed into a
very fair simulacrum of a modest Italian village church. Stylistically,
there is no compromise of any sort with materials or situation: inside
the building everything is Italian. For all its humble scale, it is a more
convincingly southern building than such ultramontane churches as
the Brompton Oratory in Kensington. The careful contriving of this
displaced chapel was overtaken by the end of the war, and in 1945 its
chief creator voluntarily stayed on for a little time to finish the font
which made it a completely furnished church, a fact that quietly states
that this building project had made from exile a sort of home.

142
 It is a strange place today, now that it sits alone on the bright slopes
of Lambholm. It is as if the air outside and inside the building are dis-
continuous. More than any Aramaic inscription along Hadrian’s Wall,
the Italian Chapel embodies a narrative of people forcibly exiled by
international events, and yet it has little of the sadness of the legionary
tombstones on the northern frontier of the Roman Empire. The church
is simply in an incongruous place: a Mediterranean village church in
exile on a bare island on the sea route to the Arctic.
As Mandelstam makes bitterly clear, exile in the north is not nec-
essarily any easier to bear for those whose homes were in the north
in the first place. W. P. Ker perceived that the first Icelanders
(refugees from the empire-building of the Norwegian king Harald
Fairhair) preserved in their language, for centuries, a sense of their
own exile from Norway:

The Icelanders turned their historical minds towards Norway . . .

It is strange how the Icelanders never seem thoroughly at home in
their colonial island: Norway, and not Iceland, is always the
focus. Iceland is outside: to go to Iceland is to ‘sail out’; while they
‘sail home’ (fara útan) to Norway. They keep the old popular
Norwegian names for the points of the compass, placing NE and
SE inland (‘land north’ and ‘land south’), an arrangement which
works well enough for the greater part of Norway, but of course is
a geographical fiction for Iceland.166

Exile from the north is a different, rarer matter. Robert Louis

Stevenson, driven to the tropics by his health, writes of the paradoxes
of longing for the north in The Silverado Squatters:

Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most

inscrutable. There is no special loveliness in that gray country,
with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains;
its unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly
looking corn-lands; its quaint, gray, castled city, where the bells
clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly
and beat. I do not even know if I desire to live there; but let me
hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out, ‘Oh, why left I my
hame?’ and it seems at once as if no beauty under the kind heav-
ens, and no society of the wise and good, can repay me for my
absence from my country.167

143
 Last winter, I was visited by a series of dreams about exile. They
lasted only as long as heavy snow besieged us in the house. They
were images of familiar places estranged and grown terrible. In the
dreams, I was inhabiting the consciousness of the most convinced
Londoner among my friends. I was seeing the north as he might see it
were chance or misfortune, the unimaginable revolutions of dreams,
to exile him in the places that my waking self accepts as ‘here’. The
clearest dream began with images of being isolated in remote country
in winter twilight, stung by the sandy attrition of tiny grains of snow
on the wind. A path by a stream through a pinewood in the bottom of
a valley. Low cloud above the trees, mixing with the dark on the hills.
When the cloud breaks or shifts, there are glimpses of moors and
upland slopes under snow. The dream exile approaches a handsome
northern house in the wood, a stone Victorian shooting lodge or a
wooden Scandinavian manor. He looks into a lit room of melancholy
elegance: there are pier-glasses, candles, a fire of pine logs. A dog on
the hearth-rug raises its head happily to his footfall. The horror of the
dream is that the beautiful room seen through the window is home,
and that home is in the wrong place.
The dream had a variant on another night where the dream exile
is again looking in deep winter through a window into a firelit room
at nightfall, but the room is in a stone-built villa on the outskirts of
one of the remotest towns on the Pentland Firth. A green-walled
drawing room with watercolours of upland landscapes in solid
frames. Substantial furniture, a standard lamp by an armchair and a
sense, in the nightmare, that this has been home for years. The
library book on the arm of the chair is a crime story set in London. It
is the only book in the town library that even mentions the native
metropolis of the dreamer, who lives tormented by the noise of the
wind from the northern isles across the sea, with the exile’s defining
sense that his real life is taking place elsewhere, that he has become
his own ghost, haunting the wrong place.

revenants

Ghosts in Europe are northern. It is panic terror that belongs to the

south: possession at noon, sudden fear born from heat haze, and
empty tracts of hillside that are suddenly inhabited. The Roman
camp at Silchester in Hampshire seemed terrible in exactly this way
at midday in high summer. The senses of misfortune and wrongness

144
have attached to Roman ruins in England since the departure of the
Romans. They are the traces of the south in the north, and, as such, it
is perhaps fitting that they inspire fears of southern demons. Ghosts
are less a feature of southern belief than are beliefs in vampires and
the evil eye – both of which are direct inheritances from the Romans.
Spirits and vampires also haunt the imaginations of south-east Asia,
inhabiting the misty jungles and the heavy air before the monsoon
breaks. In the Far East, narratives of spirits and shape shifters are
nourished by rainy seasons or by the mists of a Japanese autumn.
Chinese ghosts flee the clarities of winter, flares in ice lanterns put
them to flight.
But the revenant narrative is essentially of the north, and is a prod-
uct of occluded weather and broodings upon the fate of the dead.
Stories about the ghosts of the dead flourish particularly at times in
religious history when there has been most doubt about the after-
life. In medieval Iceland, the ghost stories in the sagas are mostly set
in the period immediately after the conversion of the island to
Christianity, and the most troublesome of the Icelandic ghosts is that
of a pagan survivor among Christians. The Reformation in northern
Europe seemed to foster ghost stories at the same time as it withdrew
from the people sacramental assistance in their dealings with the
dead. The godly of the early seventeenth century tried to tie the
English Church for all time to a Calvinist perspective in which those
who have died sleep wakeless, incommunicado until the last day,
and attempts to relate to them are proscribed and punished. This
new theology of death deprived the people of the comforting rituals
of a continuing relationship with the dead, to an extent that it is
unsurprising that ghost beliefs, half-recollected and half-submerged,
came rushing in to fill the new vacuum in official religion. Victorian
England (which remains the single place and time most productive of
ghost stories) lived with all the worries about the dead drawn to the
surface by re-examinations of belief that emphasized the raggedness
of the English theology of death.168
John Aubrey’s Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (begun in 1688,
when executions for witchcraft were by no means over) seems in
retrospect an anachronistically calm examination of these phenom-
ena of surviving popular belief.169 In this compilation he reproduces a
ballad on the fate of the soul recorded as being sung at (‘Country
vulgar’) Yorkshire funerals until the 1620s. This ‘Lyke-Wake dirge’
describes an otherworld journey of the soul, through a bleak and per-

145
ilous Pennine landscape of thornbushes on high moors, bale-fires
and narrow bridges. This vernacular purgatory is only passable by
virtue of alms given in the soul’s lifetime. There is a close analogue to
this dirge in the Draumkvaede, a Norwegian ballad collected in
Telemark in the early nineteenth century, which sets forth an even
more terrible itinerary for the soul, adding a glacier and lakes of ice to
the moor of thorns and the narrow bridge.170 Again, these trials are
easily passed by the soul who has given food and clothes to the poor
while alive. The posthumous landscape of the Draumkvaede is contin-
uous with the terrible otherworlds of Scandinavian belief, the pagan
substratum underlying the revenant narratives in the Icelandic sagas.
The verse narrative of The Waking of Angantyr, interpolated in the
Saga of King Heidrik the Wise, takes place on a burning offshore island
which is simultaneously the place where the noble dead are buried
and an otherworld to which the living can travel at their peril.
Hervor travels there to demand of her father Angantyr the supernat-
ural sword that has been buried with him. As with almost all ghost
narratives of the north, the early waning of the winter daylight is
crucial. In the zone between the living and the dead in which the
poem opens, there is a terse dialogue between the heroine and a
herdsman, on the dangers of being benighted in such a place:

To have come hither, all alone

To this land of shadows was sheer folly,
Over fen and fold fires are soaring,
Graves are opening: let us go quickly.171

But she is fearless: she curses and threatens the waking dead until
finally they yield to her the sword that has been buried as part of
Angantyr’s grave goods, not without the prophecy from its dead
owner that it will ‘Destroy your kindred, kill them all’.
But once she has the sword she seems to care little for past or
future: the interactions of the living and dead are conducted through
a brutal show of force on both sides, in a way that barely makes a
distinction between the two conditions. Hervor departs in triumph:

With a glad heart I will go now

To ride the horses of the roaring sea:
Little care I what may come after . . .

146
and throws only a half-blessing behind her as she goes, that her
father and his berserkers may be at peace in their graves.
Another region of the dead is located in the far north by an extraor-
dinary fragment of a sixteenth-century travellers’ tale that seems to
place a land of the dead once more among the volcanoes of Iceland:

a ship which, while sailing from Iceland with a strong tailing wind,
was passed by another ship sailing with the speed of a storm . . .
straight into the gale. When they called out ‘Where do you come
from?’, the captain answered, ‘From the Bishop of Bremen.’ And
when they shouted, ‘Where are you going?’, the answer was ‘To
Hekla, to Hekla.’172

The blurred boundary between the living and the dead is con-
stant in the Icelandic sagas: the burial mounds lie within sight of the
farms, and their inhabitants are spoken of as present, drowsing
rather than dead, ready to wake, speak, sing. The casual way in
which these stirrings of the dead are narrated is astonishing; they
treat hauntings as so quotidian that no living character is described
as reacting to them as to anything out of the ordinary. This is the tone
of this example from chapter 78 of Njal’s Saga:

One day the shepherd and a housemaid at Hlidarend were driving

cattle past Gunnar’s burial mound; it seemed to them that Gunnar
was in good humour and chanting verses inside the mound.173

Then two of the chief protagonists of the tragedy visit Gunnar’s tomb:

Suddenly it seemed to them that the mound was open; Gunnar

had turned round to face the moon. There seemed to be four
lights burning inside the mound, illuminating the whole cham-
ber. They could see that Gunnar was happy; his face was exultant.
He chanted a verse so loudly that they could have heard it clearly
from much further away.

And his song is a fatal song of encouragement to the young men

never to yield and so the blood feud that is at the centre of the narra-
tive continues until nearly all the characters of the saga are dead.
At the very end, when Njal and his family have been burned in
their house, the last utterance of Njal’s strange son, Skarphethinn, is

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from an ambiguous place between the living and the dead. This scene
emphasizes the transitional status of belief in the sagas: Njal, his wife
and grandson make a Christian end, signing themselves with the
cross and lying down passively under an ox hide, waiting for the
smoke to suffocate them, and they die and are not heard of again.
Skarphethinn, on the other hand, fights to the end, like a pagan
Viking, and seems to attain the status of life in death. (Although
eventually burns are found on his body that are retrospectively inter-
preted as his having branded himself with the sign of the cross.) After
the hall is burnt, he is among those presumed dead in the ashes, but
when the assailants go back for one last look he still speaks:

‘Is Skarp-Hedin dead yet, do you think’, asked Glum.

The others said that he must have been dead for some time.
The fire still burned fitfully, flaring up and sinking again. Then they
heard this verse being uttered somewhere down amongst the flames

The woman will find it hard

To stop the cloudburst of her tears
At this outcome
Of the warrior’s last battle . . . 174

The translators break off at this point with a note that the rest
of the stanza is too garbled to be intelligible. It is just possible that
this garbled verse is mimetic, ghost speech from the outsider
Skarphethinn, inhabiting at the moment of his death an unimagin-
able region between the after-lifes of pagan and Christian. ‘Grani
Gunnarsson said, “Was Skarphethinn alive or dead when he spoke
that verse?” “I shall not make any guesses about that”, replied Flosi.’
The lack of a fixed boundary between the living and the dead, as
though the dead pass into a form of life very close to that of the sur-
vivors, is the condition of the revenants of the sagas. In one extreme
case the ghost has to be killed again before the haunting ceases. This is
in Grettir’s Saga where a (significantly pagan and foreign) farm servant
is killed and becomes in death a kind of troll, not at all unlike the
Grendel of Beowulf. Like Grendel, his time of power is in the long
nights of winter:

It was not long before men became aware that Glam was not easy
in his grave. Many men suffered severe injuries; some who saw

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 him were struck senseless and some lost their wits . . . men began
to think they saw him about their houses . . . Next he began to ride
on the house-tops by night, and nearly broke them to pieces. The
district was in a grievous condition.175

When the hero Grettir finally fights the ghost on the third night of
his visit to Thorhall-stead, Glam is corporeal, supernaturally strong
and malevolent towards all living things. As they fight, it is only
luck that gives Grettir the physical advantage, and when Glam falls,
the narrative invents what will become one of the main strategies of
the nineteenth-century ghost story, the refusal of description. The
reader is told that the dead man’s eyes turned up to the moonlight
are horrible enough to change Grettir for life.

At the moment when Glam fell the moon shone forth, and Glam
turned his eyes up towards it. Grettir himself has related that that
sight was the only one which ever made him tremble.

The final curse that Glam utters before his second death is disturb-
ing, in its absolute unfairness, in exactly the same way that the
apparition in an M. R. James’s ghost story is disturbing.

henceforth there shall fall upon you evil and battle; your deeds
shall turn to evil and your guardian-spirit shall forsake you . . .
And this I lay upon you, that these eyes of mine shall be ever
before your vision.176

There appears to be no supernatural justice to restrain the efficacy of

Glam’s curse on Grettir, any more than any system of apotropeia seem
effective against James’s revenants. Indeed James remains
ambiguous in his story ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ whether a
Christian apotropeion, in this case a crucifix, is the cause of the flight of
the incubus, or if it simply flees when the servants break through the
door. In the Icelandic narrative, it is as though the two belief systems,
pagan and Christian, exist side by side so that the pagan ghost’s curse
is effective, even though Grettir is performing an act of charity in
bringing the haunting to an end.177
The Scandinavian preoccupation with ghosts reappears in the
contemporary Finnish poet Eeva-Liisa Manner, in her evocation of
wet air and dimmed light, with a shifting speaker who is sometimes

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a creator, sometimes a ghost, existing on the turn of season, at the
turn of night to day.

. . . Where do the days go?

The dark winters, the bright summers sleep in the trees
into the trees they go, the leaves go back to the earth,
and when shall I go back, tired of change, I?

The trees are bare

Autumn
is leading its mistponies down to the stream.

Dogs are barking far far away.

A tiny cart comes through a narrow gate,
Alone, driverless, and disappears.

It’s the way a ghost drives, they say,

If your heart’s asleep beneath a holly.178

It was the coexistence of parallel belief systems that provided the

mainspring of the ancient Scandinavian ghost narratives, and it
was at a point where comparable parallel belief systems evolved in
England that the Victorian ghost story flourished.
There is the complicating historical phenomenon of a kind of elite
paganism observable in upper-class England at the turn of the nine-
teenth century. Reaction against vernacular enthusiasm in religion
drove numbers of educated people through gentlemanly deism into
something like stoic agnosticism. In the time of encyclopaedias and
revolutions, with beliefs further destabilized by the Enlightenment
insistence that the irrational could simply be banished along with
ignorance (and that they had been banished), it is unsurprising that
the elite should fall back in some degree on that antiquity that lay at
the heart of their education.
In Regency England, John Flaxman’s memorials represent the
upper-class dead in an extraordinary grave masquerade as the
ancients, his calm classical vignettes consistent in their neo-Greek
fancy dress, come close to representing an alternative, non-Christian
system of belief. With the 1840s and the Catholicizing theologies of
the Oxford Movement (in the Thirty-Nine Articles, the English are
bound not to believe in Purgatory, but they are not told precisely
what they are to believe in instead), the whole question was opened

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again, and the ghost stories began. The classic Victorian ghost narra-
tives are the product of uncertainty about the dead, of absence of
belief in a system for controlling the demands of the dead, and all
this in a society that gave considerable emphasis to the public enact-
ments of mourning and commemoration.
The awkward ideological transitions from stoic neo-Classicism
to Victorian religiosity form the pivot of John Meade Falkner’s
revenant novel The Lost Stradivarius, first published in 1895. This is
the narrative, complex in its awareness of the shifts in nineteenth-
century cultural history, of an early Victorian gentleman, John
Maltravers, who is drawn supernaturally by music and the discov-
ery of a fine ancient violin into decadence and occultism. He dies
untimely as the more moral and religious, infinitely less cultivated,
High Victorian age begins. This ambivalent elegy for the epoch of
the Grand Tour is on the one hand the inheritor of the Gothick novel
and the Jacobean tragedy, in that it locates decadence and forbidden
knowledge unequivocally in the Catholic south of Europe. On the
other hand, the novel is a lament for all that has to be relinquished to
make way for the certainties of Victorian England. (The very name of
the hero is a half-conscious statement of this problem: Mal-travers
has buried within it the idea of evil or misfortune and the idea of a
crossing or transference whether in time or in place.)
The achievement of the nineteenth-century devisers of ghost sto-
ries, particularly of M. R. James, lies in placing members of their own
educated class in situations of isolation and stress where they are
most vulnerable to these monsters and revenants of the popular
imagination. Their deliverance is seldom of their own making and
seldom due to the employment of Christian objects or formulae;
usually they are saved by the ideologically neutral device of a timely
intrusion. Unlike the untroubled antiquarianism of John Aubrey,
James’s antiquarian scholars deal with a past that is a supernatural
minefield. It inherits some of the tropes of suspicion of Catholic
Europe from the Gothic novel. Two Catholic clerics, Canon Alberic
in ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ and Abbot Thomas in ‘The Treasure
of Abbot Thomas’, have been in their lifetimes black magicians, and
the unlucky whistle and that which it summons in ‘O Whistle and
I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ are found in the ruins of a Templar pre-
ceptory.179 In so far as M. R. James can be said in his ghost stories to
express a world-view, it is a remarkably bleak one: a single action of
moral transgression can leave a guilty man – a murderer or an ama-

151
teur archaeologist who has stolen from an ancient barrow – although
in the midst of one of the leisured cathedral or university communi-
ties about which he writes so well, alone with the aptganga, the
vengeful, animate corpse. Or the antiquarian can murmur aloud the
unlucky words from the manuscript, blow the summoning whistle
found in the ruins and, strangely, there is no system of exorcism that
can come to his help when the summons is answered, rescue coming
usually simply in the form of someone bursting into the space where
the abomination has manifested itself.
It is in the end the metaphysics of M. R. James’s stories that are so
troubling: by closing down or discounting certain tracts of human
feeling and possibility (including any beliefs held by anyone in the
world who is not of their own class), his clerical protagonists lay
themselves open as helpless sacrifices to the forces that inhabit those
outlawed beliefs. James was a troubled man, in perfect control of his
public manner. Publicly, the stories claim only the status of Christmas
entertainment. But they cannot help but constitute an anatomy of the
anxieties surrounding a rational clerical elite, with their certainties
surrounded by and menaced by terror and ignorance, just as much as
in the sixteenth or eighteenth centuries.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s eventual spiritualism can be seen as a
rejection of the all-explaining Thomist world of his Catholic upbring-
ing (and consequently of the palpably Thomist decoding of the signs
of the world on which rests the fame of his fictional detective,
Sherlock Holmes), but his ghost fiction fails to share the genuine
unease that M. R. James can achieve. Conan Doyle’s ghost story of
1883, ‘The Master of the “Pole Star”’, is remarkable for its setting on
a ship sailing dangerously in ice-threatened waters with winter
approaching, but the ghost story itself is essentially like the scenario
of a romantic ballet of the early nineteenth century, with the wraith
of the Captain’s lost love leading him to oneness with her in the
recesses of the ice landscape.
The American writer Henry James, on the other hand, wrote won-
derful ghost stories exploiting to the full the northerly melancholy of
England (they are in their settings sometimes close to the sad land-
scapes of Tennyson). But often there is a sense of the protagonists as
neurotic, as creators themselves of disturbances that are answered
by the manifestation of the revenants, as in the most celebrated of his
stories, The Turn of the Screw (1898), where the protagonist, the
Governess in the remote country house, creates her own isolation in

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which the horrors of the intercourse between the gentry children
and the revenants of the Valet and Governess can take place.
What is specifically northern in this whole nineteenth-century
flowering of revenant narratives is their dependence on light levels
and on tricks of weather that have the effect of occluding the light.
The dampness of the insular air is crucial: mists and vapours, after-
noons darkened by rain, the proximity of lakes and meres, still,
black, mist-generating water. The dead governess appears on the
other side of the lake in the grounds of the troubled country house;
mist and fog are crucial to the ghostly memory of the Victorian cities.
The northern weather and light are equally crucial: long twilights,
rainy and uncertain dawns, snow seen in the sparsely spaced street-
lights. Fog over East Anglian ploughlands as in M. R. James’s ‘The
Tractate Middoth’, fog in the city. Often, M. R. James’s malevolent
visitations begin with a mist hanging in the air over the unlucky
place. (This is an effect I observed myself on a bright October morn-
ing in northern Scotland, under trees, beside a Victorian urn, a man-
sized column of mist motionless in the still air. Nothing happened. A
breath of wind came up the valley and it dispersed.)
There are few poems in this register of darkness, bad weather and
the approach of the revenant, the notable exception being one of the
lyrics in A. E. Housman’s Last Poems, a poem that reveals a great deal
about English mentalities at the turn of the twentieth century:

In midnights of November,
When Dead Man’s Fair is nigh,
And danger in the valley,
And anger in the sky,
Around the huddling homesteads
The leafless timber roars,
And the dead call the dying
And finger at the doors.180

‘Dead Man’s Fair’ is the crucial phrase, and its original meaning is
specific – the last fair of the year at Church Stretton was held when
winter weather made the homeward journey dangerous. But the
phrase moves out from its local English meaning to the idea of the
first days of November as the point where the divisions (or
defences) between the living and the dead are at their most abraded
– All Souls’ Day, le jour des morts.181 It acquires both the meaning of

153
the annual time of the dead, but also an extraordinary momentary
implication of a fair attended only by the dead. This implication is
as disquieting as the heterodox medieval idea of the compagnie des
morts, the lonely company of the dead passing in the dark on the
winter roads. Housman wrote elsewhere of the young farm servants
going to Ludlow fair including among their number the unknow-
able division of those who will die young in the empire’s wars.
These are the dead men who finger at the doors, while their bodies
lie in Africa and India. Housman’s location of himself in the poem is
ambiguous: he places himself, as he does throughout his verse, as
the former companion of these uneducated young men. This is within
the homoerotic fantasy of companionship with ‘the coarse, hanged
soldier’, which enables him to write verse at all. So when the
response to the ghosts at the door is to ignore them,

Their false companion drowses

And leaves them in the cold,

Housman is their ‘false companion’ in many senses. He has displaced

desire into a fantasy of the early deaths of young men, and now the
ghosts at the door are the products of that same fantasy. Again the
ghost narrative becomes a way of approaching otherwise impossible
territories. Housman’s desire to follow the beckoning revenants to the
places where their corpses lie could be achieved only if he achieved
himself the state of a spirit travelling

Along the rainy wind,

which he resists as the poem veers prudently towards its end, with
the refusal to follow the spirits, the refusal to enter the territories of
excitement and danger that they inhabit. (This was the only poem
that Vladimir Nabokov marked in his copy of Housman’s Last Poems
– ability to quote Housman’s discreetly homoerotic verses are among
the minor accomplishments of the shape-shifting, deranged narrator
of Nabokov’s Pale Fire.)182
In another medium, Atkinson Grimshaw (1836–1893), a Yorkshire
painter of the mid-nineteenth century, has come to be seen as giving
visual embodiment to the haunted aspect of the Victorian imagina-
tion. He was a painter devoted to effects of light and half-light, so
that what were probably originally little more than studies of (mostly

154
northern English) places by a painter who had a knack of painting
by moonlight, or by the very last light of an autumn day, have come
to be read as themselves ghostly. His images are almost inevitably to
be found on the covers of reprints of Victorian ghost stories. His
paintings are usually of the quiet streets and substantial villas of the
grand new mill-owners’ quarters arising to the west of the Yorkshire
cities. His acute eye for the quotidian poetics of suburban evenings,
for distant lighted windows and moonlit garden walls, has been
reinterpreted, in all its quiet melancholy, as spectral. In the popular
imagination, his scenes are brooding, places waiting for apparitions
and revenants. His places are like the serene openings of M. R.
James’s stories into which slowly the unspeakable encroaches. And
yet this is so much a matter of northern weather: rising mists and of
the tricks of the light on cold, saturated air.
This aspect of the English imagination is apprehended by the
Dutch poet Martinus Nijhoff in his sonnet on Shakespeare’s A Winter’s
Tale (a play that famously includes the telling of an interrupted ghost
story). The visual effects of icy weather on a country of water mead-
ows are offered as parallels in feeling to the grimness and sadness of a
play which Nijhoff describes in the opening stanza as being ‘the story
of a dead princeling, imagined by the failing light of a winter fire’.

‘s Winters zijn de nachten zwijgend.

In de witte stille huivert
Zil’vren mist die, langzaam stijgend,
Tot den dageraad zich zuivert.183

The winter nights keep silent

in white silence silver rises
mist which shivers, slowly rising
purifying itself until dawn.

What is important here is the unobserved phenomenon – freezing

mist in the half-light, haunted bleakness – an equivalent for the
wintry hauntings in Shakespeare.
Paintings of interiors by James Pryde (1886–1941), with their
impossibly tall, crepuscular rooms, are already in the grip of the
manifestation of the revenant: the tattered draperies of the great
beds are stirred already by the icy air that accompanies the appear-
ance of unsatisfied ghosts. The heavy mouldings, cloudy mirrors

155
and torn curtains have been invested with the sense of the malice of
the place that Sylvia Townsend Warner described in a strange letter
of 1925 to David Garnett. She recounts an exploration of a deserted
farmhouse and credits it with having acquired, in its emptiness and
isolation, a consciousness:

I was just thinking that I had had enough . . . when I saw an arch-
way leading into a sort of cellar with a barrel roof. I went in
looking at the roof and nearly fell into a well. It was so dark and
smooth and plumb with the floor that it looked like a slate. It then
seemed to me that this deserted house I had been pitying so was
uncommonly disappointed that I hadn’t gone a step further into
its trap. It had been waiting so long for something to happen; and
a drowned lady would have been a pleasant secret to hint of to
the woods on a winter’s night.184

The tradition of Victorian ghost stories changed and broadened in

the first two decades of the twentieth century. Although Japanese
prints and lacquer work had been known and admired in the west
for decades, Japanese literature and drama were just beginning to
be translated at that time. In the 1900s the American poet Ezra Pound
had been given a substantial collection of notes and draft transla-
tions by the pioneering scholar Ernest Fenellosa, and from these he
made verse translations of the Japanese Noh plays (published in
1916), thus making available an exotic repertory of ghost narratives
to extend the western tradition.
Almost every play is about an interaction between the living
and the dead that brings a haunting to an end. The classic story for
these plays is a narrative of successful exorcism. The action is
always performed by three main actors: of these the principal is
almost always a ghost, the second the ghost’s companion, and the
third the travelling priest or scholar who encounters them. These
plays are intensely preoccupied with the haunted place: precisely
located scenes of past misfortune or unresolved love. The whole
point of plays such as Nishikigi is that the travelling priest character
(the Waki) performs ceremonies that enable the ghosts to manifest
themselves as they were when alive, to explain their histories and
to have a moment of renewed animation in which to resolve their
unfinished business and find rest.185 Sometimes this involves a
dance of anger for an unquiet warrior ghost, a posthumous religious

156
conversion for a ghost separated in life from his love by religion, or a
declaration of love unspoken in life. The play ends always with the
ghosts being laid. It is the Waki’s devout sympathy that bridges
the territories of the living and the dead, breaking the cycle of re-
enactments of past suffering that is otherwise the lot of the spirits.
This devout sympathy is not only extended to the ghosts them-
selves, it is also a right-thinking piety directed to the places that are
haunted. It heals and resolves the discordant overtones that have
built up in the haunted place, but does so not from a desire to
reclaim it, rather a desire to render it yet more worthy of respect. The
Japanese topographical tradition is a tradition of reverence as well as
of commemoration.
The other element that is central to these Noh texts, as Pound
presents them, is an acute awareness of season and weather. This
is manifested particularly in the play Nishikigi, where much of the
atmosphere and point of the play (as read, not as it might be staged)
are conveyed by the repeated descriptions of the October evening,
the fallen leaves, wet grass and wind-stirred pines, which establish
the atmosphere of loneliness and regret in which the narrative of the
ghost lovers is unfolded.

There’s a cold feel in the autumn.

Night comes . . .
And storms; trees giving up their leaf,
Spotted with sudden showers.
Autumn! Our feet are clogged
In the dew-drenched, entangled leaves186

When the ghosts appear transfigured in the second part of the

drama, they talk of lostness, of wind-blown snow as a metaphor for
the stasis of the re-enacting, powerless spirits.

Our hearts have been in the dark of the falling snow,

We have been astray in the flurry.
You should tell better than we
How much is illusion . . .
We have been in the whirl of those who are fading.187

As the benign operation of the travelling priest’s intercession begins

to work, the ghosts have the chance to act out the conclusion that

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their own actions denied in their lifetimes, and the snow image
returns transformed into the whirling sleeves in the betrothal dance.

Now comes the eve of betrothal;

We meet for the wine-cup.
How glorious the sleeves of the dance,
That are like snow-whirls.188

The return to daylight with which the play ends is melancholy,

concerned with the sadness of distant shrines as autumn draws on
(early in the play the travelling priest has told the audience that the
location of the play is in the far north of the island):

. . . nothing
Awaits you: no, all this will wither away.
There is nothing here but this cave in the field’s midst.
Today’s wind moves in the pines;
A wild place, unlit and unfilled.189

These ghost plays expand the possibilities of the revenant narra-

tive in the west: W. B. Yeats derives his ‘sad and angry consolation’
in The Dreaming of the Bones from it – a play using Japanese con-
ventions and breaking them at the crisis of the drama, in that the
traveller cannot forgive the ghosts of the long-dead aristocrats who
brought the English into Ireland. Evocation of the northern weather
fixes the mood at the conclusion, combining a sense of unended
regret with a single absolutely precise image for the unfinished-
ness of history (the withered seed from last year’s harvest still lying
shrivelled, but capable of life, in the cold fields of March).

