Extreme North: A Cultural History
-
- $41.99
-
- $41.99
Publisher Description
An entertaining and informative voyage through cultural fantasies of the North, from sea monsters and a mountain-sized magnet to racist mythmaking.
Scholars and laymen alike have long projected their fantasies onto the great expanse of the global North, whether it be as a frozen no-man’s-land, an icy realm of marauding Vikings, or an unspoiled cradle of prehistoric human life. Bernd Brunner reconstructs the encounters of adventurers, colonists, and indigenous communities that led to the creation of a northern “cabinet of wonders” and imbued Scandinavia, Iceland, and the Arctic with a perennial mystique.
Like the mythological sagas that inspired everyone from Wagner to Tolkien, Extreme North explores both the dramatic vistas of the Scandinavian fjords and the murky depths of a Western psyche obsessed with Nordic whiteness. In concise but thoroughly researched chapters, Brunner highlights the cultural and political fictions at play from the first “discoveries” of northern landscapes and stories, to the eugenicist elevation of the “Nordic” phenotype (which in turn influenced America’s limits on immigration), to the idealization of Scandinavian social democracy as a post-racial utopia. Brunner traces how crackpot Nazi philosophies that tied the “Aryan race” to the upper latitudes have influenced modern pseudoscientific fantasies of racial and cultural superiority the world over.
The North, Brunner argues, was as much invented as discovered. Full of glittering details embedded in vivid storytelling, Extreme North is a fascinating romp through both actual encounters and popular imaginings, and a disturbing reminder of the power of fantasy to shape the world we live in.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Brunner (Taming Fruit) explores "the North" as a place "both real and imaginary" in this captivating and wide-ranging account. He notes that ancient Greeks and Romans viewed the North as "a realm of cold and darkness, devoid of sunlight and inimical to life," and documents how histories of the fall of Rome and ninth-century Viking attacks on Constantinople and Paris gave rise to the image of Nordic peoples as "fearsome barbarians." Explorers' accounts and trade in cod, whale blubber, amber, and other commodities gradually changed the image of the North, and in the 18th- and 19th-century, many German and English poets, composers, and philosophers came to view the North as an "imagined homeland." (William Morris, a leader of the arts and crafts movement, went so far as to teach himself Icelandic.) Brunner also delves into 18th-century Scottish poet James Macpherson's Works of Ossian, which he falsely attributed to a "third-century Scottish bard," and French novelist Joseph Arthur de Gobineau's racist ideas about the "Aryan" north, which helped fuel anti-Semitism in Europe and the U.S. Erudite yet accessible, and packed with intriguing arcana, this cultural history fascinates.
