Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough (editor) - Imagining the Supernatural North

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Copyright 2016 The University of Alberta Press

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Imagining the supernatural north / Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Danielle Marie Cudmore & Stefan Donecker, editors.

Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 9781772122671 (paperback). ISBN 9781772122954 (PDF). ISBN 9781772122930 (EPUB). ISBN 9781772122947 (mobi)

1. Supernatural. 2. Folklore. 3. Mythology. 4. Arctic regions. I. Barraclough, Eleanor Rosamund, 1984, editor II. Cudmore, Danielle Marie, 1985, editor III. Stefan, Donecker, 1977, editor

First edition, first printing, 2016.

First electronic edition, 2016.

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Contents

ELEANOR ROSAMUND BARRACLOUGH, DANIELLE MARIE CUDMORE, and STEFAN DONECKER

YAACOV SARIG

MARIA KASYANOVA

Its Supernatural Aspects and Frameworks of Meaning

ATHANASIOS VOTSIS

Supernatural Monsters of the Far North in Medieval Lore

RUDOLF SIMEK

The Development of Supernatural Greenland in the Old Norse Sagas

ELEANOR ROSAMUND BARRACLOUGH

Septentrio and the Monstrous Female Body in Late Medieval Medicine and Theology

BRENDA S. GARDENOUR WALTER

STEFAN DONECKER

Science and Romanticism on the Fringes of Britain

ANGELA BYRNE

SHANE MCCORRISTINE

Ida Pfeiffers Journey to Iceland

JENNIFER E. MICHAELS

The Dissemination of Greenlandic Legends and Myths in the Writings of Hinrich Rink and Knud Rasmussen

SILVIJE HABULINEC

Nabokovs Zembla and Aesthetic Bliss

BRIAN WALTER

Intertextuality and Environmentalism in Philip Pullmans The Golden Compass

DANIELLE MARIE CUDMORE

The Influence of Northern Mythology and Fauna on Contemporary Spiritual Subcultures

JAY JOHNSTON

Semiotic Strategies of Constructing the Supernatural North in Music Subcultures

JAN LEICHSENRING

Daily Ritual Practice in the Supernatural North

ERICA HILL

Introduction

ELEANOR ROSAMUND BARRACLOUGH, DANIELLE MARIE CUDMORE, and STEFAN DONECKER

Into the North Window of my chamber glows the Pole Star with uncanny light. All through the long hellish hours of blackness it shines there. And in the autumn of the year, when the winds from the north curse and whine, and the red-leaved trees of the swamp mutter things to one another in the small hours of the morning under the horned waning moon, I sit by the casement and watch that star. Down from the heights reels the glittering Cassiopeia as the hours wear on, while Charles Wain lumbers up from behind the vapour-soaked swamp trees that sway in the night wind. Just before dawn Arcturus winks ruddily from above the cemetery on the low hillock, and Coma Berenices shimmers weirdly afar off in the mysterious east; but still the Pole Star leers down from the same place in the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey. (Lovecraft 33)

IN H.P. LOVECRAFTS 1920 short story Polaris, among the earliest writings of the visionary pioneer of modern horror literature, the narrator finds himself driven to the verge of insanity by the baleful light of the Pole Star. The insane watching eye draws him into the mysteries of a long-lost Arctic civilization whose downfall and destruction he witnesses in his agitated dreams. As the visions of the imagined Arctic past overwhelm him, the narrator becomes convinced that the mundane life he once lived is merely a dream, and that he is truly part of a doomed Hyperborean civilization.

The spectral presence of the Pole Star in Lovecrafts tale is but one among many septentrional mysteries that have featured in various literary genres across the centuries. H.C. Andersens famous fairy tale followed innocent Gerda on her journey to the utmost North, trying to save her friend from the eponymous and enigmatic Snow Queen. In another Scandinavian classic, Selma Lagerlfs Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils), the title character proceeds to a cave in the furthest North of Sweden, where, with the coming of winter, the summer sun is chased away by the three wolves of the Ice Witch. Representing the limits of human knowledge and experience, the frozen wastes of the Arctic frame the narrative of Mary Shelleys Frankenstein and provide the setting for the final showdown between monster and creator. Even Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre opens with the title character enthralled by descriptions of the remote North in a book on British birds:

Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space, that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of extreme cold. Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through childrens brains, but strangely impressive. (Bront 23)

THE IMAGINATION OF NORTHERNNESS: SYMBOLIC GEOGRAPHIES AND MENTAL MAPS

Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood alluded to these dream-like, otherworldly qualities of the North in her 1987 essay True North: Turning to face north, face the north, we enter our own unconscious. Always, in retrospect, the journey north has the quality of dream (33). Drawing her readers attention to the narrow limits of a purely geographical understanding of this cardinal direction, she demonstrated that the North defied any easy definition:

Where is the north, exactly? Its not only a place but also a direction, and as such its location is relative: to the Mexicans, the United States is the north, to Americans, Toronto is, even though its on roughly the same latitude as Boston. Wherever it is for us, theres a lot of it. (True 32)