The Arctic in Literature for Children and Young Adults

Heidi Hansson, Maria Leavenworth, Anka Ryall, Heidi Hansson, Maria Leavenworth, Anka Ryall, Heidi Hansson, Maria Lindgren Leavenworth, Anka Ryall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367360801
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000733440
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

As a setting for juvenile literature, the Arctic has traditionally been a space for adventure, the exotic and the fantastic. More recent works have used the Arctic setting to explore a dystopian future, often related to climate change. The aim of the present volume is to examine themes in Arctic juvenile fiction from the early nineteenth century until today. The deceptive image of the Arctic as geographically uniform seems to promise a cultural coherence, but the collection illustrates the diversity of Arctic literature by critically discussing and comparing works written by visitors and settlers as well as by indigenous peoples. The chapters combine macro- and micro-perspectives to interrogate and illuminate the role of Arctic literature for young readers in creating, maintaining and increasingly challenging Arctic myths and motifs.

Part I

Polar History and Its Transformations

1 Polar Icon?

Fridtjof Nansen for Children and Young Adults

Anka Ryall

Although Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930) made only two Arctic expeditions, he has been the personification of “the golden age” of Norwegian polar exploration since 1889. Returning that summer from what was the first successful crossing of the Greenland inland ice on skis, he received a hero’s welcome – an “intense racket” according to a newspaper polemic by the author Knut Hamsun, who pretended not to understand how a mere sporting achievement could justify “such jubilation and ecstasy” (cf. Eglinger 2015, 175–176).¹ Yet this was nothing compared to the festivities greeting Nansen in 1896 when he returned to Norway from a second and even more daring Arctic expedition that had culminated in an attempt to reach the North Pole on skis. Even though he and his companion, Hjalmar Johansen (1867–1913), failed in that endeavour, they had gone further north than anyone before them, and in that sense triumphed. When Nansen’s expedition ship, with the symbolic name Fram (Forward), sailed up the fjord towards the capital Kristiania (Oslo) on 9 September, it was escorted by several warships and a flotilla of small boats full of well-wishers, and the city itself had never seen bigger celebrations (Drivenes and Jølle 2006, 106). Nansen himself was lauded as a modern reincarnation of the heroic Viking spirit.

After each expedition, Nansen consolidated his fame with the publication of a best-selling exploration narrative, Paa ski over Grønland in 1890, followed by Fram over polhavet in 1897, both immediately translated into English and published as The First Crossing of Greenland and Farthest North respectively (Nansen 1890a; 1890b; 1897a; 1897b). Arguably, it was the enduring popularity of these books rather than the expeditions themselves that established Nansen’s iconic status as an embodiment of the grand narrative of Norway as a polar nation. Transformed and adapted into tales for children and young adults, they have mediated the Arctic for several generations of young Norwegians. Over the years, the image of Nansen in these books has changed considerably, with unavoidable implications for the depiction of the historical Arctic setting. While traditionally Nansen has been idealized as the great conqueror of the Arctic wilderness, the focus has shifted to the powerful Arctic itself.

This chapter deals primarily with the image of Nansen in some recent Norwegian illustrated books and graphic narratives addressed to children and young adults. Three of them, published in the 1980s and the 1990s, demonstrate a subversive urge not only to revise the earlier tradition by pulling the icon himself down from his pedestal and making him a figure of fun, but also to deconstruct the very concept of national polar heroism – and simultaneously of the Arctic as an ideal setting for heroic deeds. As “textual transformations” (Lefebvre 2013), they are typical of a general rebellious trend in children’s writing during those particular decades. Moreover, all are “crossover” or “all-ages” books – that is, books with a diverse cross-generational appeal (Beckett 2009). Together with two more recent – and seemingly more straightforward – graphic versions of Nansen’s polar expedition narratives, they undermine the image of Nansen as the supreme national hero, thus revitalizing him for new and presumably less reverent and less patriotic generations of young readers. Paradoxically, though, even the books in which Nansen is parodied, deflated or lampooned affirm his enduring centrality in the national imaginary.

