Book description
Joanna Kavenna went north in search of the Atlantis of the Arctic, the
mythical land of Thule. Seen once by an Ancient Greek explorer and never
found again, mysterious Thule came to represent the vast and empty
spaces of the north. Fascinated for many years by Arctic places, Kavenna
decided to travel through the lands that have been called Thule, from
Shetland to Iceland, Norway, Estonia, and Greenland. On her journey, she
found traces of earlier writers and travellers, all compelled by the
idea of a land called Thule: Richard Francis Burton, William Morris,
Anthony Trollope, as well as the Norwegian Polar explorer Fridtjof
Nansen. She met wilderness-lovers; poets writing epics about ice; Inuit
musicians and Polar scientists trying to understand the silent snows.
But she came to discover that a darkness also inhabits Thule: the Thule
Society, obsessed with the purity of the Nordic peoples; the 'war
children' - the surviving progeny of Nazi attempts to foster an Aryan
race; as well as ice-bound relics of the Cold War. Finally she arrived
in Svalbard, a beautiful Arctic archipelago, at the edge of the frozen
ocean. Blending travelogue, reportage, memoir, and literary essay,
Joanna Kavenna explores the changing life of the far North in the 20th
Century. The Ice Museum is a mesmerising story of idealism and ambition,
wars and destruction, survival and memories, set against the haunting
backdrop of the northern landscape. Joanna Kavenna teaches at St
Antony's College, Oxford University. This is her first book
