Greenland as seen by two contemporary British travellers: Joanna Kavenna and Gavin Francis

Abstract

Greenland has held a prominent place in the English imagination for a long time, its people and landscape sparking a variety of projections including the “Arctic Highlander” (Sir John Ross), “the Greenland bay of indifference” (Robert Burns), or the myth of “Ultima Thule”. This article compares the chapters on Greenland in Joanna Kavenna’s The Ice Museum (2006) and Gavin Francis’s True North: Travels in Arctic Europe (2008), two contemporary travelogues with a historical focus that also address current Arctic issues. The authors’ respective narrative strategies are critically assessed in relation to the diversity of viewpoints (external and internal), as well as the degree of reflexivity, they present. The article discusses what kinds of images their texts fashion, how they relate to the views of contemporary Greenlanders and in what ways the two authors contribute to the idea of a new Arctic narrative.