Nansen Idealized

The first children’s book about Nansen, by Jacob Breda Bull, a prolific writer best known for nationalist stories of rural life, was published in 1898, in the wake of Nansen’s own narrative of the Fram expedition (1893–1896). It starts with an account of Nansen’s childhood, which is used to demonstrate the personal qualities that would later make him a hero, and concludes with a rhapsodic report of the 1896 celebrations. Although Nansen is shown to have been exceptional in every way, and even as a boy in possession of “singular powers of endurance and hardiness” (Bull [1898] 1903, 9), the didactic emphasis throughout is on what Norwegian boys can learn by endeavouring to emulate him. Bull sums him up as “a bright model, a glorious pattern of imitation” and – reiterating the Viking theme – as someone who has “recalled to life the hero-life of the saga times among us” and “shown our youth the road to manhood” (Bull [1898] 1903, 132). That same year, a journal entitled Norske gutter (Norwegian Boys), clearly inspired by the British Boy’s Own Paper, was launched with a poem about Nansen as a “measure for body, for spirit” of Norwegian boys on the front cover (Moland 1997, 78–79).² Thus, Nansen’s enthronement as both a national polar icon and a model for Norwegian boys took place almost as soon as the Fram had anchored in Kristiania harbour.

Bull’s book was only the first in a series of explicitly didactic Nansen biographies for boys. It established a pattern that remained unchanged through much of the twentieth century, at least until 1952. That year saw the publication of the third edition of Jon Sørensen’s panegyrical Fridtjof Nansen. En bok for norsk ungdom (Fridtjof Nansen: A Book for Norwegian Youth), in which Nansen is defined as “a source of power for the young generation, a goal, an ideal” (Sørensen [1932] 1952, 6).³ In addition, abbreviated versions of Nansen’s Fram expedition narrative targeted at young readers appeared, for example in Enok Opsund’s book on Norwegian polar expeditions (Opsund 1948), and chapters from his books were incorporated into the national curriculum through school readers (Goksøyr 2013, 566).

Finally, Nansen was used as an idealized role model even in Norwegian children’s books not dealing with Arctic exploits as such. A case in point is Eiliv Skogstad Aamo’s Ørnefjell-guttene (The Boys of Eagle Mountain) (1944), which tells the story of a group of boys who successfully build character by basing their ethics on Nansen’s example as skier, explorer and leader of men. The book’s young protagonist, Knut, views Nansen as the goal of perfection: “All he thought, all he did, he first asked himself whether it was in the spirit of Nansen. Would Nansen have done such and such?” (Aamo 1944, 9).⁴ For 11-year-old Tordis, the oldest of three sisters in Ågot Gjems Selmer’s Smaapigernes bok (The Little Girls’ Book) (1900), in contrast, Nansen can be idolized but not emulated. “I will not talk about how she wears a Nansen cap and a Nansen brooch every day,” comments the narrator, “but Nansen is her hero, and if she had not been a girl, I am sure that she would have followed Nansen’s example and taken a trip up to the North Pole” (Selmer 1900, 34).⁵

Nansen’s presence is felt even in Anglophone children’s literature, the most famous instance being Arthur Ransome’s classic Winter Holiday ([1933] 2013) (see Johan Schimanski’s Chapter 12 in this volume). Like Aamo’s novel, it deals with a group of children who use Nansen as a role model. Forced to prolong their winter holiday in the Lake District because one of them has contracted mumps, they not only mimic Nansen’s Fram expedition by establishing quarters in an abandoned houseboat frozen in the lake, like the Fram in the Arctic Ocean, but also consult his expedition narrative as a complete manual of appropriate conduct in an Arctic environment. In contrast to the Norwegian children’s books, in which Nansen is specifically represented as an exemplar for boys, Ransome’s group of young explorers contains girls as well as boys, and the girls are equally inspired by Nansen’s polar adventures. Most importantly, the poetic descriptions of the polar ice in his narrative of the three-year Fram expedition form the children’s images of the Arctic landscape in its sublimity and “tremendous silence” – thus defamiliarizing a familiar place (Ransome [1933] 2013, 334).

While Winter Holiday transposes Nansen into a British context, making him a generic pioneer of Arctic exploration, in Norwegian books for children and young adults, he is depicted as an archetypically Norwegian hero embodying a glorified version of national history through his role as “pathfinder in the wilderness” (Slettan 2010, 343).⁶ In this sense, the books are representative of Nansen’s almost unchallenged position in Norway (Eriksen 2004, 372–373). Unlike the other famous Norwegian polar explorer, Roald Amundsen (1871–1928), he has never been the subject of significant critique. Indeed, a recent award-winning documentary TV series, Project Nansen, shows that he remains a positive role model for young Norwegians (see Gurholt’s Chapter 13 in this volume).