Our luck is withered away,

And wheat in the wheat-ear withered,
And the wind blows it away . . . 190

The sadness of remote places at unvisited seasons is hospitable to

the translation of the Japanese ghost narrative, just as a decade later
Auden would place his aptgangas, Icelandic ghosts re-imagined as
English athletes, faltering in the falling snow at the doors of the big
gritstone houses of the northern moors.191

158
iii Topographies

scandinavia

Old World imaginations of north are so much formed by images of the

Scandinavian lands and of the lost-and-found territory of Greenland
that they have already been a part of almost every section of this book,
as has the art and literature of these northern countries. It is impossible,
on this scale, to make a comprehensive topography of the
Scandinavian countries – so my intention is to concentrate simply on
some ideas of north centred in the Scandinavian world. In the end a
choice has to be made of a few points of focus which are united by
embodying explicitly ideas of north generated within the northern
countries: accounts of Greenland, the lost-and-found territory, the
place that is Scandinavia’s northern margin; the films of Knut Erik
Jensen, which are all concerned with the absolute north of Norway,
with Finnmark; the classic literary and artistic pilgrimage to Iceland,
William Morris’s travels of the 1870s. (Morris was one of the nine-
teenth-century romantics who felt passionately rooted in the
Scandinavian England of the Danelaw.) This section also considers two
out of many Scandinavian painters, both of whom speak particularly
to the northern nature of their native places: the Icelander Jóhannes
S. Kjarval (1885–1972) and the Dane Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916).
Greenland is powerful as an idea, one of the most powerful ideas
of north. Even to Scandinavians, it was the true ultima Thule – a per-
ception that is powerfully evoked in Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, in
which the half-Inuit Smilla’s return to Greenland is a journey into an
ultimate strangeness.1 This sense of Greenland’s uncanniness was
almost enhanced by the accidents of history. In the Middle Ages won-
derful rumours had circulated of the glories of the settlements in
Greenland, including a magical account of a Dominican friary whose
friars were regarded as gods by the indigenous Inuit peoples. The
friary, heated by the waters of hot springs, was built of solidified lava;
hot water provided the energy for cooking in sealed copper vessels
lowered into the boiling waters. There was even a rumour of a garden
in the depth of the Arctic winter, covered over and watered with

159
warm water to bring flowers and vegetables to maturity among the
frosts.2 In the twelfth century Greenland was an outlying Viking
colony, but by 1300, as Europe grew colder, it had become an ecological
tragedy. As summers got shorter and shorter, it became impossible
first to grow grain, then to grow enough grass to maintain live-
stock, while pack ice in the trade routes kept ships away. The
Greenland Vikings literally withered away due to inbreeding and
malnutrition: when the Danes excavated the remains of the early
settlements in the 1930s, they found the last generations, who were
dying out around the time that Columbus crossed the Atlantic, were
less than five feet tall (a metre and a half), and riddled with disease.3
Mysteriously, they also found vestiges that suggested that there must
once have been active and frequent contact between Greenland and
North America. In the remains of a farm at the head of Ameralik
Fjord one piece of coal was found among the ruins. The fireplaces
seemed only to have burned wood, but the piece of coal was found in
the deepest layer: geologically, it is overwhelmingly probable that it
came from America, an object as eloquent in its way as the piece of
Chinese jade found in the pre-Homeric stratum of excavated Troy. An
arrow-head of quartzite, of a type unknown in Greenland, was found
near the site, presumably having returned in the body of a dead
Norseman, brought from America to burial in consecrated ground.4
Perhaps in consequence of its remoteness, Greenland became a
locus of fantastic legend. Even as early as the eleventh century,
Adam of Bremen asserted that the Greenlanders were so called
because they were bluish-green, and got that way on account of
living in the ocean. ‘The men there are blue-green from the deep sea,
from whence the region also takes its name.’5
By 1427 a Danish geographer’s map was showing Greenland as a
home of pygmies, griffins, wodwos and even unipeds – people with
a single leg and foot. Curiously, the Vinland sagas also contain
soberly described encounters with one-footed people (conceivably a
perplexed misinterpretation of men on skis).6
Greenland was also the point of origin of a variety of desirable
natural treasures, such as the rare and beautiful white falcons, and
narwhal ivory – unicorn’s horn – so its fearsome strangeness was, as
so often in the history of ideas about the north, nuanced by percep-
tions that it was potentially a source of wealth. One of the early uses
of Greenland, from a Scandinavian viewpoint, was that it produced
polar bears – which, like rhinoceros in the Renaissance, were exotic

160
presents between rulers: an Icelander called Aud̄un punted his entire
worldly wealth on one bear some time in the early Middle Ages, and
was successful in making his fortune by presenting it to the king of
Denmark.7 In 1252 Henry iii of England was given a white bear by
the king of Norway, which was normally kept in the royal menagerie
in the Tower, but encouraged to fish its own salmon out of the
Thames (on a chain).8
The accounts of the Danish travels to Greenland in the early
eighteenth century are haunting. The pastor Hans Egede, who went
on to try to improve the conditions of the native peoples, found no
trace, not a vestige of the Norse settlement.9 It is like a fable of the
power of the destructive north, the cornlands turning to barley, then
oats, then rye before being overwhelmed by the ice sheet, the oblit-
eration of the settlers from the landscape.
The contemporary Norwegian film-maker Knut Erik Jensen is
also much preoccupied by deserted settlements in the far north, but
his beloved Finnmark, which is the subject and setting of his most
notable films, is deserted only when its settlements are destroyed
by the retreating Nazi armies. The destruction that the Nazis left
behind them in the north, and the post-war rebuilding of Finnmark,
is at the centre of his work.
His most ambitious narrative film, Brent av Frost/Burnt by Frost
(1997), is the retrospective history of a spy operating in the ambigu-
ous, far-northern territories of the Norwegian–Soviet frontier. The
fisherman Simon suffers through the terrible winter exodus following
the Nazi occupation, falls in with Russian partisans, becomes a spy for
the Russians, is discovered and imprisoned in Norway. Released on
parole, he commits suicide by drowning and (an image recurring
throughout the film) his body is rowed back through his native fjord
in the fathomless cobalt-blue dusk of the northern summer.
Always his wife Lilian is present in voice-over asking ‘why’, as if
an answer from her dead husband would be a revelation of the heart
of Finnmark and its sufferings. In one sequence of his trial she is
the only spectator in the courtroom, which was packed a moment
earlier. It is an oblique narrative, a narrative of partial disclosures in
which the nature (indeed location) of many scenes long remains
ambiguous. The theme of the north recurs endlessly, a theme that
holds the film together. When Simon is asked where he comes from,
his answer is ‘From Korsfjord and the ocean outside’. In the prison, a
guard praises his ‘Green fingers’ as he tends a rose, to receive the

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desolate answer: ‘Where I come from, our fingers are white and
cold.’ At a military banquet in Russia, he is praised as ‘Our friend
from the cold north’.
As in Jensen’s other Finnmark film, Stella Polaris (1993), the
sequence of time is dislocated: decades pass and the characters do
not appear to age. The landscapes of the very north remain a con-
stant in the film: the apparently innocent landscape of coastal rock
and low-backed offshore islands where Simon and Lilian meet in
the light summer night is also the place where Simon in autumn
scans the sea through binoculars for traces of nato submarines.
Sometimes we are shown landscapes in long-held stillness as delib-
erate enigmas – the mirroring fjord, windswept rocks. In every case
the spectator is challenged to notice the tiny infiltrations – the barely
moving rowing boat, the stir on the horizon.
The film is an elegy for a man who has done the wrong thing to try
to protect a place and person that he loves beyond reason. Throughout
the film Jensen offers us images of Finnmark in all its austerity that
compel the spectator by their sheer beauty and strangeness to imagine
how it might be to love such a remote place with such a love. These
elegiac scenes are of great eloquence: the long-held shot of the snow
falling gently in front of Lilian’s motionless face, which moves into a
dream (perhaps hers, Jensen’s films move with assurance in and out of
the protagonists’ dreams) of Simon’s return to his north in the heart of
winter. In the snow he approaches the abraded wooden buildings, the
light spilling out to greet him. But an answering sequence shows Lilian
alone and outside, in a grey landscape, looking in through the window
of a house. He stands alone looking out, and slowly behind him
shadows arrive in the room as it fills with men in military uniforms.
Again and again we see a boat moving against the twilight
summer blue of the fjord and the hills. Again and again. These
recurring, beautiful images are in fact of the boat carrying his body
through the long summer twilight back to the village, the home-
coming of someone who has loved the north too fiercely.
Jensen’s earlier film Stella Polaris is another meditation on
Finnmark and its history since the 1930s. It is a dream-film, almost
entirely located in the dreams of a young woman who is in hospital
under anaesthetic. It is almost wordless – there are scraps in
German, Russian, English and the occasional command or warning
in Norwegian – but, for the most part, the film focuses on moments
when people don’t speak.

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 Apart from the opening sequence, a dream walk through a once-
grand street of neo-Classical stone apartment-blocks – windowless,
gutted, falling to ruin – almost all the action of the film takes place in
a remote fishing village in northernmost Norway. The protagonist
and her childhood friend, later husband, run in and out of the village
of wooden houses, fish-processing sheds, playing among kingcups
and lush grass in summer, in snow mist on the shore in winter.
Simultaneously their adult selves are present, sometimes apparently
shadowing the children, but shown as adults from the late 1940s
into the 1960s or 1970s without apparently ageing, or changing the
simple work clothes that cunningly fail to give any clue to the date.
The dream texture of the film allows the co-existence of the chil-
dren and the adults to remain unexplained: the shifting and turning
of times remain unexplained. The experience of children and of the
young adults are alike reflections of the memory of a place and the
communal memories of the people who have lived there.
Like Burnt by Frost, the film is full of repetitions – dancing couples
seen through a window or in the middle distance, boats arriving and
departing, anchors rattling down into the water. The most cogently
narrative section of the film begins with the arrival of a gunboat of
German soldiers, their occupation of the village and their final herd-
ing of the villagers onto another boat (whose glimpsed name seems
to be ‘Norge’) as they destroy livestock and buildings on their scorched
earth retreat.
The protagonists are adults in the late 1940s when the village is
rebuilt (their marriage is hinted only by a wedding procession pass-
ing in the distance on the other side of the bay, between the smooth
grey rocks that break through the summer covering of grasses) and
they have not aged 20 years later, although the fish sheds have been
mechanized, and the wooden fishing boats have been replaced by
factory trawlers.
The details, observed slowly and usually in silence, are an anthol-
ogy of those elements that make one northern place distinct; they are
a summary of one Scandinavian idea of north. Clear water dividing
at the prow of a small boat as it pushes off from shore; thick summer
grass sometimes with the children playing, sometimes with the
adults lying together naked; views across water, light shifting on the
flanks of the hills sloping down to the fjord; the sense of a community
so isolated that all coming and going is by sea. The trim interior of
the wooden house, sometimes working and inhabited, sometimes

163
wrecked by the retreating Germans, sometimes in its post-war
rebuilding. In her dream, the protagonist stands on the wreck of a
pier, a skeleton of timbers above still water, the wreck of where the
fish shed had been. The slowness of everything is extraordinary –
taking a full minute to pass over a path through long grass and sparse
summer flowers to the point of the shot: the child playing with her
kitten (which the Germans later shoot), or the ribs of an abandoned
boat, rotting far from the water, with the adults lying naked together
in its shelter. The few flowers that appear are lingered over lovingly
throughout the film, for instance a few buttercups in a glass by the
bed at the beginning of one of the summer sequences, valued for their
rarity and the brevity of their season. The clarity of water is given its
own time in the film, two sequences where a rowing boat launches
from the land are filmed from the prow of the boat, watching the
stones of the bed of the fjord through the glassy water, and then the
bow wave beginning to develop, colours of lead and pewter stirring
in front of the boat. One of the slowest approaches in the film is a long
progression of the camera across gleaming water towards the outline
of a trawler at anchor with the mountains of the north just visible in
the distance. (It is wooden, of the past – the composition is precisely
that of Ravilious’s watercolour Norway, 1940.)
The woman passes to the edge of the ruined or abandoned village,
looking through a window at couples dancing slowly, silently, in the
bare space of a village meeting room that could as easily be a house
gutted by the retreating Germans. One of the strangest moments of
the film is when couples seem to be dancing to a wind-up gramo-
phone as the villagers are forcibly displaced from their village on
the ship called ‘Norway’. It is a disturbing moment, a moment when
the usually innocent and nostalgic image of dancing couples comes
suddenly to seem a metaphor for collaboration, circling in the arms of
the enemy who are just about to destroy the community.
Again and again, the protagonist in her white dress wanders
through a dream of northern place – the outskirts of a village, some-
times in ruins, sometimes inhabited. There are points where what
she sees looking into the fish sheds or through the windows of a
village hall is of a different era from the time outside. The aurora
borealis plays above the ship that takes the people home to rebuild
their village. Towards the end, the atmosphere of dream seems to
grow darker – the husband is unfaithful, then he seems to be lost
overboard at night in mid-sea. The very end of the film deliberately

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plays with the two contradictory notions of north: the north as
beautiful, the goal of the voyage home – the boat approaching the lit
village under the absolute stillness of the snowy mountains, a return
to the ideal of the northern haven, everything that is most desirable
about human habitation in a remote place. Then the disaster of a
dream, sudden falling into the icy water.
But in the last few moments of the film everything resolves to
positive in a few simple images. The protagonist is sedated because
she is about to give birth. The film ends with the image of the new-
born baby being held up against a background of deepest blue. The
camera focuses on this blueness and it is the most pellucid of
evening skies. And then, like a diamond, a beacon, all that is pristine
and unaltering, there is the north star in the cobalt sky with the two
guard stars below it. And again Jensen offers an explanation for love
of the absolute, difficult beauty of the north.
The Icelandic painter Jóhannes S. Kjarval had the same love for
the austerities of the landscape of Iceland. Like Jensen’s, his is an art
of slowness, of unhurried meditation on northern place. He is
absolute master of minute and exquisite gradations of grey, shad-
ows and streaks of snow and sunlight. His practice as an artist is
based on a long physical immersion in the landscapes that he
painted. He slept out in adverse weather, accepted the rain pour-
ing on work in progress. He had clefts and hiding-places in the lava
fields (this in itself is an index of his minute knowledge of his land-
scape) where he stored his painting materials.10
His extraordinary intimacy with the landscape and its past is
shown in his Esja in February of 1959, with its casual virtuosity in the
depiction of winter sea with rime at the shoreline, snow-moulded
rocks and then the mountains rising absolute above the ice mist that
covers their foothills. This is an extraordinary virtuoso performance of
representation of a place with the boldest simplification of the design
and brushstrokes. Yet it tells immediately as a representation of vast-
ness of looming mountains above a broad wash of sea. The painting of
the snow lying in the clefts of the mountains is dashed in with quick
expert movements of the brush, but the recession is delineated pre-
cisely. There is another layer to this painting, something of a sense of a
landscape’s past – the snowy cliffs, and indeed the fluent grey line that
defines the summits, half-invite the discernment of half-concealed fig-
ures, the giant tutelars, whose presence is made explicit in Kjarval’s
latest paintings where figure and landscape are one.

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Jóhannes S. Kjarval, Esja in February, 1959, oil on canvas.

It was the desire to see the present state of a landscape whose

histories he knew almost by heart that led William Morris to under-
take his classic voyage to Iceland in the 1870s. This is a significant
point in the history of the north as an idea: Morris’s journey was
unequivocally a pilgrimage – he was approaching Iceland as a site
of respected cultural production. His sense that it was ‘holy ground’
– one of his poems compares the whole island of Iceland to a grey
and venerable cathedral – was manifested as soon as his boat left
Scotland: their landfall at the Faroes was an arrival at the southern-
most point of the territories hallowed by the saga narratives.
Morris’s sense of the Faroes is contexted by his sense of undergo-
ing, in his own person, a Viking adventure (up to a point – since he
was in a 240-ton steam-powered vessel called the Diana with proper
cabins, rather than in an open longboat called the Long Serpent), but
all the same, it was the authentic, rime-cold sea of the sagas and Old
English verse:

We are to run between the Orkneys and the Shetlands, and we were
told last night by the mate that we were going to catch it today, as

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Steffan Danielsen (1922–76), Breaking Surf, Nólsoy (Faroes), 1972, oil on canvas.

here we first met the roll of the Atlantic . . . I went to the little plat-
form stern and lay about there watching the waves coming up as if
they were going to swallow us bodily and disappearing so easily
under her: it was all very exciting and strange to a cockney like me.11

The Faroes were, to him, the first experience of the true north:

I confess I shuddered at my first sight of a really northern land in

the grey of a coldish morning: the hills were not high, especially on
one side as they sloped beachless into the clear but grey water; the
grass was grey between greyer ledges of tone that divided the hills
in regular steps; it was not savage but mournfully empty and
barren, the grey clouds dragging over the hill-tops or lying in the
hollows being the only thing that varied the grass, stone, and sea.12

It is a melancholy image, and not only because of the repetition of

‘grey’ – Morris, as his Icelandic descriptions show, was a lover of

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greys, like Kjarval, a connoisseur of greys. He seems to say that he
was expecting something savage, more interesting – more anything,
perhaps, than this quiet nullity. There is a touch of apology, even
regret in the footnote he added later: ‘the Faroes seemed to me such
a gentle sweet place when we saw them again after Iceland.’
As he explored the main island, the principal impression he formed
was gently melancholy, that it was a place outside time, and perhaps
unreal: ‘it looked as if you might live for a hundred years before
you would ever see ship sailing into the bay there; as if the old life
of the saga-time had gone, and the modern life [had] never reached
the place.’ It seems, as he saw it, oddly lifeless; a place where nothing
will ever happen again.13
Morris approached Iceland itself ready to be thrilled. Writing
excitedly from the boat, he tried to convey his feeling: ‘it is no use
trying to describe it, but it was quite up to my utmost expectations
as to strangeness: it is just like nothing else in the world.’14 Like other
northern travellers before him, he was looking almost for an other-
world, a place where his most admired literature had its physical
setting, and he found one beyond his hopes.
It is absolutely clear from Morris’s Iceland letters that he is visiting
Saga Country: even on the first encounter, he notes passing a glacier
and mountain, then, ‘about nine p.m. we were opposite Njal’s country’
– that is, the region in which the events of Njal’s Saga took place. Once
he got into the country, he went from site to site with the rapt pertinac-
ity of a pilgrim visiting the Holy Land, ‘Flosi’s Hollow’, ‘the water that
Kári leaped into to slake his burning clothes’.15 He was responsive to
the barren beauty of the land, but as far as possible he tried to map his
literary sense of Iceland circa 1000 onto the Iceland of the 1870s, where
necessary, by auto-suggestion: ‘once more I went to Gunnar’s howe’ –
the scene of one of the most weirdly beautiful moments in Njal’s Saga:
Skarphedinn and Hogni, travelling by night, see the tragic Gunnar’s
howe open, and dead Gunnar singing, his face full of joy –

It was the same melancholy sort of day as yesterday and all

looked somewhat drearier than before . . . it was not till I got back
from the howe and wandered by myself about the said site of
Gunnar’s hall and looked out thence over the great grey plain
that I could answer to the echoes of the beautiful story.16

He was fascinated by the Hill of Laws –

168
Thórarinn Thorlákson, Thingvellir, 1900, oil on canvas. Thingvellir, the site of
the assembly of the first settlers in Iceland, was a particularly numinous site for
progressive nineteenth-century travellers, who saw these ‘parliament plains’ as
the cradle of social democracy.

a deep rift in the lava which splits into two arms, leaving a little
island in the midst bridged by a narrow space on which two men
could barely stand abreast: when you are in the island it widens
and slopes upward higher and higher till at last where the two
arms of the rift meet there is a considerable cliff above the dark
dreadful-looking rift and its cold waters . . . surely ’tis one of the
most dramatic spots in Iceland17

– and to Morris, the cradle of European democracy. Interestingly, he

says very little about contemporary crafts, though he has a keen eye
for Icelandic antiquities. He suffered a little from the disjunction
between the idea of the Icelanders and contemporary realities:

Olaf Peacock went about summer and winter after his live-stock,
and saw to his haymaking and fishing just as this little peak-
nosed parson does . . . But Lord! what littleness and helplessness

169
 has taken the place of the old passion and violence that had place
here once.18

It was hard to forgive Icelanders for being merely human, and

usually poor.
But Iceland itself paid him richly for his journey to the place that
was his own true and absolute north. His appreciation of the
steadings of the sagas and of the unearthly landscape in which they
took place was intense, if perhaps more sombre than contemporary
Icelanders would have liked. He is not alone in seeing his true north
as a place irrecoverably of the past.

Ye who have come o’er the sea to behold this grey minster of
lands,
Whose floor is the tomb of time past, and whose walls by the toil
of dead hands
Show pictures amidst of the ruin of deeds that have overpast
death,
Stay by this tomb in a tomb to ask of who lieth beneath.19

Andrew Wawn, in his classic study of the nineteenth-century English

love for the Old North, reminds us that the intense perception of past-
ness in this verse was not accepted by at least one modern Icelander:
‘The imagery in the first verse is, we may recall, exactly what Jón
Sigurd̄sson disliked. Iceland is ‘a tomb’ (three instances), it is linked
with ‘death’ and ‘dead hands’ and ‘ruin’, and . . . it is “grey”.’20 This
leads to a virtuoso investigation of Morris’s appreciation of the greys
of the Icelandic landscape.

[Grey] . . . can be found over a hundred times in his Iceland jour-

nals, in describing lava, moss, streams, clouds, cliffs, plains, skies,
seas and slopes. The are all ‘grey’ but grey is far from being a dull
colour for Morris. It was as important for describing Iceland as
it was in his fabric designs . . . We find ‘grey’, ‘dark grey’, ‘not
very dark grey’, ‘dark . . . and dreadful grey’, ‘lightish grey’, ‘dark
ashen grey’, ‘light green and grey’, ‘greyer then grey’, ‘light grey-
blue’, ‘yellowish grey’, ‘ragged grey’, ‘inky grey’, ‘woeful grey’,
‘spotted grey’, ‘dark grey bordered with white’, ‘heavy grey’,
‘cold grey’, ‘light grey . . . ‘ 21

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We come rapidly to see that this perception of the infinite gradations
of the lava landscape is moving towards being an index of Morris’s
sudden, middle-aged falling in love with Iceland. He is coming to
an observation of the minutiae of the landscape almost parallel to
Kjarval’s knowledge of the cracks in the lava fields, to Jensen’s minute
itemization of buttercups or frozen grasses. The landscape is the sub-
ject of an intensity of attention that affirms its place in Morris’s esteem
as the great cathedral of the north. And it was a recollection of the
greys of the north that led him, bored in Verona in 1878, to cry sud-
denly in a letter to Georgina Burne-Jones: ‘I long . . . for the heap of
grey stones with a grey roof that we call a house north-away.’22
Scandinavia is much concerned with the colours of twilight, with
the early winter dark, with the colours of the infinitely protracted
summer evenings. Jensen’s films return again and again to the
cobalt-blue of the last of the light. A crepuscular grey is the recurring
colour of the painted rooms of eighteenth-century Sweden, of the
autumnal landscapes of the Nils Kreuger23 and of the numinous
twilight houses of Vilhelm Hammershøi.
These paintings of dimmed interiors, with their ‘symphonic range
of greys . . .’ in which ‘even the furniture seems to have a soul of its
own’24 are precise realizations of an idea of north: twilit panelled
rooms, rain light, a balance of serenity and melancholy. They speak
powerfully to every element in the spectator that would play with the
idea of renouncing the metropolis – presence, activity, movement – for
remoteness, absence, stillness. There is an idea in Finland that it is
good to sit in silence as the light goes, to observe nightfall as a time of
contemplation – ‘pitää hämärää’, ‘keeping the twilight’.25
Hammershøi is the painter of light fading in rooms, often with
enfilades of doors, their panels catching the dimness that remains, the
sheen of twilight on a polished floor. The cornice and picture rail are
faint glimmerings overhead, darkness has already gathered in the
corners and below the high ceilings. With their enfilades, recession of
rooms, chairs against the walls, these images are about pastness, old-
fashionedness, painted mostly in the 1900s but with few visible things
that could not be of a century earlier. In the Interior with a Lady of 1901,
the daylight has faded and a gaslight has been lit in the street; a woman
(one of the very few in Hammershøi’s work to sit facing the spectator)
has taken her sewing to the window of her high, panelled room, to
put off for a little the lighting of lamps and candles. It is an image of
humble elegance, with the atmosphere of the seventeenth-century

171
Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior with a Lady, 1901, oil on canvas.

Dutch paintings that Hammershøi admired – the repose of the sparse

northern room, the beauty of the quotidian. They find beauty even in
solitariness and the early dark of the northern winter.

japan and china

It is possible here only to consider a very few ideas of north from the
intricate cultures of China and Japan. It is not always remembered
that both countries contain great tracts of northern territory, and that
an awareness of these has always attended the metropolitan culture
of both Empires.
Japan is easily thought of as opposite Korea, culturally associable
with China. But geographically the islands stretch from the Ryukyu
group in the South China Sea, at about 25º of latitude, to the top of

172
Hokkaidō, which is more like 45º. A narrow strait separates the north-
ern tip of Hokkaidō from the Russian island of Stakhalin, and the
Kuril islands make a series of stepping stones from Hokkaidō to
Kamchatka. The mass of population is in the south. Geography
ensures that the north is not merely distant from the centres of power,
but that it is also ambiguous and problematic, given the absolute
degree to which the Japanese language distinguishes between those
within and those outside.
Japanese culture has an eclectic tradition; the Japanese have a
variety of (sometimes mutually contradictory) associations with the
north. There is a proverb: ‘do not sleep with your pillow pointing
towards the north’, the reason being that the dead are laid out so that
their heads point northwards. This particular idea must have come in
with Buddhism – when Shakamuni, the Buddha, died, his disciples
are said to have laid him out with his head pointing towards his
homeland, a kingdom located in the foothills of the Himalayas. It is
said proverbially that poison will enter the brains of people who
sleep with their heads pointing north. The ancient gods of the north,
south, east and west – borrowed from the Chinese pantheon – are
now more or less forgotten in Japan, but the imagery associated with
them is still found in that highly traditional arena, the sumo ring,
above which a roof in the style of a Shinto shrine is suspended. From
each corner of this a coloured silk tassel is suspended: green for
spring (to the east), red for summer (to the south), white for autumn
(to the west) and black for winter (to the north).26
The city of Kyoto, built as the capital, was planned at the end of the
eighth century ad according to these principles: with mountains to its
north, a river to its east, a lake to its south (which no longer exists), and
a highway running along it to its west. Whereas north to north-west
are the dangerous cardinal points in western thought, in Japan it was
the north-east that was the most unlucky direction on the compass,
and was called ‘Kimon’, literally translated as ‘the gateway of the oni
[ogre]’. (There is no specific entity here, but a more generalized malig-
nity.) Temples were therefore built to the north-east of Kyoto in order
to protect the city from baneful influences and bad spirits.
For the westerner, Japan and the north associate together most
strongly with the poet Bashō, and his collection of verses and recol-
lections called The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Bashō’s northward
journey was undertaken in two-and-a-half years beginning in the
spring of 1689. He sold his house in Edo before he left, not expecting

173
to return. But the familiar translation of his title is misleading: Oku
no Hosomichi literally means ‘The Narrow Road to the Land of
Michinoku’, a feudal fiefdom that happened to be located at the very
top end of the main island of Honshū. The land of Michinoku, and
the places Bashō travelled through in order to get there and back,
have a good many important cultural and historical resonances, but
those resonances have little to do with the idea of northness as such.

In the imagination of the people at least, the North was largely an

unexplored territory, and it represented for Bashō all the mystery
there was in the universe. In other words, the Narrow Road to the
Deep North was life itself for Bashō, and he travelled through it as
anyone would travel through the short span of life here – seeking
a vision of eternity in things that are, by their own very nature,
destined to perish.27

In medieval Japanese tradition, the significance of a place was

largely determined by its history, that is, its location in human time
and space, its place in memory rather than by its geography.28 Yet
there are connections in Bashō’s work with western thinking about
the north, the idea that in the process of an arduous journey some
kind of understanding of oneself in the world can be achieved.

After many days of solitary wandering, I came to the barrier-gate

of Shirakawa, which marks the entrance to the northern regions.
Here, for the first time, my mind was able to gain a certain balance
and composure, no longer a victim to pestering anxiety, so it was
with a mild sense of detachment that I thought about the ancient
traveller who had passed through this gate with a burning desire
to write home. This gate was counted among the three largest
checking stations, and many poets had passed through it, each
leaving a poem of his own making. I myself walked between trees
laden with thick foliage, with the distant sound of the northern
wind in my ears and the vision of autumn tints before my eyes.29

It is all too easy to assimilate this to western ideas of the north, the
passing of landmarks and frontiers, the rising of the wind and the
onset of autumnal weather. Furthermore, the Japanese north, like
northern territories elsewhere, is relatively under-populated and
poor – a place not for material riches, but for the riches of the spirit.

174
 Ojima island where I landed was in reality a peninsula projecting far
out into the sea. This was the place where the priest Ungo had once
retired for meditation, and the rock on which he used to sit for med-
itation was still there. I noticed a number of tiny cottages scattered
among the pine trees and pale blue threads of smoke rising from
them. I wondered what kind of people were living in those isolated
houses, and was approaching one of them with a strange sense of
yearning, when, as if to interrupt me, the moon rose glittering over
the darkened sea, completing the full transformation to a night-time
scene. I lodged in an inn overlooking the bay, and went to bed in my
upstairs room with all the windows open. As I lay there in the midst
of the roaring wind and driving clouds, I felt myself to be in a world
totally different from the one I was accustomed to.30

Japan’s ideas of north, like those of Europe, contain supernatural

elements. A lake in the middle of the desolate range of mountains
known collectively as Osorezan, or Mount Terror, which is sited at
the northernmost part of the northernmost prefecture on the main
island of Japan, is the gathering place for the spirits of the dead. As
Carmen Blacker says in her book on Japanese shamanism,

In a white gash on the mountainside from which bubble a number

of sulphur springs, hell may be viewed. A little further on is a grey
stony strand; this is Sainokawara, the dry river bed which is the
boundary between worlds and the place where the ghosts of chil-
dren can be heard sobbing by night as they make their little piles of
stones. Walk on a little more and you come to the Sanzunokawa,
the river which divides one world from another.31

This precise location of a metaphysical frontier in an apprehensible

physical place is reminiscent of Virgil’s southern Italian entrance to the
underworld, the Scottish border location of the entrance to the other-
world at the Eildon Hills, and the early medieval cosmographers who
placed hell in Iceland. The shores of the volcanic lake are decorated
with children’s toys, pinwheels, flower offerings and Jizo statues, left
by people who come to console the souls of the dead who are thought
to be stranded here in this netherworld waiting for a chance to cross
Sanzunokawa, the Japanese equivalent of the River Styx. The bod-
hisattva Jizo is believed to ease the torments of dead children and other
lost souls in the void between the worlds, and the many visitors also

175
try to help the suffering souls by adding stones to the piles that the
dead children create. This direct mapping of an unearthly existence
onto an apprehensible physical place is an extraordinary survival, an
imaginative and metaphysical embodiment of the otherworld ele-
ments in a location, significantly, far to the north of the metropolis.
Bashō also reminds us that the north of Japan is a land marked by
old wars and forgotten conflicts:

Sleeping overnight at Toima, where the long swampish river

came to an end at last, I arrived at Hiraizumi after wandering
some twenty miles in two days. It is here that the glory of three
generations of the Fujiwara family passed away like a snatch of
empty dream. The ruins of the main gate greeted my eyes a mile
before I came upon Lord Hidehira’s mansion, which had been
utterly reduced to rice-paddies. Mount Kinkei alone retained its
original shape. As I climbed one of the foothills called Takadate,
where Lord Yoshitsune met his death . . . The ruined house of
Lord Yasuhira was located to the north of the barrier gate of
Koromo-ga-seki, thus blocking the entrance from the Nambu area
and forming a protection against barbarous invaders from the
North. Indeed, many a feat of chivalrous valour was repeated
here during the short span of three generations, but both the
actors and the deeds have long been dead and passed into obliv-
ion. When a country is defeated, there remain only mountains
and rivers, and on a ruined castle in spring only grasses thrive.32

Again this strikes a familiar note of the elegaic. Bashō is looking here
at the slighted capital of the northern Fujiwara, who went down to
defeat in the twelfth century, almost certainly thinking, above all, of
the betrayed and brilliant Yoshitsune, a figure at once out of history
and of classical tragedy, who was very far from forgotten, even five
centuries later.

Summer grass:
the remains of
warrior’s dreams33

Or, as an Irish poet of the seventeenth century put it, thinking of the
ruination of the castles of the Irish nobility at the hands of the
English,

176
 Do threascair an saol is shéid an ghaoth mar smál
Alastrann, Caesar, ‘s an méid sin a bhí ‘na bpáirt . . . 34

The world laid low, and the wind blew – like a dust – Alexander,
Caesar, and all their followers. Tara is grass; and look how it
stands with Troy . . .

But Bashō’s north is marginal territory – economically, socially, cul-

turally. Power has retreated southwards, leaving the marks of once-
inhabited crofts and the ruins of old castles, never re-edified because
the territory they guarded is no longer worth the keeping.
Japan also has the problem of an ambiguous relationship with a
second indigenous culture, a problem wearily familiar from the
British Isles. Japan has traditionally thought of itself as a highly
homogeneous society: to one Japanese anthropologist, Sasaki Kōmei,
the Japanese are those people ‘who speak the Japanese language as
their mother tongue, who possess traditional Japanese culture, and
who think themselves to be Japanese’.35 But the northern island,
Hokkaidō, is partially inhabited by a people who on all these criteria
are not Japanese at all, the Ainu.
The problem of identifying an individual as Japanese is analogous
to the problem of being English or British: from a foreigner’s perspec-
tive, British and English are interchangeable terms, while to a person of
Welsh or Scots origin the distinction is a highly sensitive one. Honshū,
in this respect, equals England; both are the largest and most politically
important units (athough in the case of Japan it is actually a separate
island). The Ainu (and the Okinawans, and others) are citizens of the
modern Japanese nation state, but they possess a significantly different
cultural and ethnic identity from that of an ordinary mainland
Japanese (Wajin). All Japanese are not Wajin, just as all Britons are not
English. (A very similar problem exists in modern Thailand: the
dominant culture is that of the south; both parts of the north were once
independent. The north-west is thought to be romantic and wild coun-
try, compared to Scotland; the north-east by the Cambodian border is
poor and disregarded, viewed as once the English viewed Ireland.)36
The generally accepted, though contentious, view of Japanese
prehistory is that a south-east Asian people settled the islands during
the Pleistocene, who are known as the Jōmon, and were succeeded,
and to a considerable extent displaced, by the rice-growing Yayoi
from north-east Asia. In a pattern parallel with the history of Celts

177
and Saxons in the British islands, the populations intermarried, but
the Jōmon who clung to their separate cultural identity were driven
to the far north, where they are now known as the Ainu: in Japan,
but not of it, and spilling over onto the neighbouring (now Russian)
island of Stakhalin.37
Japanese origin legends state that the first human emperor,
Jimmu, advanced across what is now Japan starting from the south-
ernmost island, Kyushu, subjugating the primitive tribes he found
along the way. National Foundation Day (11 February) celebrates
Jimmu’s ascension on 11 February 660 bc. In effect, therefore,
Japanese identity and ethnicity are established in the southern half
of the archipelago, and fade into something far more ambiguous
once the north is reached. The medieval Japanese state ideology
mapped inside / purity against outside / impurity. In several
medieval texts, an explicit link is made between the people of
Hokkaidō and various demons and outcaste groups inhabiting the
polluted realm beyond the border zone of Sotogahama in Aomori.
This pattern of thinking has close analogues in Europe, where at
various times the north has been seen as inhabited not merely by
primitive and uncivilized peoples but also by giants, demons and
wizards. Today, Hokkaidō is still slightly exotic in Japanese terms: a
number of plants familiar from Europe will grow there that will not
grow in Honshū, and there is some dairy farming – thus the shopping
mall at Chitose airport proudly displays local produce for holiday-
makers from the south to take home – such as potatoes, brie-type
cheese and lavender. There is a counter-cultural feeling about Sapporo
itself, a faint sense that both a concern for quality of life and some
degree of personal eccentricity can find a place there that social
pressure in the crowded cities of the south can no longer permit – in
which respect it also has some similarities with highland Scotland,
Wales, the west of Ireland.
Although trading links were established by the Middle Ages,
seventeenth-century metropolitan Japanese knew remarkably little
about the Ainu, whom they simply ignored: as Bashō demonstrates,
even the north of the main island was itself sufficiently remote from
the centres of power.38 The actual colonization of Hokkaidō by the
Japanese – extraordinarily – did not occur until the late nineteenth
century. When the possibility of colonization was being discussed in
the nineteenth century, those in favour supported their view by the
argument that ‘since they are all the descendants of the Emperor

178
Attributed to Hirasawa Byōzan (1822–76), ‘Ainu Bear Sacrifice’, c. 1870, painting
from a handscroll Scenes of the Daily Life of the Ezo, ink and colours on paper.

