The frost giant awakes

For thousands of years, no one knew what lay in the ice around the North Pole. The blanks on the maps fuelled the imaginations of classical writers, who crafted stories of Hyperboreans living in a gaudy paradise, dancing with Apollo and generally misbehaving. As explorers from southern Europe travelled further north — revealing intransigent and not very Hyperborean locals, the Scrithofini, as Procopius called them, who liked to slide through forests with planks of wood stuck to their feet — everything got mixed up: myth and reality, fable and cartography.

As late as 1893, when the Norwegian, Fridtjof Nansen, set off towards the North Pole, various eminent scholars — influenced perhaps by earlier dreams of a northern land of plenty — remained convinced that there was land at the Pole. They warned Nansen that he would run aground. Nansen, equally, set off on his expedition — armed with a theory about ocean currents, which proved to be right — describing himself as a figure in a fairytale, creeping towards an ancient sleeping frost giant, fearful of waking him.

Nansen could still write of the force and magnificence of Arctic nature, of the Pole as a place beyond the reach of man — his own attempt failed — of the eternal ice and its indifference to small struggling humans. The last century has profoundly changed both the Arctic and the myths we cast onto the ice. The most northerly reaches of the globe have been mapped. The second world war proved that nowhere was too frosted and forbidding to be dragged into the conflict. The Arctic lands were occupied by foreign troops, their populations conscripted by opposing armies. During the Cold War the Arctic supplied a vast white hiding place for military secrets: airbases at 80 degrees, nuclear submarines lurking beneath the Pole.