Nansen Contested

The general consensus about Nansen’s greatness has been contested, particularly in a slew of children’s books published over the past thirty years. Some among them – in very different ways – follow in Nansen’s footsteps. Bjørn Ousland’s informative Nordover. Med Nansen mot Nordpolen (Northbound: With Nansen towards the North Pole) (2008), together with Nansen over Grønland (Nansen across Greenland) (Ousland 2012), a prequel starting with Fridtjof’s childhood, are graphic non-fiction texts that serve as first introductions to Nansen’s Arctic expeditions. Closely following Nansen’s own narratives, they indicate that familiarity with his exploits or first-hand accounts can no longer be taken for granted. At the same time, although the second of Ousland’s books signals a return to the biographical focus of Bull and Sørensen, both downplay the heroic modality of the earlier works. Not only does Nordover foreground the mutual relationship between Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen rather than Nansen’s individual role, but the two explorers are also depicted as rather ordinary and anonymous-looking fellows in their polar outfits. They survive because they are well prepared and collaborate to surmount the many dangers and challenges of the polar trek, and also because they are lucky, but they are not in any respect larger than life.

Tor Bomann-Larsen’s Fridtjof & Hjalmar (1986) and Turen til Nordpolen (The Trip to the North Pole) (Bomann-Larsen 1991) are the most trenchant of the revisionist Nansen books. However, while Øystein Dolmen’s Knutsen & Ludvigsen avslører Fridtjof Nansens falske berømmelse (Knutsen & Ludvigsen Expose Fridtjof Nansen’s False Celebrity) (1994) is lightweight by comparison, it still works on many levels as a fantasy about the volatility of posthumous reputations, even of someone as famous as Nansen. All three are inspired by Nansen’s own book about the Fram expedition and, like Ousland’s Nordover, they highlight the most spectacular part of the narrative, the attempt to ski to the North Pole. Moreover, all of the illustrations rely for comic effect on the well-known iconic figure of the tall, broad-shouldered and mustachioed Nansen himself and also, particularly in the case of Bomann-Larsen’s books, on the physical contrast between Nansen and his shorter, squarely-built sidekick Johansen.

Nansen Exposed

In Knutsen & Ludviksen avslører Fridtjof Nansens falske berømmelse, which was originally a radio play first presented in 1979, the two alter egos of the popular Norwegian children’s entertainers and singer-songwriters Øystein Dolmen and Gustav Lorentzen, Knutsen and Ludvigsen, function as anti-heroic contemporary mediators of the heroic world of nineteenth-century polar exploration. At its centre is the story of the Fram expedition as told by Knutsen’s grandfather Captain Knutsen, a retired pirate with a wooden leg, who lives with Knutsen and Ludvigsen in a tunnel underneath an unnamed Norwegian city. He claims that it was in fact he, not Nansen, who led the expedition to the North Pole – a goal he also states that they had actually reached. While Nansen and Johansen were incompetent, lazy and cowardly, he himself had never wavered and should by rights have received the honour deceitfully claimed by Nansen on their return to Norway.

The old pirate’s fantastic tale – which contains such appealing elements as Johansen’s losing his bag of sweets, Nansen and Johansen playing board games in the tent to escape the cold, and the use of dead polar bears as kayaks – is fact-checked by Knutsen’s slightly more thoughtful friend, Ludvigsen, who looks up Nansen’s biography in an encyclopaedia. Knutsen, in contrast, is so ignorant that he has not even heard of Nansen and thinks the name is a typographical error for Hansen, one of the most common surnames in Norway. The illustrated narrative takes the two friends and Captain Knutsen on a burlesque expedition from their tunnel to the Fram Museum at Bygdøy outside Oslo, a “temple” erected around the stranded ship in the mid-1930s (Houltz 2013). Their purpose is to find a map that the latter claims to have hidden underneath the floorboards of the ship...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Arctic in Literature for Children and Young Adults
• PART I: Polar History and Its Transformations
• PART II: Indigenous and Localized Arctics
• PART III: Arcticity and Imaginary Arctics
• Index