Jimmu, they are of the same race as ourselves’. This view was rapidly
revised when the Japanese came into actual direct contact with their
northern neighbours, at which point they became increasingly con-
vinced that the Ainu were something else.
The timing of Japanese–Ainu contact is significant: the period of
the Meiji Restoration, a time in which Japan turned to the west for
education, was, unfortunately, also the meridian of western scientific
racism. A racist view (supported by western science) of the Ainu as
degenerate anachronisms, fused with a view of them as the primitive
aborigines of the island, driven north by the Emperor Jimmu, and
therefore not Japanese and, by definition, available for exploitation
by superior races. Since the Ainu have for many generations been
happy to adopt Wajin babies in order to maintain family continuity, a
simply racist approach to their separate identity is obviously impos-
sible. Recent approaches to the Ainu problem have stressed the need
for assimilation (which some sectors of the Ainu are now, inevitably,
keen to resist).39 It was in the Meiji period that the exquisite hand-
scroll of paintings of Ainu dwellings and customs, now in the British
Museum, were undertaken. The painter was Hirasawa Byōzan and
he titled his work Scenes of the Daily Life of the Ezo. His paintings
are documentary, even anthropological in intent, for all their beauty.
Houses and eating utensils are documented as well as a temple
with the corpse of a sacrificed bear surrounded by offerings to the
spirit or daimon of the dead animal.
Both Japanese and western thinking about the Ainu has instruc-
tive parallels with western thinking about other northern peoples,
the Scottish Highlanders, the Sami and the Inuit, nomadic non-

179
agriculturalists in a world where the farmers have definitively won.
Because of Ainu adoption patterns, many Ainu are in fact, to some
degree, genetically Wajin. The Ainu and the Japanese traded for cen-
turies: the Ainu wanted rice, cotton, iron and lead, while the Japanese
were eager to buy furs, eagle feathers for arrows, konbu (edible kelp)
and dried fish. Japanese material culture penetrated extensively into
Ainu Hokkaidō in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the Ainu
used Japanese iron, lacquer and porcelain vessels, while an archaeo-
logical dig at Kusado Sengen in Hiroshima Prefecture, far to the
south, produced salmon and cod bones. Despite this extensive evi-
dence for prolonged contact, there has been a strong desire to see the
Ainu as a human time capsule, a hunter-gathering people essentially
unchanged since the Pleistocene.40 Similarly, much thinking about
the Celts – even before the New Age – has emphasized their cultural
primitiveness, and, more positively, collections such as Campbell’s
Ortha na Gaidheal have attempted, with surprising success, to create
the impression that the Highlanders and the Irish may be deemed
living witnesses to a pre-Christian European identity. As with
Canada and the Scandinavian countries, the relation to the Japanese
north and its indigenous peoples is once more in transition.
Like many other northern places, contemporary Hokkaidō has
begun to exploit its reliably profound winter as a tourist attraction.
As in Finland and Canada, there is an annual festal competition for
sculptures in snow. These are not the complex and subtle installa-
tions of cold at Rovaniemi in Finland; rather, they are mildly surreal
demonstrations of the skill of the snow moulders, facsimiles of
famous buildings, rendered as if washed with the most blinding
white limewash, rendered (as houses in parts of Bristol used to be)
with icy fragments of iridescent minerals.

ii

North China, beyond the wall, is proverbially the place where the
invasions come from, a cold region terrifying in its immensity. But,
particularly after the metropolis had passed into the control of the
raiders from the north, and was being ruled by the Khan of all the
Tartars, the territories beyond the wall could be seen as a place of
freedom, the simpler homeland, the old hunting grounds. When
the first western travellers reached Beijing, the Tartar emperor,
‘homesick for the steppes of his childhood, had ordered wild grass

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to be planted in the courtyard of his palace’.41 And this familiar
ambiguity about the north – the place of danger that is also the
place of austere felicity – had already existed for millennia.
On the one hand, in the time of the Manchu emperors, the
spaces beyond the wall offered freedom and pleasure. Great imperial
hunting parties are described by Jonathan Spence in his study of the
K’ang-hsi ruler:

When Manchus and Mongols go out to hunt in the north we are

dealing with a skill which eludes words. The hunters mass like
storm clouds, the mounted archers are as one with their horses;
they fly together and their arrows bring down the fleeting game.
Heart and eye are cheered to see it.42

On the other hand, looking northwards, when the wall was still the
frontier, desolation and misfortune lurk in the north. Legends make of
unknown territory a land of ambiguous marvels – rumours of a place
where the air is full of birds’ feathers, visited by Mu, a legendary king
of remotest antiquity, who travelled into a northern land (possibly
Siberia) and came to the place where the green birds cast their feathers.
This sounds like a distant recension of a memory of the aurora moving
above snowfields.
An ancient poem, from the second or third century before the
Christian era, recounts the soul’s journey to a hostile northern other-
world.

O Soul, go not to the North . . .

Where trees and grasses dare not grow;
And the sky is white with snow
And the cold cuts and kills . . . 43

Already, the north is seen as partly otherworldly, partly as a land of

the dead, like the dark lake and dry riverbed in northern Japan.
The demarcation of the north is made emotionally (as it can be
in Britain) by the wall, which represents an intellectual as much as
a physical barrier. While the wall was still being patrolled against
the Tartars, a genre of wall laments arose which have the melan-
choly and the fear of the cold immensities beyond that attend
verses from the northern frontiers of all the empires. The poem by
Li Ho (ad 791–817) called On the Frontier is a fine and representa-

181
tive example, itemizing the sheer strangeness of the frontier, the other-
ness of those encamped beyond the wall, at what seems the northern
edge of the world: the north wind carrying the sound of barbarian
trumpets, freezing dewfall, freezing bronze armour. The armour of
the unearthly barbarians is the scales of serpents – in this frontier
lament the enemy are visible and close to the defences. And yet the
speaker cannot imagine that there is really a world at their backs, so
much does the wall feel like the end of the world:

North of their tents is surely the sky’s end,

Where the sound of the river streams beyond the border.44

An expedition against the nomads beyond the wall is the subject

of a soldier’s lament by Ts’en Ts’an, which itemizes the horrors of the
desert place: late autumn and gales so strong that they can root up
great stones from the riverbeds and hurl them through the air. The
wind slashes at them like a knife. The poem ends with the descent of
the great cold, and the approach of the battle:

The manes of the horses are icicles, strings of cash turned to ice,
Five-petal flowers among the smoke clouds of sweat.
In the tent, the general dips his pen in ice . . . 45

In the lament of a civil servant, Ts’en Shen, stationed at the

frontier of Turkestan and taking leave of a visitor now returning to
the capital, it is the unnatural winter that is at the forefront of the
lament: the astonishing early snow of August, which covers the
land as if with pear blossom, slips through curtains, makes fur and
silk garments already too cold. By the poem’s end, when the guest
departs southwards, the outpost is already in the grip of unnatural
early winter, ‘barbarian weather’. Icebergs are forming in the northern
seas; the banners are frozen so that they are motionless however
savage the wind; snow comes with evening. The unnaturally short-
ened summer is equivalent to the pleasures of the visit – music,
normal conversation – which has also come to an end.46
The imperial policy of sending (highly educated) civil servants to
places far from their native regions accounts for a whole tradition of
laments for the isolation of a northern posting. The region around
the wall is particularly singled out as desolate: waterless and barren,
wind-scoured. Separation links the northern cold with personal

182
desolation, as in the lament by Lu Chi (ad 261–303) where the wife
speaks first, waking unhappily as the cold moonlight floods into her
room, and the sudden light (in a place of the growing winter dark-
ness) is one that she cannot grasp in her hands. The wind sings like
cicadas in the branches of willows. The poem ends with a quatrain
spoken apparently by the civil-servant husband, who has gone to
the south to seek promotion, possibly another posting. He simply
says that his journey will last for a long time and that the autumn is
dying to its end – so they will be apart for at least another winter.47
Another desolate dialogue poem of northern exile (or exile from
the north), transience and parting, by Chiang Tsung (ad 518–590), is
conventionally called ‘Melancholy in the Women’s Apartments’. Its
crucial image is the migration of the wild geese. We are already in
the north – in a silent pavilion by the great road, with snow blown
past silk curtains – but the lover who has departed at dawn seems to
be travelling further northwards. A woman, perhaps originating
from further north herself, seems to speak the second part, almost as
if she were recalling a ballad. Perhaps she is an exile from the north,
reminded of her exile by the nearness of the highway, by her awak-
ening to find herself alone. In the journey of the geese there seems to
be a cipher of the driven, far journeying of the one who has left her,
in the shortness of the northern spring an image of her transient
beauty:

‘In Liao-hsi with its frozen rivers, spring is very short,

From Chi-pei the geese are coming, several thousand leagues.
May you cross quickly over the mountain passes,
Knowing my beauty, like peach or plum, will last but a moment.’48

In the eighteenth century Yuan Mei (1716–1797) – significantly in

the context of a collection of stories about ghosts and devils – wrote
an extraordinary account of a journey into the unknowable north,
into Russia, and the discovery there of the traces of an ancient
Chinese presence.
In the course of a Chinese mission to St Petersburg in 1732, Umitai
– a Mongol captain in the Chinese army – having heard of the north-
ern ocean bounding Russia, asked to be allowed to explore into
Siberia. After initial opposition, he was given a felt-lined travelling
litter and an escort mounted on camels, carrying with them the basic
tools for survival in the far north: compasses and flints for striking fire.

183
 Every element of Umitai’s account of his journey reads like the
account of a visit to the otherworld: perhaps it would be more accu-
rate to say that the strangeness of the north is so overwhelming to
him that otherworld narratives offer him the only possible register in
which he can recount his experience. The first wonder that they
encountered, some six or seven days’ journey to the north, was a
mountain of ice,

so high that its summit was lost in the sky, and shining with so
blinding a light that it was not possible to look straight at it. In the
base of this mountain was a cave. He crawled into it, guided by
his escort, who striking lights and consulting the compass wrig-
gled their way through tortuous passages.49

The great bastions of ice, three days’ journey thick, are the division
between the known world and an otherworld as strange as any
medieval European account of the Arctic oceans. Umitai’s party
emerges on the other side of the ice bastion (an unnaturally natural
echo of the wall dividing China from the unknowable regions of its
own north) and they are in a kind of northern hell. The sky is brown
‘the colour of tortoiseshell’, stinging grit (which the Russians call
‘black hail’) falls from black, windblown clouds. The landscape is
unendurable, inimical.

Every few miles, where they could find a cavern in the rocks, they
sheltered there, and started a fire, which they made with saltpetre;
for nowhere in that region are there any bushes or trees nor is
there any coal or charcoal.50

After another five or six days of these infernal travels they come to a
marvel, an inexplicable monument:

they came to two huge bronze figures, facing one another. They
were some thirty feet high. One figure rode on a tortoise and the
other grasped a serpent in his hand. In front of them was a bronze
column with some characters on it in a script that Umitai could
not read. The foreigners said that the statues had been erected by
the Emperor Yao. They had always heard that what was written
on the pillar meant ‘gate into the cold’.51

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At this point the Russians refuse to go any further. They tell Umitai
that there is a sea 300 leagues to the north but that the way to it is too
terrible to traverse. The seashore is enveloped in perpetual darkness
(it sounds as if they imagine it like the northern, foggy beach where
Odysseus goes to summon the spectres of the dead), the seawater is
black, and the cold is so savage that a nick or cut in the skin can lead
to death from frostbite. Monsters – prodigious creatures – come up
out of the sea. They ask Umitai if it is not bad enough where they are,
is the gate into the cold itself not dangerous and terrible enough?
‘Even where we are now, water does not flow nor fire burn.’ Umitai
tests this by holding a lighted torch to his robes and the flames have
no heat; they do not do so much as singe the fur. He agrees to retreat,
and this strangest of northern journeys comes to an end with an
account of the heavy losses sustained – ‘out of fifty men, twenty-one
had died of frost-bite. Umitai’s face was as black as pitch, and he did
not recover his normal complexion for six months.’52
The legendary Emperor Yao, who is supposed to have erected the
gate into the cold, was said to have lived in remotest antiquity and to
have ‘ruled everything under heaven’. So from a Chinese point of
view he could have erected a monument far into Siberia.
In Chinese apprehension, the north remains unstable and danger-
ous and its places alien and untrustworthy, particularly as popula-
tion drained out of the regions to the north of the wall: the Silk Road
was lined with ghost towns. Travellers in the 1920s found

Pulungki, a city that once must have held at least fifty thousand
inhabitants, but which now is nothing but scattered ruins, a few
poor inns, and an encircling wall of immense area. During the
next few nights we counted ten more deserted towns and villages
. . . the Gobi desert has approached with stealthy steps . . . the sur-
rounding scene is of an unspeakably desolate character, remind-
ing one of a landscape in the moon, only that instead of extinct
craters, here are dead and forgotten cities, towns and villages.53

From the perspective of the voluntary exile, north China is a very

different place. Mao Zedong’s Communists were forced out of their
free guerilla zone in the Kiangsi mountains in 1934, and had to
retreat to the remote north-west, but his poems of the Long March,
simple lyrics set to traditional music, focus not on retreat or suffer-
ing, but on the triumph of the common will to succeed. Implicit in

185
them is an absolute faith that there will be a time of return. In ‘Mount
Liupan’, written for singing in October 1935, Mao plays with one of
the most evocative tropes of northern exile – the wild geese:

The sky is high, the clouds are pale,

We watch the wild geese vanish southward.
If we fail to reach the Great Wall we are not men,
We who have already measured twenty thousand li.54

Today, Manchuria is like the wintry tip of Japan in reinventing

itself as a destination for travellers through its ice festival, held in the
city of Harbin. Where Hokkaidō has snow buildings and images,
Harbin has an ice festival of translucent sculptures and buildings of ice
(some of them on a considerable scale), with a separate section of snow
sculptures. There is precedent for these ice images in the traditional
arts and festivals of northern China, in the traditional ice-lantern
festival which was held in mid-February, ‘on the final nights of the
New Year’s festival around the fifteenth day of the first month’.
The lanterns of the 1950s were structures of comparatively modest
size, carved, and sometimes coloured and textured with the green of
sprouting seeds.

Some lanterns are marvels of fantasy, such as the ‘ice lanterns’ –

ice blocks carved to look like human beings, with a hole in which
a candle burns. These are sometimes even more intricate as when
the outside of the ice figure is covered with fresh sprouts of wheat
which were brought to generation before the ice was frozen. The
combination of the fresh green of the young wheat with the cold
white light coming through the ice is a beautiful sight indeed.55

The Harbin festival began from this tradition in 196356 and then
expanded – stretching from New Year to the traditional mid-February
date of the festival – to take advantage of a long period when tempera-
tures can be guaranteed to remain between 20° and 30° below zero.
The ice lanterns of today have expanded to great structures engi-
neered from blocks of ice chain-sawed from the Black Dragon river:
some are for the daytime ice cities on the frozen river, ice colon-
nades, fields of transparent pillars of ice like the vitrification of the
ruins of Palmyra, all translucent, all refracting the low rays of the
winter sun. By night there are structures with neon lighting built

186
into the ice walls, so that brilliant colour diffuses through their trans-
parency: traditional forms of pagodas and palaces, but also great
slides of ice, ice labyrinths of blue light with an elusive centre of red
light pulsing distantly through the cold partitions, staining the inter-
vening sheets of ice with a tinge of violet as the centre comes nearer.
These iridescent, transparent palaces are ephemeral architecture
on a scale unattempted even in Baroque Europe, the manifestation of
the technology that makes former ice deserts inhabitable and acces-
sible. As such they form a powerful contrast to the avenues of little
lanterns of snow still formed annually in the northerly prefectures
of Japan, candle glimmers magnified and refracted only by the
crystalline snow and dimmed by the frosty moonlight.

canada

One night in 1631, in Tours, Marie, a widow who had recently

become a nun, had a dream:

It seemed to her that she was walking hand in hand with a lay-
woman into a vast silent landscape of precipitous mountains, val-
leys, and fog. Above the mist rose a small marble church, on
whose roof sat the Virgin with Jesus. The Virgin talked to the
child, and Marie understood it was about her and that land. Then
the Virgin smiled radiantly and kissed her three times as the lay-
woman watched.57

This exquisite vision of women meeting in love in a wilderness is

one of the first ideas of northern Canada on record. It was to take the
visionary, later called Soeur Marie de l’Incarnation, across the
Atlantic to start the first women’s mission at Sault Ste Marie. When
she got there, she was pleased to find that the landscape of the St
Lawrence valley was very like that of her dream, only not so foggy.
Her Canada was in the process of becoming a settled land; there
were a few hundred French colonists when she arrived, and a few
thousand by the time she died 30 years later. Fur traders and Jesuits
penetrated deeper into the interior, trading and proselytizing among
the Algonkin and Iroquois peoples.
Another early French view of Canada is darker: to the early
explorer Jacques Cartier, Canada was ‘the land God gave to Cain’58 –
a place perennially accursed, a place of exile. As time went on, other

187
figures came to haunt the cultural construct of Canadian wilderness:
Mounties, prospectors such as ‘the Mad Trapper of Rat River’,
Indians, wolves, Wendigos. Meanwhile, virtually the entire popula-
tion of Canada sank like the gold dust in a prospector’s pan to within
100 miles of the border with the United States. Above this line,
Canada is a land of vast, empty spaces, mostly icebound, peopled
largely by the imagination, by ideas of north.
The wilderness, in practice, forms a small part of most Canadians’
experience of life, despite the widely known verses about silver
birches, beavers and moose; in practice, the animals north of 60° are
not often disturbed. But Canada, even at its most southerly, lies a
very long way north. This simple fact of topography gives to Canada,
particularly in the eyes of the Scots in Canada, some of the moral
virtue that attaches to the austere north of Europe. In John Buchan’s
Sick Heart River (a piece of Canadian myth-making by a Scots
Governor-General) an American corporation lawyer, met by chance
in the wilderness of the Northern Territories, says: ‘The United States
is getting to be a mighty noisy country . . . Canada is becoming to
some of us like a mediaeval monastery to which we can retreat when
things get past bearing.’59 Such a view of the Canadian wilderness as
a retreat from artificiality into reality is inevitably the view of those
who do not have to negotiate with the north throughout the year.
The north for Canadians, like the west for Americans, carries
ideas of the frontier:

The North, like the West, creates types. It is an indication of

ourselves. The North, like the West, to be expressed in paint,
demands the adapting of new materials to new methods.60

It had associations with the strange and inexplicable, with Wendigos

– the ice vampires discussed already – with lawlessness and mad-
ness, and, above all, with one of the most protracted tragic dramas
of the nineteenth century, the disappearance of, and long search for,
the explorer Sir John Franklin, who vanished on a doomed quest for
a north-west passage in 1845. The popular ballad, like the ancient
Scots ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, imagines the lost expedition as
somehow continuing in their frozen grave as if in life:

With a hundred seamen he sailed away

To the frozen ocean in the month of May,

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 To seek that passage beyond the pole,
Where we poor seamen do sometimes go . . .

In Baffin’s Bay where the whale-fish blow,

The fate of Franklin no man may know;
The fate of Franklin no man can tell,
Lord Franklin along with his poor sailors do dwell.61

The idea of north in Canada is infected, perhaps more than that of

any other country except Russia, with the primordial associations of
‘the land of Cain’, that is, with sadness, loss and exile. Much of the
settlement of Canada was involuntary: although the French settle-
ments that produced Soeur Marie de l’Incarnation were voluntary
and modestly successful, the Scots and the Irish strands in Canadian
culture derive from people displaced by the Highland Clearances
and the potato famine. Their skills and knowledge had no possible
relevance to surviving Canada’s winter, and most who found them-
selves dumped in the Northern Territories either escaped south-
wards as soon as possible or died. The novelist Robertson Davies is
descended from a group of Scottish Highlanders from Sutherland –
itself a bleak, northerly terrain by most standards – who were left to
work out their own salvation on the shore of James Bay, the south-
ernmost arm of Hudson Bay, in the Northern Territories. All they
could and did do was to abandon the land theoretically ‘theirs’ and
head south. Davies comments: ‘when I look at photographs of my
grandfather today, I think I can see something of the desolation of
those early settlers in his face still, a century later.’62 It is difficult for
someone with such stories in the family to think of the wilderness as
a potential playground either for the body or the spirit. He also
represents this aspect of the Canadian experience in a late novel
that draws extensively on his own family history, Murther &
Walking Spirits:

It was a terrible place, in swamp land north of Lake St Clair, called

Baldoon . . . What could they have farmed? Not sheep, unless the
sheep grew webbed feet and turned to a diet of reeds and grass as
sharp as knives . . . but there were some of those Scotchmen who
had the devil in them, and they saw half the shipload die the first
winter of cold and starvation and even phthisis, but mostly of
misery and exile, and they made up their minds to get out . . . and

189
 those that didn’t die on the way made it. And my great-grand-
father made it, and I had the tale from him. Often and often.63

Other Canadian writers have also tackled the inimical north. In

Mavis Gallant’s short story ‘Up North’, for instance, an English war
bride and her little boy, newly arrived, are on a train bound for the
northern wilderness where she is meeting up with her husband: she
is telling her story to a chance-met stranger, and it becomes increas-
ingly clear that she will find her new life nightmarish or even impos-
sible. ‘“It’s not proper country,” she said. “It’s bare.”’64 The child has
seen passengers boarding the train during the night, though the
adults had not, and it becomes gradually obvious that they are
revenants, the ghosts of earlier settlers who have gone north, as they
are going, to misery and despair.
At the same time, strongly positive ideas of the northern wilder-
ness of Canada have been profoundly shaped by two self-elected
spokesmen for its values: ‘Grey Owl’ and Ernest Thompson Seton.
‘Grey Owl’, lecturer, naturalist and writer, wrote books replete with
insight into the world of the moose and the beaver, which were, in
the 1930s, standard fare for middle-class boys across the Empire.

In contrast with Hitler’s screaming, ranting voice, and the

remorseless clang of modern technology, Grey Owl’s words
evoked an unforgettable charm, lighting in our minds the vision
of a cool, quiet place, where men and animals lived in love and
trust together.65

‘Grey Owl’ was born Archie Belaney in Hastings in southern

England in 1888, emigrated to Canada, and flung himself at the
Ojibway people, who charitably took him in and allowed him to
become Native Canadian by adoption. Ernest Thompson Seton was
also born in England, and was taken to Canada when he was six.
Although he did not become Native Canadian to the extent that
Archie Belaney did, he was powerfully impressed by Native
Canadians, whom he saw as ‘a model for white men’s lives’, and he
also adopted an Native Canadian name, ‘Black Wolf’. Grey Owl
became one of the first ever conservationists, a romantic embodi-
ment of the vanishing wilderness: an eloquent, literate ‘Indian’, or so
it was thought, a spokesman for the forest and its animals. By Grey
Owl’s time, the beavers, whose pelts had been the foundation of

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Canadian prosperity, were just about trapped out. If they were not to
become extinct, they had therefore to be reinvented as lovable and in
need of protection, and this was Grey Owl’s notable achievement.66
Canada is thus a powerfully defined locus classicus for the vision
of the north as a place of spiritual cleansing and healing, a powerful
antidote to the greed and decadence of modernity, and the location
of a dignified and integrated life in which man takes his rightful
place in the world of nature. Wilfred Campbell’s poem ‘How One
Winter Came in the Lake Region’ was anthologized for use in
schools in 1924, and expresses (clumsily) the ideal of the pure and
cleansing north:

That night I felt the winter in my veins,

A joyous tremor of the icy glow;
And woke to hear the north’s wild vibrant strains,
While far and wide, by withered woods and plains,
Fast fell the driving snow.67

A similar note is struck by the English version of the Canadian

national anthem written by R. Stanley Weir in 1908:

With glowing hearts we see thee rise

The True North strong and free . . .

Another, and darker, Canadian idea of north has been defined

recently by Margaret Atwood: ‘one of the patterns had to do with
going crazy in the North – or being driven crazy by the North’.68 It is
a note frequently struck by Robert Service, whose verses could be
described as a hymn of hate to the Arctic. The north as mother of
psychosis rather than sane integration, a descendant of the idea of
the ‘land of Cain’. For example, in John Buchan’s Sick Heart River,
both the French-Canadian industrialist Gaillard and the half-breed
trapper Lew Frizell go mad not merely in the north, but of the north.
Glenn Gould (1932–1982) is one of the most significant Canadian
artists to attempt to come to terms with this complex heritage of
ideas of north.69 Like most Canadians, the north had not formed any
part of his personal history, but he became interested in it as an idea,
and took a train journey called the Muskeg Express for a 1,000-mile
ride into the far north of Manitoba. The usual passengers on this
route were people travelling to jobs and lives in the far north, and he

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recorded interviews with four experienced northern travellers, later
juxtaposing these interviews as if they were conversations on the
train. This material went into the radio documentary The Idea of
North (1967), in which he explored the range of thoughts that these
people were bringing to their experience. It is a long way from being
an ordinary documentary. Gould described the work as an ‘oral tone
poem’ and his technique as ‘contrapuntal radio’.
When The Idea of North was made, its techniques must have been
revolutionary. It is a documentary that is not linear, has no narrative,
and has no controlling voice telling the auditor ‘the truth’: what you
have are five voices inter-cutting, like conversations on the long
train journey northwards. Indeed the noise of the train is heard in
the background for the duration of the conversation about the Inuit
peoples. At some times voices cut across each other, so the listener’s
attention is divided – Gould himself compared this effect to the
experience of being the dining-car steward dropping in an out of
conversations. The only organization is thematic, and it is all created
by editing five monologues, spoken by five people who never met.
The wonderful opening is a trio sonata for voices, talking about
their most intense experiences of the north – voices fading in out of
silence at such a low level that you wonder if something has gone
wrong with the equipment you are listening on. This deliberate ‘dif-
ficulty’ must itself have been an innovation when the documentary
was made. During the body of the piece, you have the words of five
speakers, all articulate, progressive visitors to Canada north of the
60th parallel, one an experienced prospector and long-term resident
of the north. Towards the end of the piece, when this prospector,
Walter Maclean, is talking about what the idea of north might mean
to a country, what it might mean to a country to enclose the wilder-
ness within its frontiers, Gould fades in the only sound effect apart
from the wheels of the northbound train, the last movement of
Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, which underlines the gravity of his med-
itation on what the north means for Canada.
The first experience to emerge audibly from the murmured opening
is the nurse Marianne Schroeder talking about walking out onto a
freezing lake at the early hour of the winter sunset: ‘and I felt that I was
almost part of that country – and I hoped that it would never end’.
All the speakers are in a sense experts (nurse, geographer, anthro-
pologist, civil servant – Canada had at the time a splendidly named
‘Ministry of Northern Affairs’) who have been to the north and

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returned. The chief speaker, Maclean, has long experience of the
north and speaks with the authority of seniority, very calm, reflec-
tive. His early remarks echo the many who have seen the north as a
place of testing of the individual’s human qualities: ‘The person who
makes the trip is going to be up against himself. You can’t talk about
the north until you’ve got out of it.’ On another tack, Gould’s profes-
sional geographer says that ‘the north is a land of very thin margins’.
‘A nation is great that has a frontier – Canada has one – the north.’
Canada has a civilization that does not conform to the rest of North
America: the non-conformists go north (as they do in the British
Isles, and Japan).
The speakers offer the old ambiguity of ‘Going up there to find
myself or lose myself’ – but there is never any pretence that the north
offers answers or transformations; it only intensifies the experience of
the individual who goes there. There is also deliberate reiteration that
human experience in the north is predictable and repetitive. The won-
derful persistence of the sound of the train all through the latter part of
Gould’s documentary expresses and echoes this. The effect outstays
its welcome; by the more recent conventions of radio, it goes on
simply far too long, but this in itself makes a deliberate point about the
merciless length of the journey, about the wintry sameness at the jour-
ney’s end. Sometimes he uses the train going through a tunnel to
drown the voices, once, beautifully, as an expression of being over-
whelmed by the isolation of the north. At one point the nurse’s voice
says that she reached a point where she couldn’t stand it any more and
the train (which at that point seems in its onward progress to express
the impossibility of turning back) drowns her voice.
The documentary is deliberately not easy: sometimes the train
noise is too loud to bear. Much of the last section is the experienced
man, Maclean, talking about how he would describe the north to
someone taking the northbound train for the first time: ‘You must
treat him tenderly. You can’t let him have the north all in one barrel so
to speak.’ As he reflects, he also recalls how the journey might feel the
first time, of points where the train stops, has to reverse out of a little
station, how the wait seems to prolong itself into an eternity amidst
the snowy landscape (a point also made in Mavis Gallant’s story
quoted earlier). And the northbound traveller must accept a progres-
sion to ‘the unknown’, towards acceptance of the realization that ‘not
everything can have a form’. ‘As if everything must have a form: the
north is not in a form. It is a shorthand for the suburb’s antithesis.’

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 The concluding point, the grave reflection underlined by the
fading in of Sibelius’s music, is that the north, the wilderness within
the frontiers, is a continual challenge, a more positive reason for
unity and the maintenance of community than any external enemy.
Indeed the suggestion is that nature in the north is the enemy.
Maclean’s summing-up plays around William James’s idea of the
place that war plays in civil societies and suggests that, for
Canadians, the north is the war, the 60th parallel the garrisoned fron-
tier and the enemy is Nature itself. The conclusion is that this vast
irreducible territory is a strength, a constant reminder of the need for
unity, a source of saving humility.
The visual mastery of the Canadian north was left to Tom
Thomson and the slightly later ‘Group of Seven’: an attempt to break
free from the traditional picturesque and to discover a new aesthetic
based on Canada itself.70 The ‘Group of Seven’ endeavoured to
express the spirituality and essential Canadian-ness of untouched
northern landscapes. Such works as J.E.H. MacDonald’s Snow-
Bound, a study of spruce branches pressed down by heavy snow, in
effect reject French influence in favour of Scandinavian, but other
works produced by the group, such as the boldly abstract land-
scapes of Lawren Harris, have a better claim to autochthony.
This connection was made explicit by the painters themselves. In
1913 J.E.H. MacDonald and Lawren Harris went to an exhibition of
contemporary Scandinavian art in Buffalo, New York State, not far
south of the border. This was a transforming experience for both
painters, since they perceived internally that the depiction of north
and northness was that which would make them distinctively
Canadian artists and that externally the Scandinavian painters had
shown them an approach to the painting of the north. In MacDonald’s
own words:

The flow and ripple of water were beautifully painted by

Gustaf Fjaestad, and shaded streams and stony rapids, and
mottled rock, and spotted birch trunks . . . We were well
assured that no Swedish brook or river would speak a language
unknown to us and that we would know our own snows and
rivers better for Fjaestad’s revelations. They . . . seemed to us
true souvenirs of that mystic north round which we all
revolve.71

194
Harris used the intense contrasts produced by snow to great effect, for
example, in his Mt Lefroy, the culmination of a long series of sketches in
which he searched for expressive meaning in the landscape. In the final
version, the simplified, white-linen folds of the snow-clad mountain
form an image of purity and exaltation. Harris’s paintings of the
Canadian Rockies and Arctic in the 1930s were an attempt to depict
‘the soul of a new country’.72 In his view, the wilderness was the key to
spiritual knowledge for Canadians; it was the particular route sug-
gested by their milieu: Canadians defined themselves, and still do to
some extent, by their landscape and their collective response to it. The
Rockies and the Arctic were physical, theoretical and emotional fron-
tiers against which Canada as a nation and Canadians as people tested
themselves.73 The reaction of the art critic of the Toronto Star suggests
that this was an idea that other Canadians were responsive to:

I felt as if the Canadian soul were unveiling to me something

secret and high and beautiful which I had never guessed – a
strength and self-reliance and depth and a mysticism I had not
suspected. I saw as I had never seen before the part the wilder-
ness was to play in the moulding of the Canadian spirit.74

More recently, a variety of photographers have responded to

Canada’s northern landscapes. David Barbour’s book The Landscape
brings together the work of eight photographers concerned with
northern Canada.75 Perhaps the most interesting feature of this fine
collection is the way that these photographs evoke damage, harm
and loss. Fragile landscapes in the process of being destroyed, from
Edward Burtynsky’s open-pit mines through to Lorraine Gilbert’s
sad, delicate portrayals of logged-out hillsides and new plantings.
But in these recent images, the north is no longer powerful and per-
haps inimical; it is something wounded, and perhaps moribund,
expressing a sense, new in our time, that we are more powerful and
destructive than the north, and not vice versa.
And yet the Canadian north remains vast, and Canadian views
of the north have evolved and deepened with the turn of the new
century. The views of the speakers in Glenn Gould’s Idea of North of
1967 are an unconscious testimony to Canadian progressiveness
and liberalism. Apart for the use of ‘Eskimo’, the old word for the
Inuit peoples, their attitudes to both the ecology and to the indige-
nous peoples of the north are respectful and positive far in advance

195
of those of their European contemporaries. They see the north as
beyond taming, indeed that to use the very word ‘tame’ is to betray
a hopeless and obsolete ambition of domination of that which can
never be shaped or dominated.
This is being recognized at the turn of the twenty-first century by
the restoration of autonomy to the Inuit (Nunavut has been since
1999 a self-governing entity within the Canadian nation) and the
restoration of the Inuit names to the northern territories, which for a
century and more have borne as aliases the names of energetic
Scottish travellers – Andrew Gordon Bay –who ‘discovered’ them.
With this restoration has come a revival and expansion of the Inuit
arts. The haunting film Atanarjuat is an early – if triumphant – man-
ifestation of this.76 It has won numerous awards, and has elicited the
recognition of epic quality from Margaret Atwood, who calls it
‘Homer with a video camera’. She is absolutely precise: it is a work
that defines a society and its traditions while being at the same time
a profound meditation on origins, on the point of a society’s origin.
(The Homeric recitations themselves were much valued among the
exiled and dispossessed Greeks of the Mediterranean.)
The narrative centres on the epic run, of the pater patriae
Atanarjuat, fleeing naked from his enemies across 20 miles of ice,
until he reaches safety, whence he returns to the defeat of the evil
shaman and to the restoration of peace to his community. This
ending – recognition of the wisdom of the elders, resolution, part-
ing, in an atmosphere of casual magic where a child speaks not
quite with the voice of a child – is new. There is no perceptible dis-
junction in the texture of the film, but the ending represents a
development and re-casting of traditional material. Perhaps it is a
grafting of the influence of 80 years of Christianity onto the old
legend – in the original version Atanarjuat returns – like an
Icelandic saga hero, like Odysseus – to slaughter his enemies. A
placed stone, the seat of Atanarjuat, is still to be seen at
Iksivautaujaak, near Igloolik, a memorial, in its own context, with
the weight of the Ara Pacis in Rome.
This placed stone is part of an intricate system of placings that act
to give both physical and spiritual shape to the northern landscape.
They are as complex as the memory systems of ancient Ireland,
whereby the whole island came to be a memory place of Irish his-
tory. Some of these stones are practical, way markers and hunting
aids; some are commemorative; many are sacral or metaphysical.

