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Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Full of Fruit: Hans Egede's Greenland"


Sarah Moss
Linacre College, Oxford
sarah.moss@linacre.oxford.ac.uk

This paper will discuss the formulation of Arctic space in Hans Egede's Description of Greenland of 1745. This text is a major influence on and source for later accounts of the Arctic well into the nineteenth century, and can be identified as a source for, among others, Thompson's Seasons and Coleridge's Destiny of Nations. In the early 1730s, Egede, then the Lutheran pastor of a small fishing community in the Lofoten Islands, felt called to go to Greenland to evangelise. Nothing had been heard of Greenland and no European had recorded a visit there since 1410 when the large Norse colony had had its last Icelandic visitors, so Egede's call was to a place at the very edge of European consciousness known only through the shadowy records of several hundred years earlier.

I will consider the ways in which Egede's book negotiates this unknown -- or uncertainly known -- Arctic space, looking at his constructions of Greenlandic landscape and paying particular attention to the portrayal of the Inuit. Egede and his few followers left Norway with the explicit intent (and state funding) to find the lost medieval Norse colonists and remind them of their presumably neglected Christian faith. The lost colony figures as a place of Arctic plenty and righteousness beyond that attained in contemporary Europe, and Egede died in the conviction that it was still thriving somewhere, perhaps just further North than he had managed to go. Throughout his work (and that of many other eighteenth century Arctic travellers) descriptions of the natural profusion just behind the next iceberg are juxtaposed with pitiful accounts of frostbite and hunger. This disparity can fruitfully be seen as a way of mediating the epistemological challenge of terra incognita. But, without relinquishing this fantasy of a European utopia somewhere in the High Arctic, Egede's Description negotiates a twenty year missionary encounter with the Greenlandic Inuit, and his conflation of the Noble Savage and the Chosen people in the context is also paradigmatic of Arctic travel writing during the next century. Like the land, the Native Greenlanders are portrayed as both uniquely challenging and potentially perfect, the most debased of "savages", eating raw meat and not washing from one year to the next, and also the least sinful humans, free of covetousness, holding property in common and respecting their elders. Egede constructs the capacity of this illiterate community with no previous experience of European civilization to keep the commandments better than churchgoers in Norway as further evidence of the divine sanction and millennial potential of his mission, claiming repeatedly that the conversion of the Inuit will signal the materialisation of the Promised Land in Arctic Greenland.


Sarah Moss
Linacre College, Oxford
sarah.moss@linacre.oxford.ac.uk

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