The Ice Museum

Table of Contents

 

 

 

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE ICE MUSEUM

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

Praise for
The Ice Museum

From the U.S.

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

—
Chicago Tribune

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

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

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

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

—
The Christian Science Monitor

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

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

—
Kirkus Reviews

 
From the U.K.

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

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

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

—
The Times
(London)

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

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

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

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

—
Scotland on Sunday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—
The Daily Mail

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

—Colin Thubron

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

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

—Avi Shlaim

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

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England 
First published in Great Britain by Penguin Books Ltd 2005
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2006
Published in Penguin Book (UK) 2006
Published in Penguin Books (USA) 2007 

 
Copyright © Joanna Kavenna, 2005

All rights reserved

eISBN : 978-0-143-03846-7

 
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LIST OF MAPS

FLIGHT

. . . ONLY THE PAST IS IMMORTAL.
 
DECIDE TO TAKE A TRIP, READ BOOKS OF TRAVEL
GO QUICKLY! EVEN SOCRATES IS MORTAL
MENTION THE NAME OF HAPPINESS: IT IS
 
ATLANTIS, ULTIMA THULE, OR THE LIMELIGHT,
CATHAY OR HEAVEN. BUT GO QUICKLY . . .

 
“PERSONAE,” DELMORE SCHWARTZ (1913-1966)

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

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

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

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