196
Inukshuk (Inuit
placed stone
portal) near
Arviat, Hudson
Bay.

The north can be articulated by the placed stones and by the fram-
ing stone portals of the indigenous hunters and shamans, but it is, and
will always remain, larger than any attempt to bring it under control.
The Inuit signs and markers in the landscape do not argue with its
vastness, they are a series of acts of recognition that work with it: they
identify sacred and metaphysical places as well as directing migrating
animals and marking the best route for a journey.77 You can lay down
way markers in the vastness of the north but there is no meaningful
way to treat it as though it was cultivable land. All western European
ways of thinking about land and its potential (that is, all the ways of
thinking about land that are built into the structure of the English lan-
guage) cease to be relevant. European landscape art (and art-placed-
in-landscape) seems by contrast intrusive, unevolved.

197
 The attitude to the land expressed by these placed stones is also
echoed by a Wordsworthian account by the Inu poet Sadlaqé of the
difficulty of comprehending any of the vastness of the territory
around him in verse:

Once, when I was quite young, I wished to sing a song about my

village, and one winter evening when the moon was shining, I
was walking back and forth to put words together that could fit
into a tune that I was humming. I found beautiful words, words
that should tell my friends about the greatness of the mountains
and everything else that I enjoyed every time that I came outside
and opened my eyes . . . suddenly I stood still and lifted my head
up and looked: in front of me was the huge mountain of my set-
tlement, greater and steeper than I had ever seen it. It was almost
as if it grew slowly out of the earth and began to lean out over me,
deadly dangerous and menacing. And I heard a voice in the air
that cried out, ‘Little human! The echo of your words has reached
me. Do you think that I can be comprehended in your song?’78

This is precisely the point which the Governor-General of Canada,

Adrienne Clarkson, was making as the last pages of this book were
being written. She was speaking in Russia, part of a tour, an explo-
ration of the links and common experiences that unite northern
countries. She began by stressing that the fact of the northern territo-
ries is inescapably a shaping part of Russian and Canadian experi-
ence: ‘That is why it is a good thing to think about the North – as our
poet Pierre Morency says – not on a compass but in us.’79 She was
speaking at the St Petersburg State Mining Institute, and was steer-
ing a path of extraordinary delicacy around the common knowledge
of the ecological devastation of much of northern Russia in the
Soviet period. (One of the most haunting sequences in Knut Erik
Jensen’s documentary about a Finnmark choir, Cool and Crazy, is
their coach trip to give a friendship concert in the Russian city of
Murmansk.80 They drive through dying forests, unimaginable pollu-
tion. There is shot after shot of the Norwegians looking out of the
coach window, unable to believe what they are seeing. The wrecked
landscape leads to the one row in the film, about socialism and how
it can lead to devastation, not progress.) Adrienne Clarkson’s central
point is that the relationship to the north has changed forever and
that exploitation (in both its neutral and pejorative senses) must give

198
way to ‘the exploration of the new humanism of the North’. This
means allowing the nature of the north to redefine the way that a
state relates to its northern territories, that the kinds of governance
and use that apply to densely settled agricultural land are irrelevant
in the face of the extent of the norths.

Both of our countries have had to overcome the idea that we were
going to dominate and tame the North. Too often, those of us living
in the South of our countries have treated the North merely as a
source of wealth from natural resources, rather than engaging fully
with our North as an integral part of our countries and societies.

She went on to appeal for an integration of the norths into the imag-
inations of countries with northern territories. She was aware of the
dangers of simple mythologizing. She stresses a need to listen to
‘what we are telling ourselves in the North’, myths and preconcep-
tions, as a precondition of hearing ‘what the North itself can tell us’:

And come to understand the words of one of our poets of the

North, Henry Beissel: ‘The Arctic Circle is a threshold in the mind,
not its circumference. North is where all the parallels [similitudes
as well as longitudes] converge to open out . . . into the mystery
surrounding us.’

britain

The north of England is consistently described in terms of dearth,

authenticity and pastness. These are images of the industrial cities
and towns, although the countryside is imagined as bleak in a dif-
ferent way, the novels of the Bröntes, starveling hilltop farms, black
weather. But descriptions of the north by northerners return again
and again to the trope of urban pastoral, to the close interpenetra-
tion of country and town, memory and nostalgia, benign pastness.
With the turn of the twenty-first century, industry itself, the very
idea of an industrial town, is becoming part of the past, subject of
nostalgia.
When the observers of Mass-Observation visited Bolton and
Blackpool in the late 1930s, they used painting and photography as
well as written expedition reports as parts of their documentary ini-
tiative. The images they produced set a way of seeing the northern

199
cities for the rest of the century. The most memorable of them are
the photographs by Humphrey Spender, casual observations, often
observations of observers. Spender himself was ambivalent in mood
as he took these photographs: intensely sympathetic with the
people, frightened and depressed by the surroundings in which they
lived. This seems an honest response to a townscape that was, to an
educated southerner, overwhelmingly alien:

I felt very much a foreigner . . . and the whole landscape, the

townscape, was severe and made me apprehensive. There was a
particular kind of dark red brick up there, a particular dark green
to the grass from the pollution; and the height of the factory chim-
neys with smoke belching from them – these were alarming. In
general, the experience was alarming – and depressing because of
the evident poverty . . .81

Spender’s photographs have human sympathy, awareness of

heroic scale and an eloquent, much-imitated contrast of textures:
rich soot-black buildings and dully reflective wet paving. Deeply
recessive blacks, lustrous greys. The paintings of Bolton by William
Coldstream and Graham Bell, made at the same time, are both
painted from high viewpoints and share the expected elements:
brick terraces, monumental mill chimneys, harsh weather. The ele-
ment that all these images have in common is the thickening and
whitening of the air with coal smoke and industrial smoke, as if air
had taken on the texture of sea-worn glass. It is like the snow mist in
the skies of Dutch ice pictures or like the roughened Perspex that
surrounds the compass in Dalziell and Scullion’s multiple The Idea of
North. Spender’s photograph of Coldstream at work on the roof of
the Bolton Art Gallery also records this blanched solidity of the air.82
This white sky is the distinguishing feature of those industrial
crowd paintings by L. S. Lowry that are still the focus of genuine dis-
agreement.83 Lowry is perhaps an insoluble problem in the history of
twentieth-century English art, but since his is very precisely an idea of
north that commands widespread (even growing) recognition, the
idea that he embodies is very much the business of this study.84 It
seems historically inevitable that his work should have first come to
wider public notice and that his status as a painter should have risen
in 1938 and 1939. The paintings and photographs of industrial
England generated by Mass-Observation prepared the way for his

200
An Industrial Town at Evening, mid-20th century, colour woodblock print.

first success. (Also the interest in naïve painters among 1930s intellec-
tuals may have contributed to his initial acceptance: the highly trained
Lowry was widely mistaken at first for a self-taught artist.) Lowry
himself, with what seems typical modesty or elusiveness, attributes
his characteristic white sky to external advice rather than to his own
observation. He suggested in an interview in 1966 that one of his
tutors at the Salford School of Art had published praise of his early
work, which tended to have a smoke-grey sky, but criticized it for
being too dark. He painted his first picture (he said) to demonstrate
how wrong this advice was, only to find that he had found a formula,
a way of showing the realities of the stained sky under which he
worked in the poor inner suburbs of Manchester.
Lowry’s work is highly stylized, elusive, remarkably free in
making palimpsests from diverse studies of figures and places. Some
of his pictures show a recognizable configuration of mills, terrace
houses and asphalted public spaces, but as many are summary assem-
blages of buildings with a fictive, high viewpoint and a ground of
whitish smog in which mills and church towers seem to float, uncon-
nected by roads or the realities of communication. There is an element
of the architectural capriccio of the eighteenth century, also a reflection
of the improvised realities of the layout of unplanned and hastily con-
structed places. These paintings are, very precisely, expressions of an
idea of north, emblematic assemblages, and it was as such that they

201
were recognized by the Director of the Tate Gallery, John Rothenstein,
at the end of the 1930s. He had come to London from Sheffield the pre-
vious year and, seeing Lowry’s work for sale in London, was led by
his emotion of recognition (recognition seems to me the point and the
problem with Lowry) to buy the work for the Tate:

I stood in the gallery marvelling at the accuracy of the mirror this

to me unknown painter had held up to the bleakness, the obsolete
shabbiness, the grimy fogboundness, the grimness of northern
industrial England.85

A representative example of Lowry’s composition of elements of

the real into composite pictures expressing an idea of northern place
reveals itself when his drawing of 1924 of The River Irwell at the Adelphi
is compared with the painting of 1935, River Scene or Industrial
Landscape, which takes the same place as a point of departure for a
dark capriccio in which warehouses, fences, pitheads and mill chim-
neys are depicted as sinking into an undefined white morass that
seems to flow on and form the sky of the distance of the picture.86 The
process is instructive: the viewpoint in the painting is much higher;
the elevation of buildings above the river, clearly represented in the
drawing, has been deliberately lowered, so that the buildings and
fences appear to be half-submerged. Colliery winding gears and mill
chimneys have been imported to crowd the foreground; rooflines
have been broken and recessed into darkness to reinforce the image of
desperation, of broken buildings sinking, weighed down by the single
smear of black smoke at the top of the blanched sky.
Humphrey Spender’s photographs of Tyneside of 1938 have also
been accepted as embodying an idea of north, and have influenced
almost all subsequent photographers of northern England. These
photographs originally accompanied an article by Auden’s friend
the mountaineer Michael Roberts, published in Picture Post in the
December of that year.87 The article has as its leading image a noc-
turne composed in the manner of Whistler’s views of the Thames: a
view across the high-level New Bridge. The lamps on the bridge and
the last light in the sky are balanced by the lit windows of tall build-
ings on the steep banks below. The sub-heading catches the ideas of
northern endurance and the pastness of the English north: ‘He saw
the irrepressible spirit of the North; but he saw stagnation, too, and a
looking-back to days that will not return.’88

202
 Among the photographs taken on the same visit is one – not pub-
lished with the article – Newcastle United Football Club Changing Rooms,
Tyneside, 1938.89 It is Saturday afternoon, the match is over; outside the
changing room the light is going (Spender had taken a classic shot of
the teams running out, seen from a vertiginous viewpoint, high in the
stand). The foreground of the photograph is taken up by the naked
body of a footballer, who is accepting a light for his cigarette from a
black-coated manager, whose dark clothes recede into the darkness of
a background lit only at the top. The photograph is tranquil, static,
monumental – an unexpected image from the antique world snatched
casually out of a winter Saturday in a northern city. It is an image rem-
iniscent of Baroque painting, in the way that it plays with rich shadow
and a single flame in the manner of Georges de La Tour. It is an essay
in urban pastoral: a moment of stillness, even of mystery, in which the
quotidian is frozen into the appearance of high art. It is also a heroic
image, monumental sculpture, expressing the sense in which – to the
spectators who have been standing for two hours in the cold – the
player is a heroic figure indeed. The image focuses on a moment of
intersection of real and ideal, illustrating the transitory status of its
subject in terms of the art of the past.
It is a translation (towards the end of a decade in which sport had
played a vast part in the inward, escapist focus of British self-percep-
tion) into the terms of high art of the expectations and hopes that the
figure of the footballer carries for the anonymous crowd who embody,
for the duration of Saturday afternoon, the City. Football and boxing
were two of the legitimate means by which the working man of the
1930s could rise to a position of esteem, if not of affluence. The photo-
graph represents the barely articulated aspirations of the standing
spectators on many winter Saturdays, throughout cold England.
Football pitches, football crowds recur in pictures of the northern city;
football is one of the most intense English sites of nostalgia. The
crowds walking to the match, then dispersing in the early dusk,
intensely peopled streets thinning, quietening, returning to normality.
In times of dearth the football team became (becomes) the focus of the
town, the town itself. Hard-pressed Newcastle still produces its
‘seated army of convicts’ whose laureate is Sean O’Brien,

Under three o’clock’s great cry on Gallowgate,

Remember the lost world, politics: cages flying
Up from the pit and disgorging their democrats . . . 90

203
who commemorates, shadowing the football crowd of the 1990s, the
spectators of Spender’s 1930s as themselves the heroes of a golden
age.
And Simon Armitage (who counts ‘First division three years run-
ning’ among the things that Huddersfield needs to remember now
that every place is being made like every other place) has his poem
of the smoking footballer, his poem to the memory of his past self
standing on the terraces in the dusk, in the days when people
remembered footballers who smoked.91

In the freezing cold with both teams snorting

like flogged horses, with captains and coaches
effing and jeffing at backs and forwards,
talking steam, screaming exhausting orders,
that’s not breath coming from my bloke, it’s smoke.92

His hero’s west Yorkshire insouciance is as touched by pastness as

Spender’s photograph with its heroic and pastoral overtones.
Smoking itself and smoke-whitened air are almost part of the texture
of the past now, part of nostalgia, part of the memory of how cities
used to smell. Sean O’Brien identifies the football crowd moving
through the town as evocative of the heroic age of the working class
between the wars. I felt this in a moment of walking out onto the
steps of the Museum in Sunderland, still thinking about the lost
north country of Thomas Bewick, the obsolete innocence of the
verses transfer-printed onto Sunderland pottery. The high splendid
bridge over the Wear, looking precisely like its engraved image on
lustreware jugs, was overwhelmed by the confluence and flow of
striped red and white football shirts walking towards the stadium,
colours moving like banners in the cool air off the water.
Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Damon’s Lament for his Clorinda, Yorkshire, 1654’
(published in 1978) is a northern pastoral, explicit in its pastness: a
lament for a rural, aristocratic north, for a north once as culturally cen-
tral as any capital. The poem anticipates the reader’s identification of
Yorkshire as urban and plebeian, defies it and plays on it. The sonnet
spoken out of the pre-industrial Yorkshire of the seventeenth century
(the Yorkshire of Andrew Marvell) makes a point of the post-indus-
trial associations of Yorkshire names. The title’s juxtaposition of the
pastoral names ‘Damon’ and ‘Clorinda’ with ‘Yorkshire’ invites the
reader to stumble on an implied incongruity. Yet Hill expresses a per-

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Humphrey
Spender,
Newcastle United
Football Club
Changing Rooms,
Tyneside, 1938,
1938, photograph.

fectly valid point of cultural history in his title alone: Yorkshire was
once as culturally central as London. The tyranny of the metropolis
was less absolute in the early modern world than it is now.
Hill is evoking the England of 1654, the Cavalier winter. His
speaker is the cosmopolitan poet Richard Fanshawe under house
arrest just north of Sheffield, in the valley where Hill spent his sum-
mers when he lived and worked in Yorkshire. The sonnet describes
displacement, house arrest in a disused aristocratic house, as mourn-
ful and dignified a location as any Jamesian imagination of great
houses in the south.
The poem is wintry in mood and season. The names of the rivers
‘Sheaf’ and ‘Don’ inevitably bring Sheffield and Doncaster anachronis-
tically to mind. Hill describes the shortness of the light and the ‘gold
foil’ ripped by the winds from the oaks in the park, about the reticent

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apartness of the local ‘shepherds’ (real ones as well as the classicizing,
false shepherds implied in the pastoral title). This title is not followed
by verses in the pastoral mode that it implies, but by Hill’s enumera-
tions of the realities of the poet’s circumstances: the annual deaths of
children; the sorrow of trying to find words for internal exile; the
condition of a poet forbidden by the government to publish his poetry.

. . . No sooner has the sun,

Swung clear above earth’s rim than it is gone
We live as gleaners of its vestiges . . . 93

The tension is between past and present expectations of place, the

gap between the sonnet’s title and its text. The literary possibilities
of the north of England are deliberately made difficult.
The relation of the northern town and high culture is considered
obliquely in Philip Larkin’s sonnet ‘Friday Night in the Royal
Station Hotel’, another deliberate, jarring juxtaposition. Most of the
sonnet describes the empty grand hotel in Hull on a Friday night,
heavy with the sense that everyone who can leave this city at the end
of the line has already done so. Only in the last two lines does Larkin
look across to translations of Chinese poetry, to the classic laments of
highly literate civil servants posted to desolate lives of provincial
exile. He makes Hull for this moment a forgotten place, and moves
from English realism into a diction approaching Arthur Waley’s
style for translated Chinese:

The headed paper, made for writing home

(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.94

When this sonnet was written (1966), Larkin was reading the north
(quite accurately) as a place of exile from the metropolis, from the
centre of culture and power. The analogy between the educated poet
in Hull and the exiled mandarin was, for the moment, just, however
much a school of poets was to flourish in the city at the end of the
decade.
The centres of the northern cities were slow to be developed after
the war, and so memories of 1950s northern childhoods have aspects
of the pre-war south. Most northern English writers of that gener-
ation were compelled by circumstances to go south, so that the

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northern cities they revisited in the late 1970s were comprehensively
rebuilt. This makes for a tradition of writing about departure and
return to a place that has altered in the writer’s absence. This in turn
maintains the presence of pastness in the tradition of writing about
the north of England from within.
Angela Carter is precisely of that generation who observed the
transformation of the English north. Her essay of 1970 on Bradford,
‘Industry as Artwork’, is an early appreciation of the aesthetic force
of the mill town, its city museum housed in a mansion with formal
gardens like the European spa hotel of L’Année dernière à Marienbad.
She does not observe only mill-owners’ grandeurs; the theme of
unnoticed splendours of light and townscape is central to her essay:

On some days of Nordic winter sunshine, the polluted atmos-

phere blurs and transfigures the light, so that the hitherto suffi-
ciently dark, satanic mills take on a post-apocalyptic, Blakean
dazzle as if the New Jerusalem had come at last . . . A russet mist
shrouds the surrounding moorland, which is visible from almost
every street, however mean . . .
Snow, however, brings out the essential colours of the city . . .
soot, although it paints in monochrome, does not create a monot-
onous scene, for here one may appreciate and enjoy an infinitely
rich collection of blacks, from the deepest and most opaque to the
palest and most exquisitely subtle through an entire spectrum –
brownish-black, greenish-black, yellowish-black and a cosy,
warm, reddish-black.95

By 1976, to visit the pre-war abundance of the Doncaster Market, she

had to pass through one of the newly built town centres, already fail-
ing to function as the genuine centre of anything. Built to serve the
needs of a moment, when that moment had already passed, Carter
compares these structures to the remains of the Jesuit reductions of
Paraguay: exotic, prodigious ruins.96
Carter is also aware of the interpenetration of northern town and
country – ragged edges, the field lines under the terraces – that is a
constant theme in the work of northern writers, becoming one of the
crucial ideas in Simon Armitage’s poetry. Larkin’s poem of 1981 for
the opening of the Humber Bridge writes of Hull and its hinterland
as a wintry unity of farm and harbour:

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 Snow-thickened winter days are yet more still:
Farms fold in fields, their single lamps come on . . .
While scattered on steep seas, ice-crusted ships
Like errant birds carry her loneliness . . . 97

In the same way Carter recollects the south Yorkshire of her child-
hood as both rural and industrial (which, she reflects, was also the
condition of the Nottinghamshire of D. H. Lawrence):

The South Yorkshire coalfields are not half as ugly as they may
seem at first glance. Rather like the potteries, they are somehow
time-locked, still almost a half-rural society as it must have been
in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. The wounded and
despoiled countryside remains lush and green around the work-
ings; sheep graze right up to the pit-heads, although the sheep I
saw when I was a child were all black with soot, and Doncaster
Market is far richer in local agricultural produce than the pretend-
markets in Devon . . . there is none of the scenic drama of West
Yorkshire, instead, a bizarre sense of mucky pastoral.98

That phrase ‘bizarre sense of mucky pastoral’ is a useful shorthand

description of the north of England as seen from within. Carter
remembers too the north in its aspect of the pastness also ascribed to
it by outsiders.99 Ideas of the ‘time-locked’ and ‘half-rural’ north are
alive in the work of contemporary poets: Sean O’Brien’s railways,
Simon Armitage’s Marsden commemorations. Ian Duhig wrote one
memorable poem of the northern pastoral at the end of his collection
Nominies, which offers a return to innocence from the spoiled pre-
sent. The setting of this place of happiness is childhood pastoral –
blackberries ripened in the autumns of the north – but significantly it
is locked into the past, into memory.

A home fed by a blackberry path,

the path becoming a leafy lane,
that gives out onto a gold-paved street. . .
of the Kingdom this is the Key.100

These ideas of northern pastoral came to focus early in Larkin’s

poem ‘Show Saturday’, a poem about rural origins underpinning
urban realities. Larkin’s celebration of the quotidian dignity of the

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‘high stone one-street villages’ is, for the culturally centralized
England of 1973, defiantly provincial. A few lines of this poem bring
the quotidian north within the canon of possible poetic subjects, an
inclusion that is still influential:

Back now to private addresses, gates and lamps

In high stone one-street villages, empty at dusk,
And side roads of small towns (sports finals stuck
In front doors, allotments reaching down to the railway) . . . 101

The sense of endings (of summer, of the show) is balanced against

the idea of the unity that it represents as a source of sustenance
through the bad months:

Back now, all of them, to their local lives;

To names on vans, and business calendars
Hung up in kitchens . . .
To winter coming . . . 102

At the close, he describes the annual show as ‘regenerate union’ –

what is left of those communal impulses that would once have been
identified as religious – and sees the country underlying and under-
pinning the town.
Travelling from the south, Sheffield seems the first real northern city.
There have been hints of the north in the journey through Derbyshire:
the increasingly hilly skyline, stone walls, the juxtaposition of fantasti-
cal castle and the ‘Cathedral of Coal’ at Bolsover. Approaching
Sheffield feels like an arrival on the other side of the frontier: there are
distant glimpses of blue fell and moor from the tangled city centre,
cooling towers in the foreground. It is hard to see, from the precipitous
suburbs, if grey reflections in the distance are from concrete terraces or
from rainy hills. From the moor tops long perspectives down and
across the city blur the distinction between buildings and fields. There
are what were once isolated villas within walking distance of the town,
now built in with brick and gritstone terraces. There are still vacant
sites, unexpected intermissions of green in front of even the most
modest houses. Everywhere there are scraps of irregular ground, wild
gardens reverting to scrubland. Rootstock suckers and willowherb. On
the Derbyshire side, the brick streets above the city are deep in hedges
and trees, front gardens shouldering each other up the hill. There are

209
hilltop allotments, hedged and fruitful, reaching to the edge of the
escarpment, so that the city can be seen with a foreground of tarred
sheds and green branches. There is a park with a little stone and timber
manor house washed up in it. (Carved oak and deep-cut plaster inside,
tremendous chimneys at the gable.) Sheffield also retains small, spe-
cialist industries still on the scale of the first Industrial Revolution, on
the scale of the narrow canal and classical mill at Cromford in
Derbyshire: there are still manufacturers of sheep shears, type-
founders. The built-up valley to the north of the city centre has secre-
tive backlands of elder bushes and wild roses (unexpected June
pastorals of dog rose and elderflowers) giving way to bluebell woods
around the watercourses and the Georgian blade-grinding shops.
Seen in the shifting, broken-clouded light of the beginning of
summer, with the smell of privet strong in the steep streets and
warmth held by the brick paths into the evening, the inner suburbs
form a continuous pattern with the countryside on the far side of the
hills. This is a constant element in northern townscape, however
abraded, however poor the mid-twentieth-century shopping centres
and housing schemes: the randomness and recent date of develop-
ment together with the hillside sites produce a sense of the underly-
ing gritstone bones of the landscape, immediately apprehensible.
Travelling on northwards through the West Riding, the pastoral
(not always quite real, sometimes wholly self-conscious) of the
Calder valley is expressed in scale, in the narrowness of the canals
and in the medieval shaping of the canal bridges as if in imitation of
the packhorse bridges that cross the rivers. Sheep graze in stone-
walled fields. As in Sheffield, the evidence of the small scale of the
early Industrial Revolution is everywhere in the rural places. Coming
out of Halifax, though, is the later heroic age of the Industrial
Revolution – tremendous retaining walls shoulder the hill out of the
way of the westbound road; rusticated cliffs, works of giants. The
valley bottom is tightly built up, gritstone rocks rise sheer behind
gritstone terraces, but the buildings on the tops are ancient, old wool
villages paved with the vast flags of the packhorse ways.
Hebden Bridge (louche, subtle, alternative) explodes out of the
valley, where Victorian terraces, in a fine display of master-builder’s
panache, climb up along the steep gradient of the Hawarth road.
(Hawarth itself is the site of a whole set of ideas of north associated
with the work of Emily Brontë – romantic wildness and romantic
fictions – but what is now remarkable about it is the way that the old

210
village centre with its few surrounding stone-walled fields is only a
small part of a complex pattern of semi-rural, intermittent terraced
building spreading over what must once have been empty uplands.)
In side valleys, scoured by the quick streams that run down to the
Calder, there are the cyclopaean relics of rural industry, chimneys
growing out of the floor of mature woodland.
This is the landscape of Ted Hughes’s and Fay Godwin’s Remains
of Elmet, terse local verses and deep soot-black and rain-grey pho-
tographs in the northern photographic style set by Humphrey
Spender and Bill Brandt. The book was published in 1979, and seems
now very much of that moment, in which the northern places
(with few exceptions) can be only the scene of elemental struggles
between men (always men) and environment. All mills, chapels
and rhododendrons are oppressions; the rocks and the moorland
weather are impatient to repossess places that have been momentar-
ily usurped by industrial settlements. The only future that Hughes
can see for the great chimneys in the woods is that they must fall in
the (‘natural’) cycle before they (or anything else) can rise again. The
moor tops are the rightful territory of the wolf and monsters of rock
and snow. A determination to be local (or a determination to be
inflexibly northern) ends in reiterated generalities about wilder-
nesses. Hughes was much more successful in fixing the northern
evening through all the senses, in verses written ten years earlier.
This is one of a series of synonyms for the desolate cry of the crow:

As the dull gunshot and its after-râle

Among conifers in rainy twilight.103

This catches not only noise and fading light, but also the smell of
cordite (like coal smoke, like peat smoke, an upland smell) and the
pricking of cold drizzle on the skin. This masculine grimness, imagi-
nation of struggle with environment and elements, is an idea of north,
which was once powerful, dominant in the mid-twentieth century.
The road north from Hebden Bridge passes many sudden breaks at
the edges of towns, raw transitions where the last row of houses gives
suddenly onto the fields. In the towns there remain the superb scale
and quality of Victorian suburbs and parks, streets of fine villas on
the outskirts of Halifax, Huddersfield, Keighley: endless invention,
profound skill in building. Keighley has one of the most splendid
mansion museums of any northern town. Outside, it is a blackened

211
gritstone mansion: a tower, winter gardens, conservatories, artificial
rockwork. Inside, three vast rooms in enfilade are decorated in the opu-
lent taste of the French Third Empire. The chandeliers, over-scale even
for such stupendous rooms, rustle overhead, the edges of the lustres
catching the light from windows that look across the town to the
rising moors beyond. It is the apotheosis of the idea of north identified
with Victorian painters – vast plutocratic houses on the slopes, with
mills in the valley below. In contrast with the spacious, confident inner
suburbs, the town centres seem scanted and indecisive, victims of
mutations of taste that have left them always unloved, un-admired,
stranded on the wrong side. The landscape between the towns shows
clear traces of the pre-industrial world in the plunging viridian valleys,
in the isolated mill villages among the fields, in the stream and dazzle
of light down near-vertical slopes of grass.
North of Keighley the villages are still industrial, although the
dales are broadening and farming begins to outweigh industry. At
Skipton the market town dominates the last traces of industry, and
the westward road brings rural, upcountry Lancashire very near.
The villages between Keighley and Skipton are poised between rural
and industrial. Mills and chapels are at the ends of the villages in the
valley bottom by the canal, while at the ends that back onto the fells
there are farmhouses, small manor houses, prosperous buildings of
the seventeenth century.
These traces of the rural and gentry past of what are now debat-
able lands between farming and industry are little remembered in
received ideas of northern England. Yet they are a vital part of the
texture of the place. The Old Hall with its crushing solidities of foot-
square beams and stone windows shrunk in scale against the wind
(for all that their arched central light is a brusque, distant echo of
Palladio) looks north through only one miniscule leaded window
(which window has the stars of the Plough diamond-scratched into
its glass), turning the shoulder of its chimney against the fells and
the worst of the weather. Inside, the solidity of the construction can
be felt as weight: spacious broad-windowed rooms borne down by
the massiveness of low wooden ceilings. These are northern rooms,
rooms expecting nothing of the weather. Further north, in Scotland
or Scandinavia, the ceilings would be enriched, panelled or painted
to catch upward-striking light from the snow. The aesthetics of the
manor houses of West Yorkshire and Lancashire are all of darkness
and richness: deeply cut dark wood taking the light of the fire. The

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high-walled garden in front of the house, its path of yard-square
flags running straight to the door with its carved date stone, looks
like the garden of William Morris’s frontispiece for News from
Nowhere, but it is only the high gritstone walls that allow the laven-
ders and roses to flourish. The stone-edged fields plunge straight
from the ridge of the moor to the garden wall behind the house.
Looking down to the house in black weather, how archaic the pat-
tern of lit windows would appear, how solid their tight distribution,
how rooted and cautious the elegance of gables and attic windows.
South-west of Huddersfield, moving towards the Lancashire
frontier by a different road, is Simon Armitage’s village. He is the
living poet who has become most intensely identified with the West
Riding, with the whole north of England. His is a distinct land-
scape, again formed by an overlay of the rural and the industrial.
His writing has been shaped by place, by being brought up in one of
the last houses in Marsden at the western end of the West Yorkshire
conurbation, in a house with the steep slope rising behind it to the
moors. Marsden is a village that balances urban and rural, a stop-
ping point on the packhorse track across the Pennines to
Lancashire, greatly expanded in the nineteenth century. As
Armitage’s topography is full of edges and paradoxes, so is his
writing. Beyond Marston the backbone of the Pennines – dorsum
Britanniae – rises to divide west from east, county from county.
Much of his poetry stems from the experience of wandering up onto
the moorland on the edge of the industrial towns, especially in ado-
lescence. He returns again and again to the experience of larking
about with a group of male friends on the borderlands of town and
country. He keeps returning to these school years (in his novel Little
Green Man they are also revisited in memory) because ‘such a lot of
poetry is about that stage of your childhood when everything is
supernatural’.104 Place is central to his poetic. Despite any redraw-
ing of divisions of north and south in the England of the 1980s, he
speaks in the very first line that Bloodaxe published (‘Heard the one
about the guy from Heaton Mersey?’)105 from a regional standpoint,
the first verse seizing the initiative in a barrage of northern place
names. This absence of apology or self-consciousness might come
more easily in a Continental context, in a cultural landscape of
regional capitals without a dominant metropolis.
He is confident (and unusual) in placing his north as present, the
place where he stands. Armitage’s north is not an elsewhere, or a

213
receding absolute. In his book of articles, All Points North, he
serenely locates north as here, in Marsden, in West Yorkshire:

It’s the middle distance really, but you call it the North . . . The
North can also be Lancashire, which is really the North-West, and
it can also be Northumberland, which is the North-East, and
sometimes it’s Humberside, which is the Netherlands, and it can
be Cumbria, which is the Lake District and therefore Scotland.
But right here is the North, with its gods and its devils . . . In one
sense it’s neither here nor there; land with a line drawn round it
for no particular reason, too far-flung to give a single name, too
divided into layers and quarters and stripes to think of as whole,
too many claims on it to call your own.106

He made this point in his earlier collection Kid, in the poem called
‘True North’, where true north is West Yorkshire, arrived at –

. . . in a cold guard’s van

through the unmanned stations to a platform
iced with snow.107

And remote northern territories, where wolves cross the pack ice,
are known only as a learned geography of distant places. A continu-
ity is maybe implied, but Armitage’s north remains fixed on the
slopes of the Pennines, where you can take ‘At dawn, a walk on the
frozen, fibre-glass lawn’.108 Or drive:

Days like those, I’d like to be motoring

through Christmas-card weather over the hills . . .
Better to hold back, wait for a full moon
and one of those planetarium nights,
then turn off the headlights and radio.109

This is unlike Sean O’Brien, who adds to his topographies of Hull

and Newcastle a glimpsed, fugitive northern otherworld, a quintes-
sence of north, a distant city of perpetual snow, unchartable locations
in Arctic seas. When Armitage and Glyn Maxwell travelled to
Iceland in homage to Auden and MacNeice, Armitage played with
the image of himself as low-grade polar explorer departing from
Yorkshire –

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 After sharpening his crampons, topping up his hip-flask with
something warm and smooth and salvaging his woollen jumpers
from assorted bedding in the dog basket, Mr Petersson left a
scribbled note on the mantlepiece, posted the latchkey back
through the letter-box, and stumbled down the unmetalled track110

– but he saw nothing in Iceland to modify his own idea of north.

