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Frozen in Time

The ice-bound lands of mythology and history.

Apr 30, 2007, Vol. 12, No. 31 • By LAWRENCE KLEPP
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The Ice Museum

by Joanna Kavenna

Viking, 293 pp., $24.95

Quests have a long, distinguished literary history, the most satisfying being the futile ones, from the Grail legends of the Middle Ages up through the Kafka and Beckett characters who surmount many obstacles while getting nowhere. Joanna Kavenna's engaging, meandering book is a quest in pursuit of the futile quest for Thule, the mist-shrouded noplace that has echoed through Western literature and explorers' diaries since ancient times as a kind of far-north anti-Arcadia, an inclement absolute, a utopia without the disadvantage of people--pure, inviolable, empty, and white, the ultimate blank slate.

Thule isn't entirely fictional. It was first mentioned by the Greek explorer Pytheus in the 4th century B.C. He sailed from Marseilles to Britain and then north, getting as far as Thule, he claimed, before turning back, and he probably got as far as somewhere. He said that Thule was a place where sea, sky, and land blurred into one, where there was no night in summer and no light in winter, where the ocean congealed into drifting ice. Shetland Islands? Norway? Iceland? Spitzbergen? Too much aquavit?

No one knows, but the northern mystery seized the Western imagination. As Kavenna recounts the story, Virgil called it Ultima Thule, ancient mapmakers put whimsical outlines of it on their maps, the Roman army that occupied northern Britain claimed to have conquered it, and the geographer Strabo thought Pytheus had made it up, since there could be nothing farther north than Britain, where the inhabitants were always miserable with cold, the only more miserable place being Ireland, where men slept with their sisters and ate their parents.

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