as long as it wasn’t windy, you were wrapped up warmly, and you took care not to walk too quickly. My most extreme experiences of cold were probably those times I went to Alta to spend hours freezing by a skating rink. The skaters were our biggest idols in the 1960s. Ice—or snow in the case of the cross-country skiers—was where it was all happening in those days. Norway was a winter nation—the winter nation. “There lies a land of eternal snow,” we would sing as we paraded, flags aloft, amid flurries of snow on May 17.
But the hero of heroes was Fridtjof Nansen, who hadn’t just crossed Greenland on skis—without any certainty that it was actually possible, since there were no aerial or satellite photographs then—but spent several winters in the Arctic Ocean, also something of a hit-or-miss affair. When I went cross-country skiing on the endless Finnmarksvidda, as I often did since we only had school three days a week some years, I’d daydream I was Nansen on his way across the Greenland ice. True, I wasn’t hauling any baggage, I knew the weather would hold for the few hours my trip lasted, and Mom was waiting for me back home with hot cocoa, but I was Nansen all the same. Far ahead of me the west coast of Greenland awaited, along with fame and glory.
It was an almost ecstatic experience to ski across the plateau: nothing but white in all directions as far as the eye could see, just small dwarf and mountain birches dotting the white surface like tiny apostrophes, and here and there the track of a ptarmigan or hare. A view that the Danish scientist Sophus Tromholt, who studied the northern lights and lived in Kautokeino in 1883, described as follows:
Below a white shroud of snow the Land of the Lapps slumbers in its winter sleep. The poor flowers, which a little while ago basked gaily in the sun, have been scattered to the winds, and only the seed remains, buried in the hard frozen earth, longing for far-away Spring, whose gentle breath shall call them into life. The thin birch copses, which used to contribute their share to relieve the desolate landscape with a faint tinge of the colour of Hope, stand enveloped in Nature’s common white garb, woven with the fine threads of filagree hoar frost and glittering ice crystals. The river, too, which spoke so cheeringly in the autumn, is silent, and bound in the iron grasp of King Ice.
Everything slumbers after the short, bright summer’s day; even the wind durst not play with the snow-white cover of Nature’s couch, the very air seems to sleep. Nothing breaks the silence. You may wander for miles over the wastes, but never a sound, save the creak of your foot in the snow, breaks the silence either from heaven or earth.11
This was before snowmobiles shattered the peace of the plateau, and you could hear every tiniest sound in a radius of miles—in other words, almost pure silence. Only the noise of your skis and poles on the snow. And sunbeams coming at you from every angle, reflected by the snow crystals. Never mind that I hadn’t heard of sunscreen and my face ended up covered in sun eczema: that was just part of the deal. No encounter with nature I have experienced since has lived up to Finnmarksvidda in all its winter glory. That said, I haven’t skied across Greenland or Antarctica, and have resigned myself to the fact that I never will.
So my relationship to the cryosphere is largely positive, meaning that in global terms, I form part of a small minority, along with those of my fellow Norwegians who will gladly pay 70,000 Norwegian kroner (about US$8,000) for the privilege of crossing the Greenland ice on a camping trip.
Given my positive winter experiences, it was odd for me to read fairy tales and stories that described it as terrifying and dangerous, a hotbed of evil, like those of Hans Christian Andersen and C. S. Lewis. In Andersen, the wicked Snow Queen steals children and takes them with her up to her realm of frost in the north, where she travels around by reindeer, just like my neighbors the Sami reindeer herders. In the fairy tale, the boy, Kay, is kidnapped by the wicked queen and taken back to her cold palace in the north, and his friend Gerda goes after them to set him free. And in the Narnia books by Lewis, the White Witch casts a spell on Narnia, throwing it into an endless winter, in which Christmas never comes to light up a cold and dreary existence. These kinds of characters and motifs are familiar to children today through Disney films such as Frozen. It is clear that such stories are written in countries where people have rarely had the opportunity to experience the positive sides of winter and know only of its troublesome aspects: like snow-blocked roads and people breaking arms or legs after slipping on the ice.
The frozen world is also a popular backdrop that thriller writers from Agatha Christie to Jo Nesbø have used to sinister effect. Snow provides a setting for the most ghastly crimes and is often the murderers’ accomplice, hiding their tracks when it settles on the ground like a pure, innocent carpet. Snow, ice, and frost also serve as neat metaphors for cold-blooded acts.
Yet it seems that people have a different relationship to snow and frost in Russia, which has proper winters, just as cold as those on Finnmarksvidda, and which has, moreover, been saved by winter twice in its history: first from Napoleon and later from Hitler. Both saw thousands of their soldiers freeze to death on the merciless Russian steppes. It’s hardly surprising that the Russians’ Grandfather Frost was the one who brought children presents, along with his beautiful grandchild, the snow maiden Snegurochka.
Some believe Hans Christian Andersen drew inspiration for the Snow Queen from the Norwegian goddess Skadi, who was actually a Jotun, but married into the family of the Aesir gods when she wedded the sea god Njord. Skadi was happiest in the cold mountains—she was, after all, the goddess of skiers—and so her marriage to the sea god fared badly. But this relationship reflects a Norse understanding of how the world originated from the encounter between cold (Niflheim, the primordial land of darkness and cold) and heat (Muspellsheim, a sea of frothing flames). Between them lay a vast, bottomless abyss, the Ginnungagap. It was here, in the meeting between fire and ice, that everything began; and it was here, too, that the world got a fresh start after Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods. But frost, Niflheim, and its children the Jotuns became the personification of evil, even though the myth acknowledges that the world wouldn’t have existed without them.
The roots of the evil that fairy-tale tellers and crime writers associate with the Snow Queen’s realm probably lie far back in the northern European myths of the migration period. The old Norse sagas of gods and heroes tell how the Aesir, the good guys, had to battle against the evil Jotuns—who, incidentally, weren’t so evil that the Aesir didn’t occasionally mate and have children with them. The fact that the Jotuns and their female counterparts, known as gygrene in Norwegian, came from the Kingdom of Frost is clear from their names, which originated as personifications of the frozen world.
We have Snow the Old (Snær or Snjó in Norse), who is the son of Jokul (glacier) and father to a son, Thorre (black frost), and daughters Fonn (bank of snow), Mjoll (a flurry of fine snow), and Driva (snowdrift). Perhaps all these “children” were originally supposed to be seen as different aspects of Snow, but in the myths, they took on separate roles, only fragments of which are known to us, unfortunately. In some of these, Snow the Old is the king of “Finland”—in this context, the term for northern Scandinavia, about which people knew little other than that it was cold there, with masses of snow. And that other peoples lived there—Finns, Sami, and Kvens—although nobody was quite sure who was who.
As I said, these stories now exist only in fragmentary form, so for a more coherent portrayal of how people in Norse times saw the origin of all things, we must turn to a more modern interpreter of myth, author Tor Åge Bringsværd:
In the beginning there was Cold and Heat. On one side, Niflheim, with frost and fog. On the other, Muspellsheim, a sea of frothing flames. Between them was nothing. Just a great, bottomless abyss: Ginnungagap. Here, in this vast emptiness—midway between light and dark—all life would come into being. In the meeting between ice and fire . . . the snow began slowly to melt, and, formed by Cold but wakened to life by Heat, a wondrous being emerged—an enormous troll. His name was Ymir. No greater giant has ever lived.12
Out of the melting ice grew something else as well: the