When they interviewed the Icelandic poet Matthías Johannessen, he
recollected that Auden, on the other hand, carried Iceland with him
as a touchstone of northness, his visit there remaining one of the
formative experiences of his life:

[Auden] said that Iceland was like the sun that had set, [but] you
could see the sunshine on the mountains: Iceland followed him
like that – the colours of the setting sun on the mountains. He said
that he was not always thinking about Iceland, but . . . that he was
never not thinking about Iceland.111

Armitage and Maxwell remain rooted in their Englands. When they

come safely ashore on the Westman Islands, after a stormy trip in a
fishing boat, they greet solid ground in these words:

We love the Westman Isles, because they’re Iceland, which is land,

which is England, which is home, which doesn’t move and is still,
and is one day going to be the present.112

(Late in their journey, on the remote beach at Breithavik, the Arctic

waters breaking on the lava cliffs, a place that in itself offers one embod-
iment of an idea of absolute north, Maxwell thought about English sea-
side holidays, but Armitage, barefoot, laboriously, wrote yorkshire on
the sand, and captioned the photograph ‘Homesickness’.)
Armitage knows under which sector of sky his own north lies. In
conscious or unconscious echo of Andrew Marvell, who has the ‘vigi-
lant patrol’ of stars circling to guard the Yorkshire estates of his patron,
Armitage ends his All Points North with the image of the northern
stars as the geography of the sky under which his north has its being:

Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the great bear and its cousin, tethered
to Polaris, plodding eternally like circus animals around the North
Star. And Gemini, the twins, falling through space together at arm’s

215
 length, repelled and obsessed at the same time, pushing each other
away and hanging on for grim death. Your stars. Your sign.
The cigarette gets flicked away, upwards into the bare
branches of trees lining the graveyard, into the Milky Way. Then
you split up, go your separate ways, towards different lives under
the same patch of the sky.113

At the end of The Dead Sea Poems collection is another dream poem,
titled simply with the date ‘Five Eleven Ninety Nine’, the description
of the last bonfire of the millennium, a bonfire that becomes all-con-
suming in a Yorkshire grown preternaturally cold. This dominating
image of the consuming cold, of the failed fire and the failure of com-
munity, is a nightmarish idea of the north cognate with the Canadian
imagination of the ice vampire, the Wendigo, and (in Tove Jansson’s
narratives) the figure of the Groke, embodiment of isolation, selfish-
ness, cold. Having consumed its substance in the fire, the community
in Armitage’s poem returns to their freezing dwellings, not as mem-
bers of a community, but as lost individuals returning

to houses that are empty, frozen, stone

to rooms that are skeletal, stripped, unmade,
uncurtained windows, doorways open wide . . . 114

Few poets have the courage to write about their native place as
persistently as Armitage does. The whole of CloudCuckoo Land is
about Marsden.115 ‘The Two of Us’ in The Dead Sea Poems is a (bitter)
variation on verses by Samuel Laycock, the nineteenth-century
Marsden poet; at the end of All Points North, the patrol of stars circle
above Marsden, first in a winter nocturne –

I think of Venus, star of the dawn

and dusk, plotting its phases and shifts116

– then in a litany of polar animals for the cold constellation

of Ursa Minor,
arctic skua, arctic hare, arctic fox, polar bear.117

And Armitage’s commissioned millennial poem Killing Time, after

holding off for almost 1,000 lines, cannot but end on his own private
north:

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 And finally, last week in a West Yorkshire village
nothing happened at all.
An incident room is being set up at the scene,
and security cameras installed118

Glyn Maxwell, Armitage’s companion in Iceland and Brazil,

affirmed that the divisions between north and south in England
had been returned to the polarizations of the 1930s by the Thatcher
governments, and that the poetic impetus of the New Generation
poets of the 1980s was essentially northern, therefore embattled. A
Bloodaxe (note the publishing house’s name) party to celebrate its
anniversary turned inexcitably to an expression of opposition to
the south. The exception in the room was Maxwell himself (‘a pale
Oxford graduate from leafy Hertfordshire’), the one on the wrong
side of ‘a very English crevasse which had opened up in the room’.
Which leads him to consider the division:

Of the countless bisections striating the old country, this is one of

the deepest, echoing not only age-old tribal enmity but also linguis-
tic intrusion, economic resentment and folk mythology . . . there
endures in English culture an instinctive association of northerness
with grit, dearth, provincialism and tradition, and of southerness
with slickness, privilege, control and newfangledness.119

This subscribes to the idea of the north as the site of authenticity;

it picks up the tropes of dearth and pastness familiar from the
1930s, from the cinema of the 1960s and ’70s. It is the context of
these reminiscences that is remarkable: this is how Maxwell
begins a review of a new version of the medieval poem of a north-
ern journey, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Maxwell is jokingly
seeing himself as Gawain, the traveller from the courts of the
south among the outlandish knights of the north, with Armitage,
the northern champion himself, presumably in the role of the
Green Knight.
Gawain has been a crucial text in imagining the north for gener-
ation after generation of English-speaking readers. Until very
recently it was a text hard for any student of English literature to
avoid. Yet the response to what was usually an enforced reading was
often a sense of personal discovery – many students forced by the
syllabus to read the alliterative poem with its hard dialect found that

217
it had told them a truth about England, about north and south. More
than that, it offered an imagination of north that compelled assent.
The winter journey in book Two of Gawain becomes a touchstone for
all solitary journeys northwards. It offers an idea of all journeys that
abandon the known for wilder land – journeys into regions of
adverse weather and fears embodied as monsters, through snow
and the icicle-covered rocks, and, finally, to the castle in the wilds
with its half-earthly shape-shifting lord.
The original intention of the anonymous Gawain poet (identified
unequivocally as a northerner by his English dialect) may have been
comic, a northern joke at the expense of the frightened south. The
winter journey has too many wonders and monsters: it is a northern
imagination of how a southerner imagines the north.

Sumwhyle wyth wormez he werrez, and with wolves als

Sumwhyle with wodwos that woned in the knarrez . . .
. . . he sleped in his yrnes
Mo nyztez then innoghe in naked rokkez,
Ther as claterande fro the crest the colde borne rennez,
And henged heze ouer his hede in hard iisse-ikkles.120

Sometimes he fought with dragons, and with wolves also

sometimes with wildmen who lived in the rocks . . .
. . . he slept in his armour
night after night among naked rocks,
where the cold burn came crashing down from the cliff-top,
and hung above his head in hard icicles.

Gawain’s second journey is within the north as he goes forth from

the shape shifter’s castle to meet the Green Knight, to pay his forfeit
of blow for blow – again the northern landscape is apprehended
through the fears of the southerner:

Mist muged on the mor, malt on the mountez,

Vch hille hade a hatte, a mist-hakel huge.
Brokez byled and breke bi bonkkez aboute,
Schyre schaterande on schorez, ther thay doun schowued . . .
Thay were on a hille ful hyze,
The quyte snaw lay bisyde.121

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 Mist drizzled over the moor, melted on mountain tops
every hill wore a hat, a huge cape of mist.
Brooks boiled and foamed on the hillsides around,
dashing white against their banks . . .
They were high on a hill,
with white snow around them.

Again it is too much: the terribilità of the territory north of the Wirral
(north Lancashire, or the Lakes, or even Galloway) is described as
perceived by the frightened Gawain, rather than as it is. The hatted
hills suggest that the Gawain poet may be playing deliberately with
the grotesque, looking to draw a laugh from his northern auditory.
The end of the story, Gawain’s getting off lightly with a flesh
wound to remind him to be more scrupulous in future, offers one
extraordinary moment, an impresa of the north, where Gawain sees
his blood on the snow in the clearing by the barrow,

The schene blod ouer his schulderes schot to the erthe.

And quen the burne sez the blode blenk on the snawe,
He sprit forth . . .122

The blood spurted over his shoulders to the earth

And when the knight saw his blood bright on the snow, he sprang
forward . . .

A few drops of blood seem a small, symbolic sacrifice to the winter

and the holly trees and the outlandish knight and all the uncontain-
able strangeness of the north: to Gawain it is very different. He is
humiliated; he has failed; he has broken the rules. In terms of the
code by which he lives, he would rather be dead. And the Green
Knight laughs. Gawain is not consoled by explanations or by an invi-
tation to return to the castle. He goes south to confess his failure. The
north has beaten him.
The Gawain poet sets his otherworld of the Green Chapel and the
shape shifter’s castle in territory identified only as lying beyond the
Wirral. It is possible that he might mean Galloway, but it is more
likely that he is thinking of northern Lancashire or Cumbria, regions
of England that, despite mass tourism to the Lakes, remain relatively
isolated, relatively poor. In the north-west of England, to cross the
Pennines from east to west is to enter (usually through gates of

219
smoky rain) quietly archaic, secretive territories. Even more than
rural Yorkshire, rural Lancashire is forgotten on most mental maps
of Britain. Lancashire signifies only the cotton towns, the splendours
and miseries of Manchester and Liverpool, the vernacular pleasures
of Blackpool. But northern Lancashire is a place shaped and formed
by its distance from the centres of power, its distance from ecclesias-
tical or governmental centres of control. The only analogues in
Britain are northern Northumberland and Aberdeenshire, also
places where the thinning of the density of population can be seen
from the merest glance at the map.
The contemporary poet David Morley, born in northern Lancashire,
writes of the hinterland to the coast of resorts as defined by its
unknowness, its unknowability:

Spindrift across Stalmine, a place you wouldn’t know.

Reedbeds, gyp sites; flat Lancashire’s Orinoco . . .
That b-road where Lancashire discharges its spoil

Split mattresses. Paint tins. Grim stuff in carriers.

The sign No Dumping No Travellers.123

This is one kind of secretive landscape, the landscape of exigency, of

keeping out of sight.
The history of the north-west has forced a covert life on many of
its inhabitants over the centuries. The main way in which northern
Lancashire has resisted change is in religion: a substantial minority
of the Lancastrian elite and their dependents remained Roman
Catholic (at whatever cost) when the rest of England became bel-
ligerently Protestant, and this affected every aspect of life. The
region was removed even further from spheres of metropolitan
influence by the legal disabilities that kept the Catholic gentry out of
the army, civil service and Parliament – the same applies to tracts of
Cumberland and Northumberland. Conventional educations, gram-
mar schools and universities were closed to Lancastrian recusants
until the nineteenth century. Three centuries on the margins pro-
duced an intense Englishness, ready to assert its authenticity in the
refusal to comply with metropolitan innovation. In 1674 two sisters
of the Dalton family placed their defiant inscription on the wall of
Aldcliffe Hall by Lancaster:

220
 Catholicae Virgines sumus
Mutare vel tempore spernimus.124

We are Catholic Virgins and scorn to change with the times.

Traces of this history are visible today: the deep hedges and
sparse signposts in the Forest of Bowland, still a secretive landscape,
a landscape of internal exile. The shadowy graveyards have cruci-
fixes on the graves. Plain-headed Georgian chapels and chapel
houses stand isolated in deep fields, down deep lanes. The treasury
at Stonyhurst is full of the wonders accumulated in the years of exile,
paintings, metalwork and needlework, all belonging to that other
history of England that happened in Douai, Valladolid and Rome.
Amidst the fields, under the gentle, unremitting rain, is a
secluded, handsome farmhouse on which the owner, Robert Alston,
paid his stonemason to cut a frieze of what he thought the important
dates in the history of England, seen from the perspective of the year
1582. It is an extraordinary conceit, a location of self in time and
space, running from the Creation of the World to the accession of
Elizabeth i. What is important here is omission: there is no mention of
Henry viii, no mention of the Reformation, although all other dates
significant in English history are inscribed, deeply cut for durability.
The Alston family were locating themselves as inheritors of the his-
tory of England, ignoring the religious changes of their century.
Elsewhere in the house there are date stones, crosses, sacred mono-
grams. It is a remarkable place, at once solid and distant, sharing its
feeling of reclusion with the early modern gardens at Levens Hall,
with defiant, allusive inscriptions on tower houses near Penrith.
Driving down into Burnley from Colne and the east, again the
gateway into Lancashire is between driven pillars of obliterating
rain. There is a real sense of edges and discontinuities. Burnley is the
last town in the industrial conurbation: on one side it is continuous
with the urban valley, but it is brought to an abrupt stop by the rise
of the ground to the fells. Town and country meet at the park of
Towneley Hall, its grounds now laid out in football pitches. This
grouping of Hall, park, sports fields, fells and stadium, its flood-
lights cutting the long dusk, is unique, one of the strongest places in
northern England. For all that it is run as a cheerfully inclusive
museum, there is a sense of dignified sadness to Towneley Hall,
partly accruing from its backwater and recusant history, partly the

221
result of the casual perfection of its modern context. The view to the
front of the house is moving northern pastoral, interpenetration of
country and town. The avenues in front of the house frame gleaming
football fields, factory chimneys, neat brick terraces. The stone of the
house has taken on depths of black and grey twilight. Great flag-
stones glimmer on the terrace. Huge trees mutter and the shouting
carries across the fields.
Inside, looking from the drawing room to the trees behind the
house, as the light begins to go, there is no trace of the town at all. In
the preterite light, between the Victorian statues, between the tall
Chinese vases, the windows give onto woods and a waterfall,
vapour from the water rising into the humid twilight. It must be a
planned view of the nineteenth century, a living re-creation of
melancholy painted evenings, born of limitless, undirected Victorian
nostalgia. It is perfect in its kind. Yet from the front windows the
town is solidly present: Sunday footballers walking away, knots of
bright shirts under dim trees, lights coming on in the streets and the
first lit windows showing in the houses, refracted in the smears of
rain on the Hall windows.
At Chorley, Astley Hall also sits beautifully in a park at the edge
of the town. The front of the house is austere, with two great bay
windows running its full height, not quite symmetrical, rendered,
unornamented. This fugal geometry is so hard, so proto-modernist,
as to draw from Nikolaus Pevsner one of the rare surges of adrenalin
in all his weary English journeys:

As you arrive in front of the house after the long walk through the
park, it hits you hard and squarely. There are nothing but right
angles, and the grid of mullions and transoms dominates to an
extreme degree over the solids of the walls. Few houses of the
1930s would have gone as far as Astley Hall in the glazing of a
façade . . . cemented as it now is, the whole display has something
ruthless and even grim.125

It is an intensely northern house, an anticipation of the castles and

towers of Scotland and Scandinavia. The outward austerity is bal-
anced by exuberance within. Fat recusant cherubs inhabit the extra-
ordinary plasterwork, enjoying themselves enormously. The ceilings
and friezes are so thick, so deep that some of the plasterwork has to
be faked with leather and lead lime-washed white. This depth of

222
undercutting is planned to tell in the dimmest of rainy lights all
winter long, or to be seen with snow light striking upwards onto it.
Again Pevsner is moved to enthusiasm:

The impact of the interior is no less forceful than that of the

façade. The great hall has a large fireplace with a big overmantel
and a stucco ceiling, exceedingly rich, exceedingly skilfully done,
but again barbaric in its very excesses . . . The ceiling is divided by
beams, and in the panels are wreaths with flowers or cherubs. The
undercutting is breathtaking, perhaps even more in the adjoining
low drawing room.126

In that room the ceiling is all but physically oppressive in the low,
dark-panelled space, with its three-dimensional angels diving in
and out of wreaths of apples and f1 artichokes. In moving firelight
or candlelight the effect must have been all the more tremendous,
especially if a draught from the windows set the hanging figures
into restricted motion. There is little to compare with this work in
Britain (although there is a breathtaking if more mainstream stuc-
coed interior, the Music Room – Muses’ Room? – marooned in cen-
tral Lancaster): Astley’s confident, rough Baroque is in part a
product of remoteness and of lines of communication that bypass
the metropolis.
Preston is the last industrial town to the north, a place with the
feeling of a regional capital. An agreeable small city, visibly an old
settlement, its earlier buildings not obliterated by industrial devel-
opment in the nineteenth century. Its sense of being specific to north
Lancashire comes from the town badge everywhere – on lamp-posts,
public buildings, on the Preston North End football shirts. The
badge is the lamb and flag, the Agnus Dei, an illegal emblem for
much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This sense of a
city set apart by a divergent religious history is sustained by the
huge, vigorous churches dominating the inner suburbs. These are so
large, so confidently placed, that they give Preston the feeling of a
German or Netherlandish town by their scale alone. It could be an
industrial town in northern Europe – the borders of France and
Belgium – but for the splendid, abraded Georgian square behind
Fishergate, with its surprise of scale and its sloping lawns, which are
wholly English. The cobbles gleam in the lanes, granite cart-tracks
shining in the low sun. And as soon as you are clear of the houses to

223
the north-east of the town, the landscape of deep trees and reticent
manor houses begins again.
That landscape, for all its Englishness, feels like the end of
England as the ambiguous territory of Cumberland approaches. The
place to feel the disjunction is where the road runs out on the lime-
stone pavement at Silverdale, north of manufacturing Lancashire,
north of rural Lancashire, north of the pleasure towns of Blackpool
and Morecombe. The limestone stretches down to the sea; across the
inlets and the bay, the southernmost hills of the Lake District are just
visible, misted in soft rain. They look further off than they are, the
beginning of another territory, the south of a receding north.
County identity is elided by the Lakes: the ‘Lake District’ is a part
of the generalized rurality of tourism. But these hills across the bay
are the first hints of a Hyperborean elsewhere, a new territory after
that industrial north which (in most southern perceptions) stretches
as far as the border. The landscape that unifies the region is uni-
formly northern: bare summits, shelving valleys with the smooth
land of cultivation stretching only a little way up the slopes from the
valley bottoms. Stone walls dominate and frame the low ground
around the water.
Cumbria has begun to experiment with a Celtic image, histori-
cally logical, reviving the ancient kingdom name of Rheged. Which
gives its name to a complex of visitor centre and service station
whose architecture (allusive to the brochs, the primitive fortresses of
the northern islands) replaces the familiar presentation of the Lakes
with a new construct, articulated as the southernmost point of a con-
tinuum that stretches far into the north. Certainly Cumberland has
been as much Scots as English in the past, at one point thoroughly
Viking, as well as at times simply a lawless ambiguity. Simon
Armitage’s definition of the English north assumes simply that the
Lake District is Scotland. The plain to the north of the Lakes lies wide
open to the Solway and Scotland, with none of the upland barriers of
the eastern borders. This ambiguity is caught by the contemporary
Cumbrian novelist John Murray, who says of his protagonist:

Beatty was a Cumbrian, which means he was neither really Scots

nor really English . . . he was from the moon or Ujjain or from the
Haugh of Urr as much as from Cumbria, the ghost county, the lost
quantity, the dystopic utopia. And he drove like a true Cumbrian,
on both sides of the road, bollicks to all comers.127

224
 Travelling from Cumbria to Durham, as soon as you turn to the
east, the northernmost Pennines stand up as a black rampart, but
after coming into the steep valleys by high, rain-glimmering roads,
the land turns green again below the cotton grass and darkness of
the moors. On the uplands are the gritstone chimneys and aban-
doned shafts of the lead mines whose washing floors and water-
wheels lie beside the thin streams. Stone portals in the hillsides
guard the entrances to the mines. It is the landscape of Auden’s
heart: relics of industry in remotest country. The autumns of England
begin here: at the head of Weardale on a still September morning, the
hills still bright with bracken under a clear sky, there is a distillation
of cold in the air, air flowing over the skin like water.
As the dale falls towards Durham, it broadens and fills with brick
and darkened stone terraces. The industries that sustained them are
as much a part of the past as the innocence of Thomas Bewick’s
engravings, as the verses on Sunderland china. They are as lost as
the rural Tyne valley of Bewick’s childhood, the fast beck between
pale-barked geans behind his house at Cherryburn. They are as gone
as Bewick’s

Fine greensward or pastureage, broken or divided . . . with clumps

of blossomed Whins, Fox-Glove, Fern & some Junipers & to the west-
ward with hether in profusion enough to scent the Whole Air.128

They are gone like the rants and ballads that Bewick whistled: tunes
whose names dignify the hardest work: The Bonny Pit Laddie, The
Brave Ploughing Boy, The Miner’s Garland.
Durham City is not only islanded in the Wear, but is itself an
island – a medieval and Georgian county town with miles of work-
ing villages and pit towns on every side. It is a place of dignity and
stark beauty, but mired in sadness, weighed down by missed
chances civic and academic, by the automatic nostalgia generated by
the wooded canyon of the river Wear, the bulk of the cathedral and
the lights of the Cathedral Close. The night view from South Street
across to the cathedral is Victorian in yearning, a nineteenth-century
imagination of a clerical ideal city. Time is passing; the Wear is flow-
ing, moving the present away from the friendly past. The lit Gothic
windows across such a gulf of darkness, trees and water seem hardly
to be shining from the same century: they seem oil lamps and gas
mantles in studies heated with coal fires. Time to draw the curtains,

225
time to shut out the view of the cathedral, to shut out the past before
it infects the present and renders it unendurable.
F. L. Griggs (1876–1938) etched an imaginary Gothic citadel in snow
that bears only a topographical relation to Durham (every architectural
element is different, the cliff-top site is the same) and yet is a portrait of
Durham as it could have been. This plate, The Almonry, made in
1925–6, is haunting for its winteriness, its precise depiction of frosty air,
and for its invention of a place out of the essence of several remem-
bered places.129 It is haunting too for its renderings of the textures of
snow and dark stone, its suggestion of tremendous medieval struc-
tures buttressed and jettied on a cliffside site falling sharply away. Fine
pencillings of rime dust bare branches; the cathedral is bright in misty
sunlight. The period implied by the figures would seem to be the ear-
lier sixteenth century, and this print is part of a whole series of imagi-
nary late medieval compositions etched by Griggs. These works carry
such titles as Anglia perdita – the England we have lost, England that
has lost its way – or defiant inscriptions recording the fine things that
have been swept away by history. One commentator on The Almonry
asserts that it must show the great imaginary minster and its commu-
nity on the verge of catastrophe, imagining that the carol that the
‘waits’ (town musicians) are playing could take on ‘an anxiously
prophetic air’ as if in anticipation of disaster to come. The etching
expresses a powerful idea of the north idealized: the winter citadel.130
The nostalgias of the Newcastle-based poet Sean O’Brien are
clean and unequivocal. He is nostalgic for a north of England where
things worked and where there was work, and his poetry is also
steadily directed towards far imaginations of north – Arctic voyages,
icebreakers, the wintry Europe of war films. At the end of all his
aspirations – further and further north – is the quintessence of the
winter city, a very distant place, which manifests itself briefly as it
snows on Newcastle, Dundee or Hull:

. . . the snow and that white, other city

I can’t recall leaving, or ever re-enter.131

O’Brien is the poet of at least two norths, two ideas of north:

northern England and a distilled, poetic, absolute north appre-
hended in hints and glimpses. He is also a hero of this book in that
he has a more sustained interest in place, particularly northern
place, than any other poet currently writing in English. Almost all of

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F. L. Griggs, The Almonry, 1925–6, etching.

his poems are responses to place, re-creations of place, not just the
norths surveyed here, but also waste grounds, provincial libraries,
bus stations, the townscapes of afternoon drinking, Audenesque
bars where you wait for the boat to sail. One strand of his work is
paramount here: he has a more clearly formulated idea of north than

227
any other living writer in English, but it does not imply that north-
ness is by any means his only subject.
In his terse exposition of his needs and sources as a poet he quotes
the estate agent’s cliché – ‘Location. Location. Location’.132 – on a line
by itself to affirm the supreme importance of place to his work:

I want to write poems which are places, in which paraphrasable

meaning has been drawn back into place itself, so that the reading
of the poem resembles inhabiting or at any rate contemplating the
place. The original landscapes of my life – Anlaby Road, Hull, in
the mid 50s; the flat behind the butcher’s shop, with its garden of
lilacs; Salisbury Street, with its vast, lost orchard; the tenfoots
between the avenues; the riverwide greenmantled drains . . . these
are not something to use but to enter, though I don’t know why.
They are sufficient . . .
It would also contain railway arches, viaducts, junctions, cut-
tings, dead stations, torn-up lines, dockside buffers, lock-gates,
estuaries, the Ouseburn, statues of De La Pole and Collingwood,
lighthouses, sea-lanes, ice-bergs, places which exist only as num-
bers on an Admiralty chart.133

This list, moving northward from railway arches to sea lanes and ice-
bergs, is close to a list of the subjects chosen by Ravilious in the last
years of his life. O’Brien’s affinity with Ravilious is unsurprising, as is
his choice of Ravilious for the covers of two of his collections. In
Downriver there is a short poem in memory of Ravilious as honest wit-
ness to a lost, decent England of chalk figures and railways from
which the modern English have been excluded. (O’Brien is very clear
that the majority of English people have been reduced to the status of
exiles in their own country.) He is supremely well placed to see in
Ravilious the quality of reverie about place and the awareness of
the sacredness of the quotidian, both of which are found abundantly
in his own poems. Ravilious’s honouring of a cared-for working
England, as well as his Arctic imaginations (Ravilious’s otherworldly
landscape, Norway 1940, is in the art gallery in Newcastle), make him
the painter whom O’Brien claims, in even worse times, as fellow wit-
ness to what has been and to what could have been.
O’Brien is eminently the poet of the moment of the country
within the northern city. In the statement on his work above, he sin-
gles out a garden and orchard among terraced houses in Hull as his

228
sacred place. His recollection of the north of his childhood is focused
on the numinous: the points where parks and the scraps of country
left in the city could open out in the mind to

Industrial pastoral, our circuit

Of grass under ash . . . Our place
Of in-betweens, abandoned viaducts . . .
birdsong scratching at the soot
Of the last century.134

The litanies of the lost places, deserted places, in-between and

discarded topographies in ‘To the Unknown God of Hull and
Holderness’ is a catalogue of the real, of the unvisited north of
England as it exists in his memory.135 It is as much affectionate as it is
regretful, an assertion that discarded things matter. This is central to
O’Brien’s north, the acceptance of grimness, celebration of the land-
scape of those who have been pushed to the margins. in ‘this funeral,
lost August’,136 and yet there is always a balancing appreciation of
the accidental beauties of the north, whatever has been done to it:

The fog burns off: I see the birth of stars

Out in the blue as evening’s lamps come on
The coal-smoke glides like rivers into heaven137

And the north’s potential for transformation, with the coming of the
snow and the hinted manifestation of the Arctic otherworld, changes
the post-industrial incoherence –

the north in its drizzle,

Its vanished smoke, exploded chimneys138

– at the moment when the snow comes out of the north:

the minute at nightfall

When rain turns to snow and is winter.

This moment of the arrival of the snow, of hearing the noises of

shipping from the Humber or the Tyne, balances on the line between
the real and imaginary norths. The process of moving from Hull into
the imagination of ultimate north is traced precisely: the snow falls

229
on the City, he imagines leaving the City by sea, and begins to dream
the names of Hyperborean places, far destinations. The poem is
called ‘Coming Home’ – he often associates these hyperborean other-
worlds with a metaphoric homecoming:

Then there are white shores receding

And gone, with the last light still ghosting the eye
As the snow comes again, and the complement
Enters the atlas you gave me, a place
Made of names which are cold and exciting to say
In the intimate arctic of almost-sleep.139

There is one more imagination of the north that is equally impor-

tant to this poetry: a frozen secondary world, a wintry Europe of
heavily guarded frontiers and warring totalitarian states. This is
partly an imagination fed by the cinema, a world from black-and-
white films, a world garnered from hints in Isherwood and Auden,
recollections of the war. Time is imprecise in this world of minute
details: it is the past ‘one unspecified year’, and a motorcyclist, an
undercover agent, ‘Captain January’, is riding the icy roads, even
though ‘those who might liberate do not exist’. It is partly an imagi-
nation of nightmare, the poet himself as the frightened citizen of the
city where ‘snow is hard-packed on the cobbles’, in a comfortless
apartment where ‘the water has set in the bowls / And the towels
have stiffened beside them’,140 and no one can trust their lover not to
betray them. The landscape outside the city is accumulated with
absolute precision, in its itemization of frozen marshes and ice-
bound farms.
This malign Mitteleuropa is the antithesis of O’Brien’s other snow-
bound city, a place of removed felicity, a place to which you come
home out of the north of England that has been despoiled. Again the
entry to the true north is the moment of snow at nightfall and its
noise is the sound of ships from the river. This time it recalls the
distant ports that were trading partners in the days of prosperity:

In late afternoon, when the snow began,

The sirens of craft on the river,
Bound outwards from elsewhere to elsewhere,
Reminded the city of sailings –
North Cape, the Baltic forests, Arkangelsk.141

230
The northern England on which the snow falls is lost and abraded,
one of O’Brien’s most carefully realized townscapes of desolation,
workless, with empty harbours, unvisited museums of the days of
prosperity, a place of unemployment, a place that has lost meaning
with the deaths of harbours and railways. But in a last rush of
energy, a fantasy of escape, O’Brien imagines a mass emigration of
those exiled in their own country, heading for his true north, for a
just city which is not yet on any map,

Then I wished the whole place would embark . . .

Singing Sod you old England, we’re leaving
For work, heading out on a snow-boat
To sail off the compass for home.

Home is to be found somewhere in the absolute imagination of that

north to which O’Brien is endlessly faithful. ‘. . . I’ll wait / With the
snow and the sirens, as long as it takes.’142
Whatever the maps say, it is hard to fix the northernmost frontier
of England: is it the star castle of Berwick, the Roman wall, the
Tweed water, the marshes of the Solway? All of these can be used
imaginatively to make a border. (It is a recreation of educated Scots
to stand on the wall at Housesteads and debate on which side of it
they belong: north by birth, or south by their stake in the Latinate
heritage of the west?) The border is shifting, resistant to being tied to
a fixed line: historically, the frontier has shifted up and down the
lawless cordon sanitaire administered by the sanguinary Armstrongs,
Bells and Grahams. Even now the miles of empty land on the eastern
border are silent witnesses to past violence.
The village of Bewcastle feels like the last of England. It lies in the
border hills, north of the wall, near the junction of Cumbria,
Northumberland and southernmost Scotland. It is impossibly alone,
remote in the way that a Finnmark settlement can be remote. By the
time that the road arrives at the village it has dwindled: passing
through the farmyards rather than skirting them. It lies on the
cobweb of secretive tracks, scratches on the map, laying across the
border. Just south of Bewcastle a blocky castle-farmhouse by the
road is a reminder of isolation and lawlessness. There are ruins of
four other peel-towers within a few miles. There are a few houses
and a church around a vast green with rough grass, grass that is
almost continuous with the surrounding fell. There are no windows

231
on the north side of the church: partly a precaution against the
weather, partly a shutting-out of the evils that come from the north.
In the graveyard, shouldered by Victorian headstones, is the slen-
der shaft of the Bewcastle Cross.143 It stands, a miracle, as it has stood
since the late seventh century, to mark the grave of King Alcfrith, son
of Oswi. The cross-head has gone, but the runic inscription is still
(just) legible, the panels of Christ treading the beasts, of St John and of
the Agnus Dei, the checkerwork and the vine scrolls all survive in
remarkable order, having defied the northern weather for 1,300 years.
The point of the Bewcastle Cross within any idea of the English north
is the absolute, internationalist sophistication of its iconography and
execution: the vine scrolls are eastern Mediterranean in inspiration;
the panel of Christ is derived, via Ireland, from Coptic sources. This is
as sophisticated an artefact as the England of the late seventh century
was capable of producing: it has details consonant with the sculpture
of contemporary Rome. It forces a reconsideration of the whole ques-
tion of centre and periphery, standing as it now does in a hamlet at the
very edge of England where to go further north you would have to
walk to reach Scotland. By drove roads, moss-troopers’ tracks, memo-
rized secret paths to the frontier.
Patrick Keiller’s film of 1997, Robinson in Space, ends on this
northern border, his pair of investigators of ‘the problem of England’
are dismissed from their investigations just as they approach
Scotland.144 Their contracts have been terminated. They are being
punished for having come too close to solving the problem that they
have been set. Real footage of Hadrian’s Wall is impossible since
parts of the wall itself have been placed off-limits to photographers
by the National Trust, so instead they have to show a phone-card
image of the wall, branded with the red logo of English Heritage.
But at this point the film moves into its own northern otherworld
with sparse music and images of prehistoric rock-scribings, cup and
ring markings, the spirals and unicursal mazes that were cut on nat-
urally occurring flat stones around the English–Scottish border.
Keiller’s commentary observes that these markings relate to ‘entopic
forms characteristic of the early stages of trance experience’. The
final words of the commentary are: ‘I cannot tell you where
Robinson finally found his utopia.’ The image over which they are
spoken, an image that is held for a long time as music fades up to
end the film, is of the bridges of Newcastle with traffic passing
across them. Like Humphrey Spender’s image of the same place, the

232
bridges are isolated by the angle at which they are shot and by the
evening light. Neither urban decline nor urban development can be
seen (far less the maculate townscape of ‘urban regeneration’), only
the sheer scale of nineteenth-century engineering, still in use, a bal-
ance of pastness with activity.

ii

From the south, Scotland is inevitably hyperborean, lying beyond

the imaginative (industrial English) north, beyond the debatable
lands of the Lakes. There are multiple frontiers: the Solway, the
Tweed, the North Pennines, the high moors around Otterburn. The
border crossing emphasizes distance. Mile upon mile of sparsely set-
tled upland divides the valley of Hadrian’s Wall from the southern-
most Scottish towns. This is a landscape formed by (indeed, emptied
by) lawlessness and remoteness. All place names here are also the
names of battles. The border was barely settled, because cross-
border raids rendered it not worth settling. Only near the coast is the
descent into the valley of the Tweed a descent into old cultivated
land. On the west side is the misty flood-plain of the Solway,
sparsely populated, and for the same reasons. The western motor-
way runs into bare lead-seamed hills between the border and the
Clyde valley: empty, inhospitable terrain.
Scotland seen from the south is a place of dearth: a mean, negligi-
ble land. This is a necessary mythology from the early seventeenth-
century Union of the Crowns onwards. In all places that define
themselves as a ‘south’, there is a need to believe that whatever lies
to the north is the place of hunger and savage weather, so that the
‘south’ can congratulate itself on its relative ease and prosperity. This
mythology was built on periods of famine and financial instability in
the early eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries. It was supported
by the apparent lack of Scottish cultural production in any sphere
outside architecture and the visual arts (this lack is being proved to
be more and more delusive) and by the institutionalized philistinism
of Calvinist theocracy. The unchanging Scottish reluctance to be
assimilated into the southern kingdom has supported the develop-
ment of these myths of poverty.
But in turn the Lowland Scots have thought of the Highlands as
the place of dearth, and the Highlanders as treacherous savages,
herders not farmers, dangerous anachronisms. In the early nine-

233
teenth century, Sir Walter Scott was certain that the antiquated life of
the Highlands had reached its natural end with the decline that fol-
lowed the Jacobite revolutions. The equally Jacobite and dissident
north-east of Scotland, seen from the Lowlands, was far away and
austere, less foreign in language than the Western Highlands, but
still an outward-facing outpost of the kingdom of winter. In Britain,
only Scotland has an insulting and dismissive word – teuchtar –
equivalent to the Italian terrone (earth-man, peasant) to describe the
inhabitants of the rural north, a word that is both a geographical
descriptor and an indicator of backwardness, disorder and laziness.
Scottish modes of writing about Scotland (often anger and lamen-
tation) have gone far to support the myth of dearth, the idea of an
impoverished north, as in the much-quoted lines of Edwin Muir,
who wrote of the Scots of the mid-twentieth century:

. . . that do not know

Whence they come or where they go
And are content
With their poor frozen life and shallow banishment.145

In the late twentieth century, Irvine Welsh’s fictions of urban des-

peration, reflecting the very real troubles inflicted on Edinburgh by
appalling mid-twentieth-century city planning, were accepted as rep-
resentative of the condition of Lowland Scotland as a whole. The
preservation of the illusion that Edinburgh is a compact medieval and
eighteenth-century city, with its historic centre still elegantly residen-
tial, was achieved only at the incalculable cost of destructive clearance
and re-settlement. The eagerness with which London believed Welsh
to be a true witness to the state of contemporary Scotland is itself an
index of the uncertainties of the England of the 1980s and ’90s, the
need to believe in the kingdom of dearth to the north.
‘North’ and ‘deprivation’ are shifting and unstable descriptors.
There is a Scottish tradition of seeing Fife and the Lothians as ‘south-
ern’: they are described by poets and topographers from the eigh-
teenth century onwards as fruitful, open to the sun, clement as the
territories of antique pastoral. Here were built the first Renaissance
country houses of Scotland. In the eighteenth century the philoso-
pher-landowners built themselves houses in imitation of the classi-
cal architecture of the Netherlands, set a model of a prehistoric
fortress over the entrance to a stable block in the passionate delusion

234
that it was the model of a Roman temple, proving the Romanitas of
Scotland. They saw their fields of oats and barley as continuous with
the Virgilian pastorals, part of the ancient world. They were united
by a belief that Hadrian’s Wall (the visible witness to the barbarian
status, the outsideness of ancient Scotland) was medieval, was unim-
portant, simply was not there.
Small towns by rivers spread through the fertile Lothians: until
the twentieth century most of them had their tall seventeenth-century
buildings, towering like the Lands in the Old Town of Edinburgh.
The suburbs of Edinburgh now wash along both shores of the Forth,
but what they have reached out to engulf includes the first early
modern country houses, small whitewashed castles at first glance,
but built in the first cautious imitation of the Italians or ancient
Romans. Houses that once stood isolated on the wide slopes, their
views and avenues aligned on the Bass Rock or on the hills to the
north. Pleasure houses, in a southern mode. Villas set in an extensive
river landscape.
One of the earliest of these, Northfield, now stands, its high-
walled garden intact, but with its corner turret now overlooking
rows of white-rendered public housing, panel-fenced back gardens,
scuffed football fields. The doorway with its broken pediment looks
unremarkable now, but, in the earliest seventeenth century, it was a
first attempt to echo the glories of the ancients. The crab-apple trees
in the walled garden are white and enormous like ghosts. In April,
the evening light begins to draw out. Seen from the garden at dusk,
lime-white gables and dormers glimmer high above; tall, curtain-
less windows on the first floor frame rooms like Netherlandish
paintings. Lamplight strikes up to Renaissance painted ceilings –
deepening their stylized garlands of fruit and flowers with the
shadows of the beams –a tentative version of the distant splendours
of the Romans. The flattened garlands on the planks between these
beams are the laurels of antiquity translated to adorn this first
south-facing villa in a country of introverted fortresses. The
arabesques on the sides of the beams are very like the printers’
flowers of Plantijn or Elzevir: ornaments in the pocket books that
Scottish students brought back from Paris and Leiden. The panelled
walls are painted in vivid eighteenth-century colours below the
Renaissance darkness of the ceilings: milk-yellow, broken white,
clear green. Gilded frames and shelves reflect the fading light on the
shadow side of the rooms.

235
 Candlelight in the high panelled room seems intolerably dim at
first, but the eye adapts quickly to moving, nuanced light. Four
flames from the slim silver candlesticks on the mantelpiece, four
candles in crystal sconces. The flowering trees outside in the walled
garden grow immense, fill the windows, their presence stronger as
the daylight fades. The trees have come into their power, their white-
ness invading the room. They fade as the light goes and candlelight
grows brighter, splashing jets of coloured light out of the prisms
across the panelling. Firelight refracts through the claret in the glass.
The bedrooms are warmed only by the reds and ochres of the
painted beams overhead. These rooms are full and empty at the same
time like all rich spaces: yet this richness is only an idea of antiquity, a
few weeks of a painter’s time in the 1600s, cheap pigments of lamp-
black and red oxide. The room is too full for sleep to come easily, the
darkness too populous. Outside, streetlights of the outer suburbs,
cars and trains passing on the main routes north and south.
On the north side of the Forth, modest almost-fortified houses of
this kind stand amid hedged fields running down to the shore,
where the white sea-towns are folded into the breaks in the cliffs,
embracing the natural harbours. They have their high streets still of
tall seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses in the upper
towns, Dutch tiled and with Dutch-built town houses; steep, intri-
cate lanes and back ways thread between the garden walls, leading
to the lower towns with their harbours. There are still a few inshore
fishing boats with names as innocent as the verses on Sunderland
china: The Daystar, The Provider, The Little Secret. At the head of the
Firth, upriver of the great rail bridge that articulates the crossing
into wild land in the thriller films of the 1930s, is the most complete
of these burghs, Culross, preserved in almost its seventeenth-cen-
tury state by centuries of poverty, failure of mines and local indus-
tries, depopulation.146 It is inturned, high-walled with a surprising
number of castellated houses in its narrow streets. The streets are
paved with broad cobble, opening into a little central square with
its Market Cross, the shaft crowned with the thin unicorn of
Scotland, its nostrils flaring in the frosty air. By the silted harbour, in
the street called the Sandhaven, is the Palace of Bruce of Carnock,
tall blocks around a courtyard, with many painted rooms inside:
patterns in red and black, abstract as star charts, and one room
painted with emblems from an illustrated book published at
Leiden. This is an extraordinary room for a merchant prince to have

236
chosen for himself: the whole cove of the ceiling is covered with
warnings in images and verses, warnings of the uncertainty of for-
tune, the brevity of life, the imminence of the end of things.
On midsummer night almost the whole landscape of pastoral
Scotland can be seen looking southward across the Forth from the
Law, the little hill behind Kellie Castle. The castle garden is crossed
on cut stone paths flush with the shaved grass between the borders
in their brief summer depth of Celestial roses, white Lothian stocks,
Cockenzie pinks, weavers’ pinks from Paisley. The way out into the
trees and up onto the hill is by the recalcitrant, seldom-used back
gate, beside Robert Lorimer’s stone garden house. Gentle dun slopes
with a midsummer scatter of umbelliferous flowers. On the tussocky
plain of the summit, under the hourless light, brightness lingers on
the northern horizon in a false, unwavering dawn.
Civil Scotland, the Scotland that can be described as in its own
terms as a plenteous south, seems for a moment all in view. The castle
with its sculptural, abstract pattern of stair towers lies at the foot of
the hill, the garden walls in a parallelogram to catch every moment of
winter sun, every benign stir of the air. Nearer the Firth are solid
farmhouses, dense trees around the larger Georgian houses with
their terraced gardens. Past the coastal burghs is the stump of the
Bass Rock. Edinburgh registers only as a stir and glimmer in the dis-
tance far to the west. Perthshire and the shadowy rich land under the
mountains are behind and still more westerly. To the left the Firth
broadens to the points with the lighthouses, the unquiet house of
Wormiston in its dark wood guarding the peninsula, the North Sea.147
In the little sitting room in the tower, under the deep-cut plaster
medallions of emperors and heroes, talk goes on as the room fills
with midsummer twilight, so that the mouldings on the panels show
still as wavering bands of light. Mirrors, picture glasses and chande-
liers hold a pencilling of brightness at their edges. The sky outside is
never quite dark; the trees are silhouetted, always with a tinge of
blue behind them. And in the preposterously early dawn, the fields
of green barley stretch to the blinding sea.
One of the starkest differences between England and Scotland is
the absence in Scotland of the village in the English sense. In Scotland
the break between town and country is absolute. Small settlements are
small urban settlements with market crosses and (often) with charters
for markets, urban rules and privileges. The smallest settlement is a
city townscape, on however minute a scale. Terraces of houses with

237
stone-walled gardens behind are set straight onto the pavement with
little space between them. The only houses in a Scottish village that
stand back in their own ground are the Victorian or later villas of the
grain merchant and the doctor, not rural villas, but imitations of the
Victorian suburbs of the cities.
The ancient centres of the cities are similarly huddled and close-
built, the Old Town of Edinburgh being the only one to survive with
something like its original street plan. This Netherlandish or
Scandinavian awareness of the civic fosters public, communal mag-
nificence in the cities themselves. This is distinct from the Victorian
grandeurs of northern England, because it is less the result of individ-
ual acts of philanthropic donation than of a settled civic mentality
reserving exterior distinction for communal and public buildings.
The most visible of these civic initiatives is the New Town of
Edinburgh, the eighteenth-century development for which the elite
abandoned the medieval and Renaissance old town of Edinburgh in a
generation. This attitude to the city is widely visible, as in the great
flights of cut stone steps, with massive cast-iron handrails, on the scale
of Piranesi, that ornament both Glasgow and Edinburgh. This is
public grandeur and solidity beyond anything found in the northern
cities of England. The stone used to be blackened with soot, which
added to the sombre magnificence of the great flights of processional
steps up to the Italianate Crown Terrace in Glasgow, or to the shad-
owed, massive Tuscan columns of St Bernard’s Terrace in Edinburgh.
In both of the Lowland cities the sea feels very near: from any
point of elevation in the Old Town of Edinburgh the view is over the
roofs of the New Town and across the broad Forth to the hills of
western Fife. Western Glasgow is built on hills with an abrupt drop
to the valley of the Clyde below, creating a townscape of vertiginous
streets. The mid-Victorian villas are on the highest slopes of the hill,
and at the bottom are the working streets, the former docks. The vast
ship-owners’ villas of western Glasgow, with their grounds creating
an almost rural townscape of fruit walls and huge trees, look out
directly to where the cranes of the shipyards used to be, to where the
ships sailed out for America.
Glasgow is western and rain-washed, looking in many aspects of
its vernacular speech and culture to Ireland, yet with its own schools
of neo-Greek and Art Nouveau architecture. Its stone buildings are of
sporadic magnificence: scrupulous detailing of tenement buildings in
Greek Revival or Abbotsford Gothic. Again it is the public and coop-

238
erative aspects of these developments that is remarkable: the vast
plinths on which the terraces stand, the sheer weight of the cast clas-
sical ornaments of their railings. In the western part of Glasgow the
vast confidence of these squares, terraces and villas obliterates the
memory of the early Victorian fields below. There are steep lanes
between the ship-owners’ garden walls, cobbled and overhung with
leaves. An eighteenth-century farmhouse is immured by blocks of
red-stone tenements. The orchard wall of a country house is shared
by the back gardens of two handsome classical villas. Panelling in the
drawing room of an 1850s house is reused, perhaps from an earlier
house on the site, or from the best cabins of a ship.
Both Edinburgh and Aberdeen bluff level ground out of their
hilly sites by resting the street level on top of cyclopean bridges and
embankments, creating a whole subterranean townscape of cellars
and passages. The underground world of Edinburgh is a world of
great vaults and arches, streets at the bases of canyons of black
masonry, tenements and bars that never see the sun, even in high
summer. The under-city of Aberdeen can be empty even at noon on a
working day, great tunnels cutting under the terraced streets leading
to the slopes and backlands that stretch down to the docks.
Aberdeen, neither Lowland nor Highland, is a city that is best
seen in bright winter: grey late Georgian streets with the port and
the vast Baltic merchant ships at the bottom of them. The light in the
streets is low all winter, the sun sitting on the horizon, casting spec-
tral lengths of shadow. The noise of gulls is always there. Frost and
coal smoke, frost and peat smoke. In the light of the low sun, it is
hard to tell whether glimmerings in the pavements are ice, ashes or
filaments of mica.
Despite this civic solidity, despite pastoral associations of the
Lowlands, the whole country is sensible of its vulnerability to the
northern weather: east wind in Edinburgh, driving rain in Glasgow,
sea fog and snow in Aberdeen. Even the most settled parts of the
Lowlands are still vulnerable to the sudden descent of the storm: the
inverse of the summer Lothians is described by Robert Louis
Stevenson in The Master of Ballantrae (1889), a history of two eight-
eenth-century brothers, an allegory of a divided country, a country
vulnerable to visitations of arctic weather:

All the 27th that rigorous weather endured: a stifling cold . . . the
wide hearth in the hall piled high with fuel; some of the spring

239
 birds that had already blundered north into our neighbourhood,
besieging the windows of the house or trotting on the frozen turf
like things distracted. About noon there came a blink of sunshine;
showing a very pretty, wintry, frosty landscape of white hills and
woods with Crail’s lugger waiting for a wind under the Craig
head, and the smoke mounting straight into the air from every
farm and cottage. With the coming of night, the haze closed in
overhead; it fell dark and still and starless, and exceeding cold: a
night most unseasonable, fit for strange events.148

This sense of the lurking winter underlies Douglas Dunn’s

Northlight, the collection with which he marked his return to
Scotland in 1988, after half a working life in the north of England. A
sequence of new beginnings: marriage after years as a widower, a
young child, a new job, a new dwelling in the border-post of
Tayport, between the ancient pastoral of East Fife and the nine-
teenth-century complexity of Dundee. And Tayport offers long
views into the Scotland beyond: eastwards out to sea at the mouth
of the estuary, and west up the valley of the Tay into the mountains.
The sense of place is the unifying element in the book: and it is an
index of the inexhaustibility of the theme of north that Dunn makes
a north absolutely of his own. He shares with the poet and novelist
Andrew Greig the sense of the fragility of the northern summer –
the frost giants are biding their time in the hills until they can travel
south on the first chill in the August air. The title itself has diverse
resonances: the light from the north has always been held by
painters to be truthful light, the light to paint by. This has become a
familiar idea: the journey to the north is a journey into austerity and
truth, a journey that leaves illusions behind. Clarity is fostered in
the winter light of Scotland. There is a sense of paradox in the use
that Dunn makes of his title: a sense of resplendent light when only
dimness was expected; happiness and home found late and against
the odds.
The winter is the time of transformation and haunting, not neces-
sarily hostile revenance, but the cold dusk offers access to a past that
is almost overwhelming:

Beyond our neighbours’ frosted washing-lines,

Their silvered slates and chimney-pots,
Our borderland begins . . .

240
 Make what you can of it, for no one knows
What story’s told by winter-misted hills . . . 149

Just as the cold dusk seems to be sliding beyond control, taking

Dunn with it – ‘It’s 1940 on the weatherglass’ – the stillness that
comes with frosty night dispels the malign aspects of the revenants
and the end of the poem is another quiet affirmation of the reality of
a family dwelling in a real northern place on a frosty night. The place
is as much the possession of the living as of the dead:

The house of us now, love, of you and me

I turn a blacksmithed key in its lock.
Feeling its freezing metal on their hands150

The saddest and most troubled poem in the collection is strongly

focused upon the northness of Dunn’s new life. A walk on a snowy
day leads his mind unstoppably, inevitably, to a kind of malign fan-
tasy of snow over Europe, a hostile Europe of searchlights, barbed
wire and command posts. (This black-and-white, malign Europe,
locked in the winter, is kin to Sean O’Brien’s ‘occupied Europe’ in
‘Captain January’.)151 The familiar Tayport pastoral dissolves, turned
by snow and low light into a landscape of desperation, a place lack-
ing all safety, all reassurance. The associations of northern places are
all turned to grievous things: persecutions, frontiers, revolutions, the
German wars.

What’s haunting what, the birchwood or the snow?

It feels too European – this high, barbed fence,
A dog barking, a shot, and the sub-zero
Mid-winter . . .152

The water tower turns to a guard post, a searchlight base, and the
stumps of trees in the wood start to turn to a shrouded, abandoned
Romanov palace, deserted in circumstances of barely imaginable
cold and suffering:

Closed forest rooms, palatial solitude,

Iced armchairs and a branch-hung chandelier . . .

These images seem haunted too by the ghost of a ghost: lines from

241
Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, with its evocations of a shadowy, mirror-
ing northern kingdom, whose monarch has been deposed and
exiled:

Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass

Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land.153

The deranged annotator in Nabokov’s novel associates these lines

with unhappy revolutions in northern countries.
For once Dunn has no answer to this malignity of associations: the
desolate mood of the opening persists to the very end of the poem, a
distillation of the sufferings of the north:

Home feels a life away and not an hour

. . . friendly holdings and a water-tower
Robbed of simplicity and innocence.154

The other side of the north is always present: dangerous weather;

melancholy and desperation of the winter. If Northlight has a central
dialogue, it is the essentially northern one between pleasure and
caducity: personal happiness considered against the poignant
brevity of the summers of Scotland and against an inimical, even sin-
ister, government, whose agents (territorials; distant, hostile critics)
lurk on the margins of the Scottish pastoral.
One element of life that Scottish writers take for granted is that
the weather needs constantly to be negotiated. North of the Forth
and Clyde, there is the endless mist and the slow rain to take into
account, lowered light in every season, particularly over the north-
west. Apples will ripen only in sheltered or walled gardens through
all of Scotland, except in some favoured parts of the south-west.
Much of Scotland lies too far north to grow wheat. Like Canada,
Scotland contains what is sometimes described as ‘wilderness’
within its borders. In any Scottish context ‘wilderness’ is a fraught
term, a political time bomb. The difference between the naturally
treeless flow country of Caithness and the emptied shooting estates
of the western highlands is bitterly (and not always accurately)

242
present in popular memory. Those parts of Scotland given up to
sport of one kind or another are ambiguous places. Hillwalking,
sking and climbing are popular on a Scandinavian scale, but the
cleared land, closed land now, produces a sombre response. Empti-
ness is seldom the friend of humanity. Pylons can be amiable in the
highland landscape of Scotland as signs of life and settlement. A row
of well-built houses can dignify a glen.
But the highest ground feels otherworldly: it is not a human
domain. The weather is too active, too much on a hair trigger for the
uplands to be safe or hospitable. There is frost in every month of the
year. Snow falls on the highest road, between Cock Bridge and
Tomintoul (Jacobite, dissident uplands that once sheltered an illegal
Catholic college with a handful of students) while it is late summer
in the far south of England. The uncontrollable land functions on its
smaller scale like the tracts of Canada north of the 60th parallel, as a
reminder that human cooperation is not optional, as a national
memento mori. The poet Kathleen Jamie, herself a climber and hill-
walker, writes with precision of the starkest upland landscape of
Scotland, praising life in all its uncontrollability:

And the fit slow pulse of wipers as you’re

creeping over Rannoch, while the God of moorland
walks abroad with his entourage of freezing fog,
his bodyguard of snow.155

Elsewhere the same poem praises God for death by avalanche, a

propitiation of the divinity of the snows, which recognizes the
uncontrollability of the Scottish mountains.
The middle term that unites north and ice is Scotland: the
Cairngorms are smallish mountains which, in bad weather, can offer
the challenges posed by very large ones. The Scottish poet and novelist
Andrew Greig (b. 1951) has made of upland Scotland an adventurer’s
north, the north of altitude, of the winter that bides its time above the
snowline.
Greig sees north as the direction of adventures – winter climbing,
a landscape of risk. He is a poet of the snowline, who has made a dis-
tinguished career of meditating on the imperatives of adventures
and the mountainous landscapes against which they are enacted. He
is conscious of the aesthetics of climbing and adventure: connoisseur
of fear, lover of starkness, refuser of consolation.

243
 The graphic novel-style cover of his collection of poems The
Order of the Day shows a conventionally handsome young couple
at the breakfast table. The man drinks coffee, the woman is read-
ing a mysterious newspaper called The Order of the Day in front of
shelves of books (a couple of feminist titles, a few books of
modern poetry including Greig’s own, climbing books, the north-
bound thrillers of John Buchan). The young man is a traveller – his
passport is ready on the table, the badge on his rucksack reads
‘Just Passin’ Thru’. His speech bubble says ‘My heart’s in shreds’;
she thinks, but does not vocalize, one of Greig’s most resonant
lines, ‘But Love’s the needle not the North’. ‘North’ here is a self-
explanatory, self-limiting term, the inevitable direction to draw
the adventuring heart.
In Greig’s poems there is a sense of the uplands and outlands as
places of enchantment drawing the addicted climbers back to
repeating patterns of terror and exaltation: delight in place and
physical skill can turn to obsession, a masochistic affair with altitude
and the destroying north,

Hung from a hand-jam,

rock crystals enquire of his skin
How much you want to live, sweet youth?156

The sort of life glimpsed in Greig’s poems is developed at length in

his novel, The Return of John McNab, an elegant late-twentieth-century
re-write of John Buchan’s pre-war novel of poaching wagers among
the highland big houses. In Greig’s version a little group of climbers
roosting in borrowed bothies and cottages in northern Scotland carry
out philosophical acts of poaching and mountaineering.
Greig writes exactly about trust and friendship acted out in the
endless evenings of the highland summer: something survives of the
nostalgic, ceremonious atmosphere of Buchan’s lost shooting-lodge
world. This is a novel about archaic places and archaic bravery –
courage as a philosophical puzzle. The book has a special relation-
ship with place based on intimacy: heather crawled through and
quartz rock climbed. The most memorable passages in the book
show Greig’s ability to go far beyond his original (he takes a genre-
fiction plot and deepens it, gives it reality) in his use of the loved
landscape as a protagonist in his narrative:

244
 Neil walked towards the Atholl through the end of the gloaming.
The hills were black lumps against a paler sky and the night air
was blowing hills and heather and adventure down into the
valley. Somewhere up there was the debatable high ground
where landowner and poacher were born to confront each other
. . . He nipped a rose hanging over a garden wall by the police sta-
tion. Petals colourless now but cool and silk-soft on his fingers.
He stuck it in the buttonhole of his jacket and daundered on. All
he had to do was to find a way of growing up without giving in.157

Throughout the book there is a loving involvement with the north-

ern kingdom itself, as when the sleepless protagonist imagines him-
self filling Scotland, ‘the beloved country’:

He began to relax for sleep by visualising himself expanding with

each outbreath, bigger and bigger, like cotton wool teased out,
more and more loose and insubstantial . . . Now the size of the
town, hovering over it like a fine mist, the wind blowing through
the pores as the body drifts without harm through the streetlamps
and hilltops, expanding so much now it covers the whole Spey
valley, the whole Cairngorms, the whole beloved country, the
body so huge and light and empty it’s very nearly nothing but
never quite nothing for there’s a centre somewhere that holds you
together, so nearly nothing but not quite.158

Within Scotland, the north-eastern counties of Aberdeenshire and

Moray are perceived as lost, grim, especially at the mercy of the
weather. For all the unstable prosperity caused by the oil in the
North Sea, Aberdeenshire is seen from the Lowlands as impossibly
northern, impossibly distant and provincial. Its character in the his-
tories of Scotland is to be an exception: the Reformation was not
entirely welcome in Aberdeen, which practised a good deal of prag-
matic religious toleration throughout the early modern period.
There was far less destruction in the wake of the Reformation in
Aberdeen than in any other Scottish city. A significant proportion of
the population of the city and shire remained either Episcopalian or
(under the protection of rural Catholic aristocrats) Catholic. The
result of these factors is that the culture of the city and region
remained distinctive: the painted Catholic chapel of Skene’s House
survives in the old city centre. (It is wholly Scandinavian in style,

245
apart from one fine vernacular passage where the painter has inter-
preted a Roman soldier’s kilt from his engraved source as plaid
cloth.) Traditions of music and song survived in Aberdeen and
Aberdeenshire when they had failed in the Lowlands under theo-
cratic pressure.
Thus the province perceived from the south as a place of dearth
and adversity is actually the centre of cultural production in music,
poetry (particularly Latin poetry) and painting. Again definitions of
northness and provinciality are wholly dependent on acts of self-
location. The north-east of Scotland is (still) not quickly or easily
reached by road, but in the early modern system of transport by sea,
it was as much within the reach of the ports of the Baltic and the
North Sea as was Edinburgh or Newcastle.
Places still more northern have been in their day centres of cul-
tural production. The Baroque erudition of Sir Thomas Urquhart
(1605–1660) found its early expression at Cromarty Castle in the
Black Isle, which castle he appears to have decorated so that it
functioned in some degree as a palace of memory.159 The castle has
long been ruined, but the Burgh of Cromarty still occupies its shel-
tered site at the mouth of the Cromarty Firth under the hanging
woods. It is one of the most haunting places in northern Europe.
Fine stone and colour-washed houses, mostly of the eighteenth
century, and some grander town mansions – Lairds’ Lodgings –
suggest that Cromarty must have been once the winter resort of
gentrice from almost unimaginably remote estates. At Cromarty
there are street upon street of fine houses, all excellent of their peri-
ods. Along the shores of the Firth, out of the town are grander free-
standing houses, almost Palladian in layout with their forecourts
and ancillary cottages, but Palladian on a minute scale, a rigorous
scheme of simplification preserving proportions, discarding orna-
ment. From everywhere in the town there are views out to calm
water, encircling hills, small industry on the other side of the Firth,
oil rigs brought here for maintenance out of the open sea. There is a
perfect, small Regency lighthouse, in the Egyptian taste, a distant
northern commemoration of the Pharos of Alexandria.
My friend Helen Gardiner talked once of coming back to
Cromarty from the south as the very last day of summer turned to
autumn, the fjord like a mirror, the crescent moon falling in the
bright night sky as Orion rose and the northern lights suspended
cloths of green and citron-coloured tissue in the air. The whole

246
spectacle in the sky was mirrored and duplicated in the motionless
waters, stirred only by the folding and refolding of the aurora. Still,
blue dusk, sky and water alive with colour and the first intimation
of autumn in the evening wind.
Cromarty has been held in an extraordinary state of preserva-
tion by the constrictions of its site; almost no ancient burgh further
south has survived into the twenty-first century without draggled
outskirts of expensive new housing. The 40-minute drive from
Inverness on slow roads has also contributed to the preservation of
this extraordinary townscape of Scotland as it was. Peat-smoke
blurs the air, turning the distance blue against the trees. To the
north it is not far before the road twists and narrows and the trees
give way to bare marsh and stone pavement. All of rural Scotland
must once have been something like this.
James McIntosh Patrick’s Autumn, Kinnordy of 1936 (see over) is a
painting that documents the northernmost lowlands in a way already
nostalgic, as if aware that the kind of life that it documents has
nearly run its course. It is loved and recognized within Scotland as
an image of northern Lowland landscape as it was in the mid-twen-
tieth century. It is accepted by many Scots as an idea of north, as the
authentic visual representation of the rural Scotland that lies to the
north of the Central Belt. For all that Patrick is often spoken of as
conservative in technique, this painting uses subtle manipulations of
multiple perspective to emphasize its breadth of prospect and to
deepen its atmosphere of regret and pastness.
It shows the precise moment when the harvest is over and the fields
are beginning to be turned by the horse plough (there are two plough-
teams at work in the landscape) to show red earth beneath the stubble.
The leaves have turned and mostly fallen, but as yet there is no snow
on the distant hills. Two men with guns are walking up the steep field
in the foreground. It is already afternoon and the sunlight is weakening
below a dappled sky. Evening will approach slowly, but soon.
What gives this painting its quality and urgency is that it catches
a moment of lastness. The last of the days when it is possible even to
pretend that winter is not imminent. The last moment of the autumn
afternoon before the chill strikes. The last moment of stillness before
the evening wind rises. The last moment of the agricultural year
before the earth is turned over. In retrospect, it is hard not to read the
painting as an image of loss: the last years before the war, the last
years of farming with horses. How empty the air is in the last of the

247
light. How cold it will be by the time that the men with guns have
returned to the handsome farmhouse.
My father was brought up in Perthshire, in a landscape like this. I
have only one photograph of him from the late 1930s, and it is a docu-
ment of the same world. He is leaning against a reeded doorcase, in
late afternoon sunlight, hands in pockets, absurdly handsome in his
twentieth year. I think that he must be facing into a substantial walled
garden, the borders going over to phlox and Japanese anemones,
straight paths crossing, an old sundial. Beyond the garden wall,
foothills and dusty August trees. His clothes seem heavy for the
season: peaty tweed coat, heavy pleated trousers, all beautifully cut.
The afternoon light strikes into a panelled, white-painted room
behind him. This photograph too is of a moment of lastness, of the end
of the last summer vacation before the war. He would have fished the
Earn for trout, he would have walked his spaniel up the Knock behind
the town, he would have made up a cricket xi at the ground on the
outskirts of Perth. Despite its flashes of defiance and ferocious gaiety,
how sad Scotland can be, how sad this image is of my father’s world,
of the lost rural Scotland of the 1930s, of which he never spoke because
I never thought to ask him.
A generation of educated Scots came out from the war almost free
from nostalgia. There seemed to be nothing about the pre-war world
they were minded to regret, except the world of McIntosh Patrick’s
picture. Radicalized by the war, they thought that the old world had
had its day, that its injustices had lasted over long. Their only regret
was for the autumnal rigs, the horse-teams and the intricate skills of
the horsemen.
The barley has hardly been reaped in the north before the swallows
assemble. The shores of the Forth are still in sunlight as cloud shadows
move down from the north, from Caithness and the darkened northern
isles. Every year the departure of the swallows seems unnaturally
early, while the full light is still on the stone garden walls. Cold dew lies
longer there every morning. The armillary sundial with its gilded uni-
corn catches the light for less and less of each day. In the past, this time
of the swallows’ departure was also the time for burning the fields. The
red flames against the stubble echoed the red-tiled roofs of the eastern
lowlands, bright against the sea. Jacobite landscapes, with a serious-
ness to them: flames crossing the fields in a reminder of the winter to
come, flame against the September sky recalling past evictions, distant
sufferings, farmlands ‘cleared’ into wilderness.

248
James McIntosh Patrick, detail from Autumn, Kinnordy, 1936, oil on canvas.

John Lorimer’s picture Goodbye to the Swallows hangs on the stair at

Kellie Castle in Fife: in it, the castle children lean from the tall window
on the first floor, looking out southwards over the stubble fields
towards the Forth and the Bass Rock. The uncertain September sun-
light marks yellow lichen on grey stone. The year is 1890, and as yet
there are few griefs to touch these children, only a generalized sadness
at the fading of the summer. Seen from the distance of more than a
century, the painting grows darker, the summer of that distant year is
not the only loss to which it bears witness. It begins to approach the
distilled sadness of the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti’s

Passa la rondine e con essa estate,

E anch’io, mi dico, passerò . . .

The swallow leaves and summer passes, I,

I know, will pass as well . . . 160

249
 Deep in the autumn, the wild geese come. When the ploughs
have ripped the stubble fields open, when the air has turned smoky,
when the afternoons are shortening day by day, when cold has
leached the colour from the sky. Most years they pass in high skeins,
a few each day, as light shortens and weeks pass towards winter. But
some years they come all at once, a visitation, a portent. It is terrible
if they land for the night on the hills around the house.
If it is the autumn when they land, an afternoon comes when the
air fills with wingbeats and the geese dim the sky. As they land they
turn the brown hill grey. Once their crying has begun, it is impossi-
ble to think of anything else. The migrating geese used to be called
the wild hunt, ‘Gabriel’s hounds’, hounds of the armed angels. Their
crying in the darkening sky is as sombre and as desolate as the noise
of hounds over flooded fields. Their passing brings sadness, a present
reminder of the cold growing with the dusk. Put down forks and
spades, turn away from the garden bonfire,

. . . considering
The autumns, personal and public, which already creep
Through city-crowded Europe, and those in want
Who must soon look up at the winter sky and weep . . . 161

The northern year brings you up sharply against yourself and

against your preparedness (or unpreparedness) for the winter. The
creaking and moaning in the sky is a marker in a year, in a life. The
river roar of the migration overhead call for acts of propitiation:
touching wood, turning silver. Their sheer number is overwhelming;
only a fool or the crazy third son in a fairy tale would shoot at them.
The noise of the wild geese landing for the night, crying to each
other on the hill, brings terror, loneliness in company. On the night
when the geese settle, the rituals of home are needed in opposition to
crying in the sky. Food tasting of smoke, heavy red wine, whisky; the
closing of the thick curtains hung at windows that were bare all
summer. Nobody wants to leave the fire of peat and driftwood, with
its salt flares, its flames the colours of verdigris and roses, its flames
the colours of the aurora over Cromarty.
The last flowers, chrysanthemums or nerines brought in from the
garden, are garish in the lamplight. Music fails on the night when the
wild geese come. Reading is no distraction on such a night of transi-
tion, a rip in the seasons. Silence falls around the fire. Frozen fields

250
stretch away on every side, the garden is blackened and rotting
within its walls, and still the migrating flocks rustle and scream on
the hills above the house. Almost everything that consoles us is false.

251
Epilogue: Keeping the Twilight

Alone in the winter afternoon, suddenly you notice the light failing.
Outside, the first mists gather in the distance, vapours over the
fields. The inevitable moment of loneliness. You ask yourself why
you have left your friends behind in the cities to the south. Too late
to go. Too late to go there now. Think of the length of the journey,
impossible to start now with the light going. The twisting hill road ,
the slow ring road, the exposed shoulder of the coast road, the misty
straights through the empty Mearns, small towns in coal smoke and
fog like thirty years ago. The skein of bridges at Perth and then another
hour of twilight roads. Far too far.
You make the fire: a whole newspaper, every double page folded
and twisted. You lay on the kindling: ash twigs snapped in the gales,
stored in the lee of stone walls. You fetch the basket of peats from the
back door. Small crumbs first then the solid rolls of fossil grass. You lay
a match to the corner of the paper. White smoke, then blue smoke.
Smell of autumn on the snowline. Smell of malt whisky and frost.
Smell of the winding glens of the Cairngorm, the frosted trees round
the church at Corgarff, Sancta Maria ad Nives. The air behind the trees
thickens. The bare trees against blue and grey are the blotting-paper
trees on Mocha-ware mugs, poor art of the nineteenth century, trea-
sured by early twentieth-century artists. Ravilious bought one for his
wife the year before he was killed.
Go to the window again. The night is moving up the valley towards
the house. Turn away. Feel nothing now. Almost all the colour has
gone: the landscape of bare trees is like the landscape in slices of
Cotham marble, dun against grey, adventitious landscapes in split
rocks. Find the matchbox. The first scraped match brings the dark
striding towards you. The reflection of the fire burns outside, hovering
over the frosty grass. This was called ‘witch-fire’ in Scotland in the old
days: a reason to draw the curtains, to fasten the bars on the shutters.
Light the candles so that their flames reflect and multiply in the glass
lustres of the girandoles, doubled in the slab of mirror above the fire.

252
Switch on one lamp by the sofa. Too early for other lights, too early to
admit nightfall.
Turn back to the book open by your place. Before you begin to read
again, think (despite yourself) of the progress of the dark. It has been
dark in Tromsø since noon, the grey-painted rooms of Stockholm have
been dim with evening for over an hour. The garlands painted on their
panels are vanishing: roses no longer, but sedge and willowherb, flora
of decline. Night has moved down island by island: Faroes, Shetlands,
Orkneys. Stromness is dark now, the twin lights marking the channel
reflect across the sheltered bay. Thurso and Wick are in the dark now.
The last reflections of white gables glimmer in the firth at Cromarty.
Uncurtained windows in the houses under the hanging woods, houses
dispersed along the shore of the firth, show lamplight on white-
painted panelling, Delft tiles around the grates. The light is going fast
now, and already the afternoon has begun to fade, even in the cities
to the south. The Edinburgh shore recedes, Anglepoise lamps are
switched on in the artists’ rooms along the Fife coast. Newcastle is dim
with mist from the river; wet cobbles reflect shop lights in Alston and
Appleby; on the western slopes of the Pennines red sun flashes a
moment in Black Moss then sinks in cold above Manchester.
Read again of the midwinter visitation that will leave no tracks in
the snow. The ghost lover has neither weight nor gender, arriving by
night, when the household is asleep and only one lamp casts the
shadows of the glazing bars onto the snow. Think of other verses of
revenants and the snow. Auden’s aptgangas, athletes killed between the
wars, lost in surreal feuds across upland country, returning, hesitating
in the doorway of the big house on the moors. The forgiven ghosts of
the play Nishikigi delivered from the re-enactment of their mistakes,
their entrapment in the sad provincial autumn, into their wedding
dance with its song of snow falling in the night. Emma Tennant’s Aunt
Thelma, arriving with the snow at the remote house, filling the rooms
with phantoms of Victorian despair.
Go up the stairs. The last light is lying faintly across doorways,
turning colour to grisaille. The house flattens into paintings.
Glasgow school interiors of the 1890s: dim, high rooms painted in
tones of charcoal, ash and trodden snow. Only the greys and broken
whites of the window frames show still. Sparse twilight lustre of
silver or mirror-glass, false moonlight of nautilus-shell cup, false
starlight of chandeliers. James Pryde grandeurs, their shadows
stirring as draughts move the curtains as if they were moth-worn

253
tapestries, abraded magnificence seen by the last of the light. Go
through the twilight house, switching on the lamps that turn the
windows black, then drawing the curtains. A last glimpse outside
of cobalt trees in the last grey light, hardly light any more, a dis-
turbance rather in the texture of the dark
Go into the room where the computer is. Pull down the blind
against the wind moving in the fields. Press the switch. Look into the
depths of the winter landscape on the wall above the screen. Snow
over Flanders, centuries ago. The spires of the city are dimmed with
cold. They are skating on the frozen sea. Black birds in the empty air.
The lights focus on the screen. Dial out. Connect. Click on the
weather. Then the weather for the north. Then the webcams. The ones
for the remotest places in the hills. Here at last is the hieroglyphic
of the winter. The squares assemble on the screen. A block of dusk
above a block of moor. A smear of dark above a line of snow.

254
References

introduction
1 Dalziel and Scullion, Home, exh. cat., Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2001),
pp. 89–91.
2 Alexander Pope, ‘Essay on Man’, in Pope: Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davies
(Oxford, 1966), p. 256.
3 Quoted by Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China
(Oxford, 1989), p. 286.
4 Pauline Stainer, The Ice-Pilot Speaks (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1994), pp. 9–17.
5 C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (London, 1955), p. 23.
6 Martinus Nijhoff, Een Geur van Hoger Honig, ed. W. J. van den Akker and
G. J. Dorleijn (Amsterdam, 1990), p. 36.
7 Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London, 1990), pp. 302–5.
8 Emily Dickinson, # 1696. In Works, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (London, 1975), p. 691.
9 Andy Goldsworthy, Touching North (London and Edinburgh, 1989), p. [1].
10 Théophile Gautier, Emaux et Camées (1852) (Lille and Geneva, 1947), pp. 21–3, 145.
11 Herman Pleij, De sneeuwpoppen van 1511 (Amsterdam, 1998), p. 23.
12 Pleij, Sneeuwpoppen, pp. 24–5.
13 Pleij, Sneeuwpoppen, pp. 357–70.
14 Norman Hallendy, Inuksuit: Silent Messengers of the Arctic (London, 2000), p. 77.
15 Celso Pastor de la Torre and Luis Enrique Tord, Perú: fe y arte en el Virreynato
(Córdoba, 1999), pp. 61, 272.
16 Neil Kent, The Triumph of Light and Nature (London, 1987), pp. 168–9.
17 Tony Harrison, ‘Facing North’, Selected Poems (Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 180.
18 Edward Mendelson, The English Auden (London, 1978), p. 26.
19 See Hallendy, Inuksuit.
20 Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (London, 1996).
21 Frank Morley, The Great North Road (London, 1961), p. 312.
22 Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (London, 1991), p. 248.

i histories
1 Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, i. 3, in More Latin Lyrics, from Virgil to Milton,
trans. Helen Waddell (London, 1976), pp. 106–7.
2 Albertus Magnus, Quaestiones [on Aristotle’s Physica], vi, questions 19–22, in
Quaestiones, ed. Wilhelm Kübel and Heinrich Anzulewicz (Münster in Westfalen,
1993), pp. 215–37.
3 Socrates, quoted by Peter Brown in The World of Late Antiquity (London, 1971), p. 11.
4 Aristotle, Politics, vii. vii, trans. T. A. Sinclair (Harmondsworth, 1962), p. 410.
5 Strabo, Geography, iv. 5. iv, trans. Horace Leonard Jones, 8 vols (Cambridge, ma,
and London, 1917), vol. ii, p. 259.
6 Hippocrates, Airs, Waters and Places, trans. W.H.S. Jones (Cambridge, ma, and
London, 1923), vol. i, pp. 77–9.
7 Aristotle, Politics, vii. vii, trans. Sinclair, p. 410.
8 The basic source is Herodotus, Histories, iv, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt
(Harmondsworth, 1954), pp. 271–339.
9 Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica, iii. 47, trans. E. H. Oldfather, 12 vols

255
 (Cambridge, ma, and London, 1935–67), vol. ii, p. 39.
10 Pindar, Pythian Odes, x.25–45, trans. John Sandys (Cambridge, ma, and London,
1915), pp. 291–3.
11 Olaus Magnus, Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus, iii. 2. (1555), trans. as
Description of the Northern Peoples by Peter Fisher and Humphrey Higgins, 3 vols
(London, 1996), vol. i, p. 149.
12 Sophocles and others on the Ripaean mountains: David Blamires, Herzog Ernst and
the Otherworld Voyage (Manchester, 1979), pp. 93–5.
13 Yves Abrioux, with Stephen Bann, Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer (London,
1992), pp. 299–300, 302. In the 1980s, at the time of the bitterly resented intro-
duction of the poll tax in Scotland, it was widely rumoured – I think without
foundation – that Finlay had filled in his poll-tax form giving ‘The Apollo of the
Hyperboreans’ as the ‘person responsible’ for his garden and had given ‘at the
back of the north wind’ as his address.
14 E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, ca, 1951), pp. 161–2.
15 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) (Harmondsworth, 1994), p. 13.
16 Information on Admiral Byrd from Slainte, ‘The Hyperboreans’ , at
http://www.zombienation.force9.co.uk (posted 29 March 2001).
17 Dr Tunalu of the Institute of Druidic Technology is contactable at
[email protected].
18 Inigo Jones, The most notable antiquity of Great Britain vulgarly called Stone-henge on
Salisbury Plain (London, 1655).
19 Herodotus, Histories, iii. 116, trans. de Sélincourt, p. 250.
20 For the Mediterranean desire for blond hair in antiquity, see Terence MacLaughlin,
The Gilded Lily (London, 1972), pp. 33–4.
21 A representative discussion of the idea of Thule, ultimate north, darkness, can be
found in Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vita Merlini, ed. Basil Clarke (Cardiff, 1973),
pp. 99–101.
22 Homer, Odyssey, x. 507, trans. A. T. Murray, rev. George E. Dimock, 2 vols
(Cambridge, ma, and London, 1995), vol. i, p. 395.
23 Odyssey, xi. 12ff., vol. i, p. 401.
24 Timothy Severin, The Oriental Adventure (London, 1976), pp. 43, 54. An alleged
antique myth, quoted here, which I have been unable to trace to any reputable
source, asserts that Alexander also made an expedition to the North Pole and that
he found there the spring of the water of life.
25 Procopius, History of the Wars, viii. 20. xlii–xlviii, trans. H. B. Dewing, 7 vols
(Cambridge, ma, and London, 1928), vol. v, p. 323.
26 Theo Brown, The Fate of the Dead (Cambridge and Ipswich, 1979), p. 65.
27 Jeremiah 1: 14.
28 Gildas, De excidio Britanniae, i. 19, trans. Michael Winterbottom (Chichester, 1978),
p. 23.
29 Marijke Spies, Arctic Routes to Fabled Lands (Amsterdam, 1997), p. 100.
30 Wulfstan, Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, in Wulfstan, Homilies, ed. Dorothy Bethurum
(Oxford, 1957), p. 267.
31 Saxo Grammaticus, The History of the Danes, ed. Hilda Ellis Davidson, trans. Peter
Fisher (Cambridge, 1979; reprinted 1996), pp. 7–8.
32 The Kalevala, trans. Keith Bosley (Oxford, 1989), p. 546.
33 Saxo, History, viii, trans. Fisher, pp. 262–5.
34 John Buchan, Sick Heart River (1940) (Oxford, 1994), p. 208.
35 Peter Høeg, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (London, 1993), pp. 363–409.
36 The Voyage of St Brendan, trans. J. J. O’Meara (Dublin, 1978), chapter 23, p. 54.
37 Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning, chapter 49, in Edda, trans. Anthony Faulkes
(London, 1987), p. 50.
38 Spies, Arctic Routes, pp. 80–82.
39 ‘To Sanctae Michaheles [sic] Messan’, Blickling Homilies, trans. R. Morris (London,
1879), pp. 208–10.
40 Chaucer, Friar’s Tale, ed. F. N. Robinson, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (London,

256
 1957), p. 90, lines 1410–14.
41 Saxo, History, trans. Fisher, ii. 2. ii, p. 43.
42 Olaus Magnus, Historia, trans. Fisher and Higgins, iii. 22, vol. i, p. 182.
43 William Blake, Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1966), p. 222.
44 J.J.M. de Groot, The Religious System of China (Leiden, 1892), p. 803.
45 John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities, 2 vols (London, 1813), vol. ii, p. 292.
46 Iona Opie and Moira Tatem, Dictionary of Superstitions (Oxford, 1989).
47 R. S. Hawker of Morwenstow, Footprints of Men in Far Cornwall (London,
1870), p. 24.
48 Collated version of Tamlane in Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, ed. T. F.
Henderson, 4 vols (Edinburgh, 1902), vol. ii, p. 295.
49 Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols (New York,
1965), vol. iv, pp. 212–13.
50 Dante Alighieri, La divina commedia: Inferno, ed. Natalino Sapegno (Florence, 1985),
Canto xxxiv, lines 49–52, p. 381.
51 Inferno, Canto xxxii, line 60, p. 358.
52 Inferno, Canto xxxii, lines 25–7, p. 356.
53 Inferno, Canto xxxiii, lines 127–8, pp. 373–4.
54 Inferno, Canto xxxiv, lines 4–7, p. 378.
55 Inferno, Canto xxxiv, lines 53–4, p. 381.
56 Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt (London, 1989), pp. 52–63.
57 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, ed. Piero Buscaroli (Milan, 1992), p. xiv.
58 John Florio, Queene Anna’s New World of Words (London, 1611), p. 494r.
59 Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. Ugo Dotti (Milan, 1992), p. 76.
60 Ernest J. Moyne, Raising the Wind: The Legend of the Lapland and Finland Wizards in
Literature (Newark, nj, 1981), pp. 29–30.
61 Sor Juana, in ‘Testimonia’, subjoined to Sophia Elisabeth Brenner, Poetiska Dikter
(Stockholm, 1713), sigs a2v–a3v.
62 François Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, 2 vols, ed. Pierre Jourda (Paris, 1962), vol. ii,
p. 205.
63 Rabelais, Oeuvres, vol. ii, p. 207.
64 Lucy Atkinson, Recollections of Tartar Steppes and their Inhabitants (London,
1863), p. 5.
65 Robert Conquest, quoted from Martin Amis, Koba the Dread (New York, 2002), p. 69.
66 Kate Marsden, On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers (London, 2001),
pp. 136–7.
67 Mariusz Wilk, The Journals of a White Sea Wolf, trans. Danusia Stok (London, 2003),
p. 145.
68 Wilk, Journals, p. 19.
69 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (London, 1999), p. 58.
70 Wilk, Journals, p. 19.
71 Wilk, Journals, p. 286.
72 Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (London, 1996)
73 S. Small (composer, Henry A. Russotto), Churken Titanic [The Titanic disaster]
(New York, 1912), p. [2].
74 G. P. Krapp and E. V. Dobbie, eds, The Exeter Book (New York, 1936), p. 197;
translation in R. K. Gordon, Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London, 1926), p. 300.
75 Richard Fortey, Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution (London, 2001), p. 187.
76 Marijke Spies, Arctic Routes to Fabled Lands (Amsterdam, 1997), pp. 24–5.
77 George Frederick Kunz, The Curious Lore of Precious Stones (New York, 1989), p. 57.
78 Homer, Odyssey, xviii. 11. 295–8, trans. A. T. Murray, rev. George E. Dimock, 2 vols
(Cambridge, ma, and London, 1995), vol. ii, p. 223.
79 Andrew Marvell, ‘The nymph complaining for the death of her faun’, in Poetry
and Revolution, ed. Peter Davidson (Oxford, 1999), pp. 438–41.
80 Patrick Mauries, Cabinets of Curiosities (London, 2002), p. 52.
81 Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the Peoples without History (Berkeley, ca, and London,
1982), p. 159.

257
 82 Wolf, Europe, pp. 158–94; Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History
(Cambridge, 1984), pp. 207–29.
83 James E. Montgomery, ‘Ibn Fadlān and the Rūsiyyah’, Journal of Arabic and Islamic
Studies, iii (2000), pp. 1–25.
84 Odell Shepherd, The Lore of the Unicorn (Boston, ma, London and Sydney, 1930),
p. 255.
85 Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (London, 1986), p. 128.
86 Shepherd, Lore of the Unicorn, p. 262.
87 John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book iv. 15. v., discussed in
Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago, 1994), p. 229.
88 Voyage of St Brendan, trans. O’Meara, chapter 22, pp. 50–51.
89 Edna Kenton, ed., Black Gown and Redskins (London, 1956), p. 17.
90 Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus; or, Purchas his Pilgrimes, 20 vols (Glasgow,
1905–7), vol. xiii, p. 63.
91 Olaus Magnus, Historia, trans. Fisher and Higgins, pp. 50–51, 47–8.
92 Carte of the Warld, in The Asloan Manuscript, ed. W. A. Craigie, 2 vols (Edinburgh,
1923–5), vol. i, pp. 163–4.
93 Olaus Magnus, Historia, trans. Fisher and Higgins, vol. i, pp. 61–2, 47–8.
94 Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, The Figure of the Earth, Determined from
Observations Made by Order of the French King (London, 1738), pp. 55–7.
95 Groot, The Religious System of China, p. 1167.
96 E. L. Keithahn, ‘There’s Magic in the Arctic’, Alaska Sportsman, July 1942; reprinted
in S.-I. Akasofu, Aurora Borealis: The Amazing Northern Lights (Anchorage, ak,
1979), p. 20.
97 William Scoresby, An Account of the Arctic Regions, 2 vols (London, 1820), vol. i,
pp. 384–5.
98 Akasofu, Aurora Borealis, p. 53.
99 Seneca, from Akasofu, Aurora Borealis, p. 9.
100 Akasofu, Aurora Borealis, p. 13.
101 Ernest W. Hawkes, The Labrador Eskimo (Ottawa, 1916), p 153.
102 The King’s Mirror (Speculum Regale, Konungs Skuggsja), trans. Laurence Marcellus
Larson (New York, 1917), pp. 146–51.
103 Finnish auroras: my thanks to Anna Maija Rist and Hildi Hawkins for this informa-
tion.
104 John Gregorson Campbell, Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland
(Glasgow, 1908), p. 200.
105 Olaus Magnus, Historia, trans. Fisher and Higgins, iii. 14, vol. i, p. 169.
106 Ernest J. Moyne, Raising the Wind: The Legend of Lapland and Finland Wizards in
Literature (Newark, nj, 1981), p. 35.
107 Cases of Conscience Concerning Witchcraft and Evil Spirits Personating Men (1693), in
Moyne, Raising the Wind, p. 45.
108 Olaus Magnus, Description of the Northern Peoples, iii, in Moyne, Raising the Wind,
pp. 22–3.
109 Cyrus Lawrence Day, Quipus and Witches’ Knots (Lawrence, ka, 1967), p. 41.
110 ‘Witches of Lapland’, in Poems and Fancies (1653), in Moyne, Raising the Wind, p. 64.
111 Olaus Magnus, Historia, trans. Fisher and Higgins, iii. 16, vol. i, p. 173.
112 Olaus Magnus, Historia, trans. Fisher and Higgins, iii. 18, vol. i, p. 176.
113 Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning, chapter 50, in Edda, trans. Anthony Faulkes
(London, 1987), p. 52; Voyage of St Brendan, trans. O’Meara, chapter 25, pp. 55–8.
114 Anna-Leena Siikala, ‘The Rite Technique of the Siberian Shaman’, dissertation,
University of Helsinki, 1978, p. 77.
115 Johannes Scheffer, Lapponia (1674), quoted in Moyne, Raising the Wind, p. 36.
116 Arthur MacGregor, ed., The Late King’s Goods (Oxford, 1989), p. 417.
117 John Bell, A Journey from St Petersburg to Pekin, ed. J. L. Stevenson (Edinburgh,
1965), p. 3.
118 Bente Dam-Mikkelsen and Torben Lundbæk, Ethnographic Objects in the Royal
Danish Kunstkammer, 1650–1800 (Copenhagen, 1980), pp. 12–13.

258
ii imaginations of north
1 Hans Andersen, Fairy Tales and Legends (London, 1935), p. 122.
2 Andersen, Fairy Tales, p. 147.
3 Andersen, Fairy Tales, p.150.
4 Selma Lagerlöf, The Further Adventures of Nils (New York, 1911), pp. 230–35.
5 Edith Sitwell, The Song of the Cold (London, 1945); Emma Tennant, Wild Nights
(London, 1981), p. 97; Tove Jansson, Moominland Midwinter (London, 1958); and
C .S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (London, 1950), The Silver Chair
(London, 1953).
6 Robert W. Service, ‘The Spell of the Yukon’, in The Complete Poems of Robert Service
(New York, 1945), p. 12.
7 Richard Leighton Greene, ed., The Early English Carols (Oxford, 1977), p. 82.
8 Margaret Atwood, Strange Things (Oxford, 1993), pp. 62–86.
9 Paulette Jiles, Celestial Navigation Poems (Toronto, 1984), p. 104.
10 W. H. Blake, in Brown Waters and Other Sketches (Toronto, 1915), p. 100.
11 Knut Liestol Guthmund, ‘Draumkvæde’, Studia Norvegica i/3 (1946), p. 11; and see
Bengt R. Jonsson, The Ballad and Oral Literature (Cambridge, ma, 1991), p. 167.
12 Osip Mandelstam, Stone [Kamen, 1913], trans. Robert Tracy (London, 1991), p. 69.
13 David Morley, Mandelstam Variations (Todmorden, 1991), pp. 42–3.
14 Niki de Saint-Phalle, The Tarot Garden, ed. Anna Mazzanti (Milan, 1998), p. 56.
15 Information can be found at www.ice-hotel.com
16 Alan Riding, ‘In the Arctic, Artwork Rises from the Ice’, New York Times, 7 and 8
March 2004. Also see www.thesnowshow.net
17 Situla in Los Angeles, Getty Center, 84.dr.654.
18 Erik Kruskopf, ‘Design and the Applied Arts, 1945–1990’, in Bengt von Bonsdorff
and others, Art in Finland from the Middle Ages to the Present Day (Helsinki, 2000),
p. 351.
19 Ice glass, Los Angeles, Getty Center, 84.dr.564.
20 Tapio Wirkkala’s Ultima Thule glass is comprehensively displayed at
www.iittala.com and discussed at www.lib.helsinki.fi/bff/101/wirkkala.html.
21 Andy Goldsworthy, Stone (London, 1994), pp. 12–13.
22 Andy Goldworthy, Wood (London, 1996), p. 87.
23 Christopher Jackson, Lawren Harris: North by West: The Arctic and Rocky Mountains
(Calgary, 1991), pp. 34–7.
24 Adalgisa Lugli, Wunderkammer (Turin, 1997), plates 124–7.
25 A. C. Leighton, Transport and Communication in Early Mediaeval Europe, AD 500–1100
(Newton Abbot, 1972), p. 151; P. G. Foote and D .M. Wilson, The Viking Achievement
(London, 1973), p. 255.
26 Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (London,
1996), pp. 237–8.
27 Quoted by George Frederick Kunz, The Curious Lore of Precious Stones (New York,
1989), pp. 100–01.
28 The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Charles Sayle, 3 vols (London, 1904), vol i,
pp. 202–16.
29 Judikje Keers and Fieke Tissink, The Glory of the Golden Age, exh. cat., Rijks-
museum, Amsterdam (2000), pp. 56–7.
30 Peter Davidson and Adriaan van der Weel, eds and trans., A Selection of the Poems
of Sir Constantijn Huygens (Amsterdam, 1996), pp. 176–7.
31 Laurence Whistler, Point Engraving on Glass (London, 1992), pp.31– 4.
32 M.E.A. Gibson, Esq., private communication, quoting unpublished notes made
in 1982.
33 Lugli, Wunderkammer, no. 127.
34 Ursula Sjöberg and Lars Sjöberg, The Swedish Room (New York, 1994), pp. 12, 21.
35 Evelyn Waugh, ‘The First Time I Went to the North, Fiasco in the Arctic’, in
The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher
(Harmondsworth, 1986), pp. 144–9.
36 Edward Mendelson, ed., The English Auden (London and Boston, ma, 1978),
259
 pp. 48–9. Auden was writing at Blanchland in County Durham, on a walking tour
of the North Pennines, in the company of a man with whom he was in love, the
former captain of the first xv at Sedbergh School, one of the figures around whom
Auden wove a creative confluence of northern mythologies.
37 A very good idea of the nature of the project is given by Humphrey Spender, ed.,
Jeremy Mulford, Worktown People: Photographs from Northern England, 1937–38
(Bristol, 1982).
38 Mendelson, The English Auden, p. 175.
39 For Collingwood, a fellow-member with G. A. Auden of the Viking Club,
see Andrew Wawn’s superb The Vikings and the Victorians (Woodbridge, 2000),
especially pp. 308–9 and 335–41; George Auden’s serious academic interest
in the Old North is summarized in Sveinn Haraldsson ‘“The North Begins
Inside”: Auden, Ancestry and Iceland’, in Northern Antiquity: The Post-Mediaeval
Reception of Saga and Edda, ed. Andrew Wawn (Enfield Lock, 1994), pp. 255–84,
which offers, incidentally, the information that the ‘Aud̄un skökull’ half-seriously
claimed by Auden as an ancestor possibly derives his cognomen from an
expression of phallic power meaning literally ‘cart-pole’ or ‘horse’s yard’.
For G. A. Auden’s seriousness and competence as scholar of the Old North,
see his contributions, as district secretary for York, to Saga-Book of the Viking
Club, or Society for Northern Research, v (London, 1906–7), pp. 53–9 (1906) and
pp. 247–50 (1907); vi (London, 1908–9), pp. 169–79. Wawn, The Vikings and the
Victorians, p. 364, records G. A. Auden’s correspondence with Eiríkur Magnússon
on old Icelandic topics and on the possible Icelandic origins of the name ‘Auden’.
This establishes an intellectual ancestry for Auden’s passion for the Old North.
40 W. H. Auden, Juvenilia, ed. Katherine Bucknell (London, 1994), pp. 226–35.
41 Christopher Isherwood, ‘Some Notes on the Early Poetry’, in W. H. Auden:
A Tribute, p. 77.
42 Davenport-Hynes, Auden, p. 18.
43 Bucknell, Juvenilia, p. 75.
44 Mendelson, The English Auden, pp. 22, 25, 28, 46.
45 Bucknell, Juvenilia, p. 176
46 All this information in Bucknell, Juvenilia, p. 226, a tour de force of detection and
reconstruction.
47 Bucknell, Juvenilia, p. 227
48 Bucknell, Juvenilia, p. 235.
49 Bucknell, Juvenilia, p. 240; Mendelson, The English Auden, p. 26.
50 Christopher Isherwood, ‘Some Notes on the Early Poetry’, in W. H. Auden:
A Tribute, ed. Stephen Spender (London, 1975), p. 75.
51 A concise account of the borrowings in Paid on Both Sides from Old English sources
can be found in Chris Jones, ‘W. H. Auden and the “Barbaric” Poetry of the North:
Unchaining one’s Daimon’, Review of English Studies, liii/210 (2002), pp. 167–85.
52 George Macdonald, The Princess and the Goblin, first published in 1872: modern
editions include the Penguin (Harmondsworth, 1975).
53 Mendelson, The English Auden, pp. 191–2.
54 Carlisle Public Libraries, local history collection. John Postlethwaite, Mines and
Mining in the (English) Lake District, 3rd edition (Whitehaven, 1913). Auden’s
annotated copy.
55 Mendelson, The English Auden, p. 25.
56 Mendelson, The English Auden, p. 14.
57 Mendelson, The English Auden, p. 26.
58 W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, Libretti and other Dramatic Writings, ed.
Edward Mendelson (Princeton, nj, 1993), pp. 189–244.
59 Postlethwaite, Mines and Mining, p. 49.
60 Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (Boston, ma, and London, 1981), p. 62.
61 Bruce Dickins, ed., Runic and Heroic Poems of the Old Teutonic Peoples (Cambridge,
1915), pp. 30–31.
62 Mendelson, The English Auden, pp. 79–80.

260
63 Mendelson, The English Auden, p. 65.
64 Mendelson, The English Auden, p. 68.
65 Mendelson, The English Auden, p. 109.
66 Mendelson, The English Auden, p. 100.
67 Mendelson, The English Auden, p. 99.
68 Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows (London, 1996), p. 128.
69 Spufford, I May Be Some Time, p. 54.
70 W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Plays, ed. Edward Mendelson (London,
1989), p. 343.
71 Auden and Isherwood, Plays, p. 296.
72 Auden and Isherwood, Plays, p. 296.
73 Geoffrey Winthrop Young, Speech, June 1924. June Parker and Tim Pickles, The
Lakeland Fells (Keswick, 1996), pp. 212–13. Communicated by Nicholas Graham.
74 Auden and Isherwood, Plays, p. 334.
75 Auden and Isherwood, Plays, p. 354.
76 W. H. Auden, ‘England, Six Unexpected Days’, American Vogue, 15 May 1954,
reprinted in Alan Myers and Robert Forsythe, W. H. Auden, Pennine Poet
(Nenthead, Alston, Cumbria, 1999), p. 55.
77 W. H. Auden, ‘I Like it Cold’, House and Garden, December 1947, p. 110; quoted in
Richard Davenport-Hynes, Auden (London, 1995), p. 17.
78 General information on Ravilious is found in abundance in Alan Powers, Eric
Ravilious: Imagined Realities, exh. cat., Imperial War Museum, London (2003),
which appeared as this book was going to press.
79 Private communications from Anne (Ravilious) Ullmann, October 2003. Anne
Ullmann, with notable generosity, has catalogued for me Arctic, polar and wintry
material from her father’s books, scrapbooks and collections. The books are: Polar
Scenes Exhibited in the Voyages of Heemskirk and Barentz to the Northern Regions and in
the Adventures of Four Russian Sailors at the Island of Spitzbergen (London, 1822), Sir
John Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a North-West Passage and of a
Residence in the Arctic Regions during the Years 1829–1833 (London, 1835), and
Andrew James Symington, Pen and Pencil Sketches of Faröe and Iceland (London,
1862). The Everest photographs were a ‘Special Illustrated Edition’ of The Times for 8
May 1933: ‘Flying to the Summit, Photographs taken on the second Everest flight’.
80 Timothy Wilcox, Francis Towne (London, 1997), see particularly pp. 88–105 and
133–5.
81 Wilcox, Francis Towne, pp. 101–5
82 Helen Binyon, Eric Ravilious: Memoir of an Artist (Guildford and London, 1983),
p. 136.
83 Anne Ullmann, ed., Ravilious at War: The Complete Work of Eric Ravilious, September
1939– September 1942 (Upper Denby, 2002), pp. 104–6. Also personal communica-
tion from Anne Ullman.
84 Ullmann, Ravilious at War, p. 7.
85 Ullmann, Ravilious at War, p. 8.
86 Pauline Stainer, ‘Modern Angels: Eight Poems after Eric Ravilious’, in Sighting the
Slave Ship (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1992), p. 76.
87 Bucknell, Juvenilia, p. 176.
88 Ullman, Ravilious at War, p. 52.
89 Ullmann, Ravilious at War, p. 11.
90 This is the point where he becomes an embodiment of Auden’s aesthetic – as it
happens, they (almost) met only once: ‘at a grand party in London . . . with
Benjamin Britten playing the piano and Auden turning over the music’. Eric
Ravilious, letter to Diana Tuely, transcribed and communicated by Alan Powers.
esro acc 8494/1, er to dt, 17 January 1939.
91 Ravilious, letter to Helen Binyon, transcribed and communicated by Alan Powers.
esro acc 8494/6, er to hb, 7 May 1935.
92 Edward Lear, ‘The Jumblies’, in The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear, ed.
Holbrook Jackson (London, 1947), pp. 71–4.

261
 93 Ullmann, Ravilious at War, p. 93.
94 Ullmann, Ravilious at War, p. 93.
95 Ullmann, Ravilious at War, p. 130.
96 Binyon, Eric Ravilious, pp. 29–30.
97 John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera [1728]; ed. Bryan Laughren and T.O. Treadwell
(Harmondsworth, 1986), p. 66.
98 Ullmann, Ravilious at War, p. 206.
99 Ullmann, Ravilious at War, pp. 257–8.
100 Binyon, Eric Ravilious, p. 137.
101 Ullmann, Ravilious at War, p. 259.
102 Ullmann, Ravilious at War, p. 259.
103 Ullmann, Ravilious at War, p. 261.
104 Ullmann, Ravilious at War, p. 260.
105 Pauline Stainer, Sighting the Slave Ship, p. 79.
106 Mendelson, The English Auden, p. 80.
107 Nabokov, Pale Fire, p. 248.
108 Some indication of the scope of the Naboland enterprise can be found in Reinhard
Behrens, Twenty-Five Years of Expeditions into Naboland (Glasgow, 2000).
109 Nabokov, Pale Fire, p. 81, p. 236.
110 Nabokov, Pale Fire, p. 71.
111 Nabokov, Pale Fire, p. 117.
112 Nabokov, Pale Fire, p. 116.
113 Nabokov, Pale Fire, p. 232.
114 Nabokov, Pale Fire, p. 240.
115 Nabokov, Pale Fire, p. 243.
116 Philip Pullman, Northern Lights (London, 1996), p. 134.
117 Dino Buzzati, La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia (Milan, 1945; reprinted Milan,
2002).
118 Dino Buzzati, Il Deserto dei Tartari (Milan, 1945), trans. by Stuart Hood as The Tartar
Steppe (Manchester, 1985).
119 Claudio Magris, Microcosms, trans. Iain Halliday (London, 1999), p. 197.
120 M. John Harrison, The Course of the Heart (London, 1992), pp. 202–4.
121 Ursula Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World (New York, 1990), p. 171.
122 Reinhard Behrens, Travels to the Archaeological Monuments of Naboland: The North, an
Interim Report (Edinburgh, 1980).
123 Reinhard Behrens in conversation, August 2003.
124 Alan Spence, personal communication.
125 Christabel, part i, lines 15–22. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford and
New York, 1985), p. 67.
126 Roderick Watson, ed., The Poetry of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1995), pp. 262–3, 264–5.
127 Joel Lehtonen, ‘A Happy Day’, trans. by David Barrett in Books from Finland, xv/4,
1981, pp. 142–7.
128 Lehtonen, ‘A Happy Day’, p. 143.
129 Lehtonen, ‘A Happy Day’, p. 144.
130 Lehtonen, ‘A Happy Day’, p. 146.
131 Lehtonen, ‘A Happy Day’, p. 147.
132 Ingmar Bergman, Four Screenplays, trans. Lars Malstrom and David Kushner
(London, 1960).
133 Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, lines 1167–75, trans. John Northam (Oslo and Oxford,
1973), p. 110.
134 Sabine Rewald, Caspar David Friedrich: Moonwatchers (New York, 2001), p. 16.
135 Tove Jansson, The Summer Book, trans. Thomas Teal (Harmondsworth, 1977).
136 Jansson, Summer Book, p. 112.
137 Jansson, Summer Book, p. 113.
138 Jansson, Summer Book, p. 116.
139 Tove Jansson, Moominsummer Madness, trans. Thomas Warburton
(Harmondsworth, 1971).

262
140 Elizabeth Gaynor, Scandinavia, Living Design (London, 1987), pp. 64–72.
141 Tove Jansson, Finn Family Moomintroll, trans. Elizabeth Portch (Harmondsworth,
1961), p. 126.
142 Jansson, Finn Family Moomintroll, p. 127.
143 Jansson, Finn Family Moomintroll, p. 142.
144 Tove Jansson, Moominpappa at Sea, trans. Kingsley Hart (London, 1974), pp. 14–15.
145 Emma Tennant, Wild Nights (London, 1981), pp. 5–6.
146 Tennant, Wild Nights, pp. 69–70, 97.
147 Douglas Dunn, Northlight (London, 1988), p. 18.
148 Dunn, Northlight, p. 19.
149 Dunn, Northlight, p. 21.
150 ‘Band of Shearers’, in Norman Buchan and Peter Hall, The Scottish Folksinger
(London and Glasgow, 1973), p. 79.
151 Buchan and Hall, The Scottish Folksinger, p. 111.
152 Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols (New York,
1965), vol.iv, p. 360.
153 ‘Bold Riley’, see the following Reference (no. 154) for most of the ‘John Riley’
ballads. An unique, common-time version of the shanty is on Step Outside (bake
cd001), track 10.
154 The Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection, ed. Patrick Shuldham-Shaw and Emily
B. Lyle (Aberdeen and Edinburgh, 1981), vol. i, pp. 49–52.
155 Tristiae, v. 7, trans. David R. Slavitt, Ovid’s Poetry of Exile (Baltimore, ma, and
London, 1990), p. 104.
156 Tristiae, iii. 4, Slavitt, Ovid’s Poetry of Exile, p. 51.
157 Tristiae, iii. 10, Slavitt, Ovid’s Poetry of Exile, p. 61.
158 Arthur Waley, trans., Chinese Poems (London, 1946), p. 43.
159 Jack London, ‘ In a Far Country’, in Tales of The North (Secaucus, nj, 1979), p. 139.
160 Edna Kenton, ed., Black Gown and Redskins (London, 1956), p. 75.
161 Osip Mandelstam, ‘Tristia’, in Tristia, trans. Bruce McClelland (Barrytown, ny,
1987), p. 40. See Ovid, Tristiae, i. 3, trans. Slavitt, Ovid’s Poetry of Exile, pp. 10–13.
162 Mandelstam, Tristia, p. 56.
163 Morley, Mandelstam Variations, p. 40.
164 Morley, Mandelstam Variations, p. 69.
165 Morley, Mandelstam Variations, p. 70.
166 W. P. Ker, Collected Essays, 2 vols (London, 1925), vol. ii, pp. 123–4.
167 R. L. Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters, part i, chapter iv (New York, 1902).
168 For a general guide to the English ghost story it would be hard to better Glen
Cavaliero, The Supernatural and English Fiction (Oxford and New York, 1995).
169 John Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme in Three Prose Works, ed. John
Buchanan-Brown (Fontwell, Sussex, 1972), pp. 176–8.
170 Knut Liestol Guthmund, ‘Draumkvæde’, Studia Norvegica, i/3 (1946), p. 11; Bengt R.
Jonsson, The Ballad and Oral Literature (Cambridge, ma, 1991), p. 167.
171 Paul B. Taylor and W. H. Auden, The Elder Edda: A Selection (London, 1969),
pp. 101–5.
172 Marijke Spies, Arctic Routes to Fabled Lands (Amsterdam, 1997), p. 94.
173 Njal’s Saga, chapter 78, p. 173.
174 Njal’s Saga, chapter 130, p. 271. A more recent translator has attempted a rendering
of the verse in full, working through its ferociously allusive and kenning-ridden
second part to produce a complete reading. By the kindness of Professor Andrew
Wawn, I have a report on where the crux now stands. ‘Robert Cook’s translation
(drawing on the learned counsel of a Russian scholar of skaldic verse, Yelena
Yershova, also in Rekyavik) reads:

Gunn of gold will not hold back

the gushing tears from her brow
over the sparring of spears
of the spirited shield-warrior,

263
 when the allies of the edge
exulted in the slaughter –
I boldly sing this song –
and spears tried in wounds cried out.

I must stress, though, that this is a translation of the partly reconstructed verse as
it appears in the Íslenzk Fornrit edition of the saga done in 1953 by Einar Ólafur
Sveinsson. These editions carry the same considerable authority as, say, the Early
English Text Society in Britain, but the new philology had assuredly not arrived in
Iceland in 1953.’
175 Grettir’s Saga, chapter 32, trans. G. H. Hight (London, 1965), p. 90.
176 Grettir’s Saga, chapter 35, pp. 98–9
177 There is one ghost story from the sagas where at least Christian apotropaeia
appear to work: in Gautrek’s Saga the Christian trickster and giant Thorstien
(‘Thorstien-as-big-as-a-house’) is troubled at his farm of Gripaluend by the
corporeal and destructive ghost of his father-in-law Earl Agni. The ghost is
strong enough to destroy a timber farmstead and continues to haunt the rebuilt
house. As usual in Icelandic narrative, the account of the haunting is devastat-
ingly casual: ‘One night, Thorstein got out of bed and saw Agni wandering
about, but Agni didn’t dare to go through any of the gates as there was a cross
on every one of them.’ Thorstein seizes the initiative and goes to Agni’s barrow,
which is casually standing open. Thorstein steals from the barrow the pagan
grave goods. They are referred to as ‘whitings’, probably precious goblets. The
ghost of Agni comes back into the mound; Thorstein slides out past him – not
an agreeable thought, giving an aptganga the slip in the narrow passage of a
grave mound – and puts a cross on the doorway, after which the barrow
remains closed and the ghost of Earl Agni is never seen again.
178 Eeva-Liisa Manner, ‘Mistponies’, trans. Herbert Lomas in On the Border: New
Writing from Finland, ed. Hildi Hawkins and Soila Lehtonen (Manchester, 1995),
pp. 83–5.
179 M. R. James, ‘O Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, in The Oxford Book of Ghost
Stories, ed. Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert (Oxford and New York, 1986), pp. 214–15.
180 A. E. Housman, ‘In midnights of November’, in Poems, ed. Archie Burnett
(Oxford, 1997), p. 88. and footnote, pp. 389–90.
181 Housman, Poems, note pp. 389–90.
182 This marked-up copy is in Cornell University Library, call number Rare pr4809
h15 a68 1922.c2.
183 Martinus Nijhoff, Verzameld Werk, 3 vols (Amsterdam, 1954–61), vol. i, p. 95.
184 Sylvia Townsend Warner, Letters, ed. William Maxwell (New York, 1983), p. 7.
185 Hugh Kenner, ed., The Translations of Ezra Pound (London, 1953), pp. 286–98.
186 Kenner, Translations, p. 291.
187 Kenner, Translations, p. 293.
188 Kenner, Translations, p. 297.
189 Kenner, Translations, p. 298.
190 W. B. Yeats, The Collected Plays (London, 1963), p. 445.
191 Bucknell, Juvenilia, p. 235.

iii topographies
1 Peter Høeg, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (London, 1993).
2 Marijke Spies, Arctic Routes to Fabled Lands (Amsterdam, 1997), pp. 103–4.
3 J. T. Oleson, Early Voyages and Northern Approaches (Toronto, 1963), pp. 70–86.
4 Helge Ingstad, Westward to Vinland (London, 1969), pp. 92–3.
5 ‘Homines ibi a salo cerulei, unde et regio illa nomen accepit’ They are the colour of
the deep ocean (as observed in the phrase ‘blue-water sailing’). Ingstad, Westward
to Vinland, pp. 92–3.

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 6 Spies, Arctic Routes, p. 29; The Vinland Sagas, trans. Magnus Magnusson and
Hermann Pálsson (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 101–2.
7 Jane Smiley, ed., Sagas of the Icelanders (London, 1997), pp. 717–22.
8 Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, eds, The London Encyclopedia, 2nd edn
(London, 1993), p. 896.
9 Neil Kent, The Soul of the North (London, 2000), p. 305.
10 Julian Freeman, ed., Landscapes from a High Latitude: Icelandic Art, 1909–1989
(London and Reykyavik, 1989), especially pp. 25–30.
11 The Collected Works of William Morris, viii (London, 1911), pp. 10–11.
12 Morris, Collected Works, viii, p. 11
13 Morris, Collected Works, viii, p. 15.
14 Letter, 16 July 1871; Morris, Collected Works, viii, p. xvii.
15 Morris, Collected Works, viii, p. 45.
16 Morris, Collected Works, viii, p. 207.
17 Morris, Collected Works, viii, p. 170
18 Morris, Collected Works, viii, p. 108.
19 Quoted in Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians (Woodbridge, 2002), p. 254.
20 Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, p. 254.
21 Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, p. 254.
22 Wawn, Vikings and Victorians, p. 254.
23 Neil Kent, The Triumph of Light and Nature (London, 1987), pp. 125–6.
24 Kent, Light and Nature, p. 168.
25 Hildi Hawkins, private communication.
26 Japanese proverbs: I owe these references to the kindness of Yoko Kawaguchi.
27 Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, trans. Nobuyuki
Yuasa (Harmondsworth, 1966), introduction, pp. 36–7.
28 Mark J. Hudson, Ruins of Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Japanese Islands (Honolulu,
1999), p. 1.
29 Bashō, The Narrow Road, pp. 105–6.
30 Bashō, The Narrow Road, p. 116.
31 Carmen Blacker, The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan (London,
1975), pp. 83, 159.
32 Bashō, The Narrow Road, p. 118.
33 Bashō: poem, quoted from Hudson, Ruins of Identity, p. 1.
34 Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella, An Duanaire / Poems of the Dispossed
(Portlaoise, 1985), pp. 194–5.
35 Hudson, Ruins of Identity, p. 3.
36 Personal communications, 1999, from Varavadi Vonsangah Monaghan.
37 Hudson, Ruins of Identity, pp. 4–6.
38 Hudson, Ruins of Identity, p. 30.
39 Fred C. C. Peng and Peter Geiser, The Ainu: The Past in the Present (Hiroshima,
1982), p. 19.
40 Hudson, Ruins of Identity, pp. 224–5.
41 Spies, Arctic Routes to Fabled Lands, p. 45.
42 Jonathan Spence, The Emperor of China (London, 1974), pp. 12–13.
43 Arthur Waley, trans., Chinese Poems (London, 1946), p. 37.
44 A. C. Graham, ed. and trans., Poems of the Late T’ang (Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 97.
45 Arthur Waley, The Secret History of the Mongols (London, 1963), p. 37.
46 ‘Snow Song made when parting with Assessor Wu on his return to the Capital’, in
The White Pony, ed. Robert Payne (New York, 1947), p. 180; this translation is by
Yuan Chia-hua.
47 J. D. Frodsham and Ch’end Hsi, An Anthology of Chinese Verse, Han Wei Chain and
the Northern and Southern Dynasties (Oxford, 1967), p. 90.
48 Frodsham and Ch’end, An Anthology of Chinese Verse, p. 184.
49 Arthur Waley, Yuan Mei (London, 1956), p. 125.
50 Waley, Yuan Mei, p. 125.
51 Waley, Yuan Mei, p. 125.

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52 Waley, Yuan Mei, p. 126.
53 Mildred Cable and Francesca French, Through Jade Gate and Central Asia (London,
1929), pp. 134–5.
54 http://www.longmarchfoundation.org/english
55 Wolfram Eberhard, Chinese Festivals (London and New York, 1958), p. 63.
56 http://www.chinaetravel.com/china/fice.html
57 Natalie Zemon Davies, Women on the Margins (Cambridge, ma, 1995), p. 77.
58 Jacques Cartier, quoted by Robertson Davies, ‘Literature in a Country without a
Mythology’, in The Merry Heart (London, 1996), p. 45.
59 John Buchan, Sick Heart River [1940] (Oxford, 1994), p. 54.
60 Frederick Housser, quoted in Christopher Jackson, Lawren Harris. North by West:
The Arctic and Rocky Mountains (Calgary, 1991), p. 15.
61 Quoted from Margaret Atwood, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian
Literature (Oxford, 1995), pp. 15–16.
62 Davies, ‘Literature’, p. 49.
63 Robertson Davies, Murther & Walking Spirits (London, 1991), pp. 169–70.
64 Mavis Gallant, ‘Up North’, in Home Truths (Toronto, 1981), pp. 49–55.
65 Lovat Dickson, Wilderness Man: The Strange Story of Grey Owl (Toronto and
London, 1974), p. 5.
66 Atwood, Strange Things, pp. 44–51.
67 Anthology compiled by W. J. Alexander, Shorter Poems (Toronto, 1924), cited in
Davies, The Merry Heart, p. 8.
68 Atwood, Strange Things, p. 62.
69 All quotations from Glenn Gould, The Idea of North, in Glenn Gould’s Solitude
Trilogy, cbc Records, pscd 2002–3 (Toronto, 1992).
70 Anne Newlands, The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson (Willowdale, 1995), pp. 19,
55; see also Jackson, Lawren Harris, p. 23.
71 Roald Nasgaard, The Mystic North: Symbolist Landscape Painting in Northern Europe
and North America, 1890–1940, exh. cat., Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, 1984).
72 Jackson, Lawren Harris, pp. 7–9, quotation on the Rockies, p. 13
73 Jackson, Lawren Harris, p. 32.
74 Toronto Star, quoted in Jackson, Lawren Harris, p. 33.
75 David Barbour, The Landscape: Eight Canadian Photographers, exh. cat., 20,
McMichael Canadian Art Collection (Toronto, 1990).
76 Paul Apak Angilirq, Atanarjuat the Fast Runner (Toronto, 2002).
77 Norman Hallendy, Inuksuit: Silent Messengers of the Arctic (London, 2000).
78 Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 81–2.
79 Adrienne Clarkson, ‘Russia and Canada: Polar Partners Shaped by our North,
Globe and Mail, 1 October 2003.
80 Knut Erik Jensen, Cool and Crazy, 2001, Norsk film as.
81 Humphrey Spender, Worktown People: Photographs from Northern England, 1937–8,
ed. Jeremy Mulford (Bristol, 1982), p. 16.
82 Illustrated in Deborah Frizzel, Humphrey Spender’s Humanist Landscapes: Photo-
Documents, 1932–1942 (New Haven, ct, 1997), p. 32.
83 Michael Leber and Judith Sandling, L .S. Lowry (London, 1987), pp. 21–2.
84 Reactions to Lowry in terms of popular enthusiasm and professional disdain
are at one only in their intensity: one admired contemporary painter said, in all
seriousness, that he would not read this book if Lowry was so much as mentioned
in it. This paradox is discussed in Leber and Sandling, Lowry, p. 88.
85 Leber and Sandling, Lowry, p. 88.
86 Compare Leber and Sandling, Lowry, fig. 8, the drawing The River Irwell at the
Adelphi, 1924 (at Salford) with pl. 16, the painting River Scene or Industrial
Landscape, 1935 (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne).
87 Frizzel, Humphrey Spender, pp. 42–3.
88 Frizzel, Humphrey Spender, p. 42.
89 Newcastle United image reproduced with special thanks to Humphrey Spender.
90 Sean O’Brien, ‘Autumn Begins at St James’s Park, Newcastle’, Ghost Train (Oxford

266
 and New York, 1995), p. 9.
91 Simon Armitage, ‘Lest We Forget’, CloudCuckoo Land (London and Boston, ma,
1997), p. 15.
92 Simon Armitage, The Dead Sea Poems (London, 1995), pp. 16–17.
93 Geoffrey Hill, ‘Damon’s Lament for his Clorinda, Yorkshire, 1654’, Tenebrae
(London, 1978), p. 23.
94 Philip Larkin, ‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’, Collected Poems, ed.
Anthony Thwaite (London, 1988), p. 163.
95 Angela Carter, ‘Industry as Artwork’, Nothing Sacred (London, 1982), p. 62.
96 Carter, Nothing Sacred, p. 66.
97 ‘Bridge for the Living’, Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 203.
98 Carter, Nothing Sacred, p. 6.
99 A phenomenon whose degrees of authenticity range from generic television
advertisements for Hovis bread to the act of poised recollection in Simon
Armitage’s ‘Lest we forget’ (CloudCuckoo Land, pp. 15–16.)
100 Ian Duhig, Nominies (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1998), p. 63.
101 Larkin, ‘Show Saturday’, Collected Poems, p. 200.
102 Larkin, ‘Show Saturday’, Collected Poems, pp. 200–201.
103 Ted Hughes, ‘Dawn’s Rose’, Crow, from the Life and Songs of the Crow (London,
1970), p. 48.
104 Simon Armitage in conversation, 1998.
105 ‘Simon Armitage, ‘Snow Joke’, Zoom! (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1989), p. 9.
106 Simon Armitage, All Points North (London, 1998), pp. 16–17.
107 Simon Armitage, Kid (London, 1992), p. 3.
108 Armitage, CloudCuckoo Land, p. 53.
109 Simon Armitage, The Universal Home Doctor (London, 2002), p. 6.
110 Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell, Moon Country: Further Reports from Iceland
(London, 1996), p. 8.
111 Armitage and Maxwell, Moon Country, p. 37.
112 Armitage and Maxwell, Moon Country, p. 81; yorkshire on the sand, pl. 14, facing
p. 89.
113 Armitage, All Points North, p. 246.
114 Simon Armitage, The Dead Sea Poems (London, 1995), p. 56.
115 Armitage, The Dead Sea Poems, pp. 32–4, and see Samuel Laycock, Warblin’s fro’ an
Owd Songster (Oldham, London and Manchester, 1893), pp. 9–10. Laycock ends his
consideration of the rich and poor man by hoping that they will meet happily in
heaven; Armitage ends: ‘That way, on the day they dig us out/ they’ll know that
you were something really fucking fine/and I was nowt./Keep that in
mind,/because the worm won’t know your make of bone from mine.’
116 Armitage, CloudCuckoo Land, p. 27.
117 Armitage, CloudCuckoo Land, p. 81.
118 Armitage, Killing Time (London, 1999), p. 52.
119 Glyn Maxwell, The New Republic, 2 June 2003, p. 36. My thanks to Liam
McIlvanney for this reference.
120 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. W.R.J. Barron (Manchester, 2001), pp. 68–9.
121 Sir Gawain, pp. 142–3.
122 Sir Gawain, pp. 154–5.
123 David Morley, ‘Clearing a Name’, Scientific Papers (Manchester, 2002), pp. 26–7.
124 Aldcliffe Hall is now demolished; the stone survives in the Lancaster Museum. Cf.
Sharon Lambert, Monks, Martyrs and Mayors (Lancaster, n.d.).
125 Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Lancashire 2, The Rural North
(Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 94.
126 Pevsner, Lancashire 2, pp. 96–9.
127 John Murray, Reiver Blues – A New Border Apocalypse (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1996),
p. 214.
128 Thomas Bewick, A Memoir, ed. Iain Bain (Oxford, 1979), p. 23.
129 Harold Wright, The Etched Work of F. L. Griggs (London, 1941), pl. x; commentary

267
 on the plate, pp. 23–4.
130 F. A. Comstock, A Gothic Vision: F. L. Griggs and his Work (Boston, ma, and Oxford,
1976), pp. 155–6.
131 Sean O’Brien, ‘Poem Written on a Hoarding’, Ghost Train (Oxford and New York,
1995), p. 16.
132 W. N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis, eds, Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern
Poetry (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2000) p. 237.
133 Herbert and Hollis, Strong Words, pp. 239–40.
134 Sean O’Brien, ‘The Park by the Railway’, The Indoor Park (Newcastle upon Tyne,
1993), p. 16.
135 O’Brien, HMS Glasshouse (Oxford and New York, 1991), pp. 51–2.
136 O’Brien, Indoor Park, p. 16.
137 O’Brien, ‘Paysage (a Long Way) after Baudelaire’, Ghost Train, p. 33.
138 O’Brien, ‘After Laforgue (in Memory of Martin Bell)’, HMS Glasshouse, pp. 53–4.
139 O’Brien, ‘Coming Home’, HMS Glasshouse, p. 47
140 O’Brien, ‘Captain January, HMS Glasshouse, p. 24.
141 O’Brien, ‘Terra Nova’, The Frighteners, p. 25.
142 O’Brien, ‘Coming Home’, HMS Glasshouse, p. 47.
143 Nikolaus Pevsner, Cumberland and Westmoreland (Harmondsworth, 1967), pp. 68–9.
144 Patrick Keiller, Robinson in Space (London, 1999), pp. 199–203; this is the printed
version of the last five minutes of his film of the same name.
145 Edwin Muir, ‘Scotland’s Winter’, The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse, ed. Tom Scott
(Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 430.
146 The Palace at Culross is fully discussed in Michael Bath, Renaissance Decorative
Painting in Scotland (Edinburgh, 2003), pp. 57–78.
147 Wormiston: part of the palpable strangeness of this fortified house in a dense wood
with sea on either side is the way in which (quite apart from having a curse on it,
which appears to be effective) it has hitherto eluded all the inventories. At time of
writing it was absent from the old Survey of Fife, from McGibbon and Ross’s monu-
mental The Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1887–92),
and from John Gifford’s Fife volume in The Buildings of Scotland.
148 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale (London, 1924),
p. 92.
149 Douglas Dunn, Northlight (London, 1988), p. 8.
150 Dunn, Northlight, p. 9.
151 O’Brien, HMS Glasshouse, p.24.
152 Dunn, Northlight, p. 42.
153 Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (London, 1991), p. 29.
154 Dunn, Northlight, p. 42.
155 Kathleen Jamie, ‘The Way We Live’, in The New Poetry, ed. Michael Hulse, David
Kennedy and David Morley (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1993), p. 318.
156 Andrew Greig The Order of the Day (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1990), p. 16.
157 Andrew Greig, The Return of John Macnab (London, 1996), p. 20
158 Greig, The Return, p. 99.
159 Urquhart: there is still no comprehensive study of this compelling, evasive figure,
master of the prospectus, the shifty promise and the uncompleted text. He did,
however, complete the family tree of the Urquharts which begins: ‘God the Father,
Son and Holy Ghost, who were from all eternity, did in the time of nothing create
red earth; of red earth framed Adam.’ The Works of Sir Thomas Urquhart
(Edinburgh, 1834), p. 155. The date stone from Cromarty, dating the castle by at
least four systems of chronology, and some emblematic carved panelling, also
from Cromarty, survive at Craigston Castle in Aberdeenshire.
160 Giuseppe Ungaretti, from ‘Giorno per giorno’, in The Penguin Book of Italian Verse,
ed. George R. Kay (Harmondsworth, 1969) p. 380.
161 W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland (London, 1937), p. 236.

268
Acknowledgements

Winifred Stevenson has made an extraordinary contribution to this book, which the
dedication hardly begins to acknowledge. She has been my oracle on all matters to do
with northern antiquity, Old Norse and Old English (not to mention Medieval Welsh
and Chinese).
I am very grateful to Professor Edward Mendelson both in propria persona, as scholar
and editor of W. H. Auden, and as literary executor of Auden’s estate; I am also much
indebted to the flawless scholarly work of Katherine Bucknell, which makes working on
early Auden a pleasure; I should also acknowledge Alan Myers and Robert Forsythe for
their pioneering work on Auden’s early topographies. Professor Andrew Wawn of the
University of Leeds, both in his published work and in kind and patient correspon-
dence, has greatly added to my knowledge of nineteenth-century attitudes to the Old
North; he also opened the way to further investigations of the Icelandic interests of
Auden’s father.
Anne Ullmann has been exceptionally kind in giving me information on her father,
Eric Ravilious, and in giving me permission to quote from two of his unpublished
letters. Alan Powers has helped me vastly, as he always does, particularly from his
unrivalled knowledge of Ravilious and his context.
I am most grateful to the living artists who have given generous permission for the
reproduction of their works in this book: Reinhard Behrens and Dalziel and Scullion.
They could not have been kinder, nor more encouraging.
Stephen Bann offered vital encouragement at the start of this project, as did
Jonathan Key and Andrew Gordon. Harry Gilonis and Robert Williams at Reaktion
Books have been equally encouraging at its end.
I am grateful also to the Ravilious estate, to Trine-Lise Stavnes and to the estate of the
late James McIntosh Patrick for permissions to reproduce illustrations, and to Shirley
Sawtell of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, who has kindly supplied one
of her own photographs. My thanks also to the following institutions and agencies:
Aberdeen Art Galleries and Museums; Noordbrabants Museum, s’Hertogenbosch,
Netherlands, with special thanks to Helmie van Limpt, Nasjonalgaleriet, Oslo; the
Reykjavik Art Museum, with particular thanks to Thorbjorn Gunnars-dottir; the
National Gallery of Iceland, with particular thanks to Svanfridur Franklins-dottir; The
McManus Gallery, Dundee; The Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne; Kunsthalle,
Hamburg; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Carlisle Public Library; Myndstef,
dacs.
Jeffrey Debany of The Snow Show has offered interest and encouragement as well as
his own fine photograph.
The Norwegian Film Institute in Oslo have been extraordinarily efficient and
exceptionally helpful.
This book has been written at a time of ill-health which has generated its own set of
obligations: to the Turriff Medical Practice above all, and to the friends who have trav-
elled, taken notes, or found books or photographs for me. Nick Graham climbed Pillar
Rock for me (and reported that Auden’s mountaineer hero is quite right about the
extent of the view); Hildi Hawkins has contributed vastly on Finland and the whole
view north; Soila Lehtonen has sent me essential books from Helsinki. Dirk Sinnewe
in Germany has been most generous with texts and ideas. In northern Italy, Laura Tosi
and Renato Campaci, with their family and circle, have been endlessly generous, as

269
has Flavio Gregori. Loredana Polezzi and Jon Howes have been most kind with books,
articles and ideas. Pat Brückmann and Howard Hotson have been immensely kind
with finding, lending and giving me Canadian material. Yoko Kawaguchi and Simon
Rees have been generous in sharing books and ideas about Japan. Tine Wanning and
Allan MacInnes have offered endless encouragment and material on Denmark and
northern Scotland. Anna Maija and Tom Rist have been most generous with Finnish
material. Colm O’Baoill has kindly lent me Gaelic texts, David Duff Gothick ones. Will
Oxer has been a tireless driver on obscure northern expeditions, inevitably under-
taken in nasty weather.
I am indebted for conversation and hospitality to Finlay Lockie, Annie and Hugh
Buchanan; Annie and Eddy Coulson; Helen Gardiner; Alison Shell; Petra and Arnold
Hunt; Jill and Stephen Wolfe. A few years ago, Simon Armitage answered an unrea-
sonable number of topographic questions with great good humour. Those who have
read drafts, have also contributed their own ideas and knowledge (only the errors are
mine); my especial thanks to Marcus Gibson; Pat Hanley; Carol Morley; Dominic
Montserrat and Michael Wyatt. Alan Spence read drafts and returned good for evil by
giving me an unpublished verse of his own.
Michael Leaman at Reaktion talked this book into being; if it catches some of the
excitement of that conversation, I will be well pleased. There are other conversations,
sustained over many years, which have been of great importance to me and to this book
– with Pat Brückmann, Andrew Biswell, Hildi Hawkins, Jonathan Key, Dominic
Montserrat, David Morley, Alan Powers, Adriaan van der Weel.
Janey Stevenson has made this book: it is literally impossible to quantify how
much she has contributed to it; it is hers as much as mine.

270
Photographic Acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the following sources of
illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. Where no locations are given
for artworks illustrated, they are in private collections.

Photos William Bain: pp. 8, 39, 85, 119, 201, 227; © Reinhard Behrens, 2003: p. 119;
British Museum, London (Department of Japanese Antiquities, 1948.7-10.08.1),
photo © The Trustees of the British Museum: p. 179; Carlisle Public Library (Local
History Collection): p. 85; City of Aberdeen Art Galleries and Museums Collection
(photo Aberdeen Art Galleries Photographic Service): p. 101; © Dalziel and Scullion,
2003: p. 8; photo © Jeffrey Debany: p. 74; Fitzwilliam Museum, University of
Cambridge (photo Fitzwilliam Museum Photographic Service): p. 44; Kunsthalle,
Hamburg/bpk, Berlin (photo Elke Walford): p. 45; Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle
upon Tyne (photo Tyne and Wear Museums Service/© Estate of Eric Ravilious,
2003; All rights reserved, DACS): p. 100; McManus Gallery, Dundee (photo Dundee
Art Galleries and Museums, courtesy of Andrew McIntosh Patrick, © the Estate
of James McIntosh Patrick): p. 249; by kind permission of Prof Edward Mendelson,
for the estate of W. H. Auden: p. 85; Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo (photo J. Lathion/
Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo/© Estate of Harald Sohlberg): p. 123; Noordbrabants Museum,
s'Hertogenbosch, Netherlands: pp. 15, 52; Reykjavik Art Museum (photos Reykjavik
Art Museum): pp. 166 (Kjarvalsstadir/© Myndstef), 169; Scott Polar Research
Institute, University of Cambridge (photo Shirley Sawtell): p. 197; © Humphrey Spender,
2003: p. 205.

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