Extreme North

A Cultural History

By: Bernd Brunner, Jefferson Chase - translator

Narrated by: Jonathan Yen

Scholars and laymen alike have long projected their fantasies onto the great expanse of the global North, whether it be as a frozen no-man's-land, an icy realm of marauding Vikings, or an unspoiled cradle of prehistoric human life. Bernd Brunner reconstructs the encounters of adventurers, colonists, and indigenous communities that led to the creation of a northern "cabinet of wonders" and imbued Scandinavia, Iceland, and the Arctic with a perennial mystique.

Like the mythological sagas that inspired everyone from Wagner to Tolkien, Extreme North explores both the dramatic vistas of the Scandinavian fjords and the murky depths of a Western psyche obsessed with Nordic whiteness. In concise but thoroughly researched chapters, Brunner highlights the cultural and political fictions at play from the first "discoveries" of northern landscapes and stories, to the eugenicist elevation of the "Nordic" phenotype (which in turn influenced America's limits on immigration), to the idealization of Scandinavian social democracy as a post-racial utopia. Brunner traces how crackpot Nazi philosophies that tied the "Aryan race" to the upper latitudes have influenced modern pseudoscientific fantasies of racial and cultural superiority the world over.

©2019 Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne/Germany; translation copyright 2022 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (P)2022 Tantor

Erudite Nordic and Arctic History

This book does a remarkable job exploring and weaving together centuries of cultural and intellectual development around the idea of “the North.” I appreciated its breadth, stretching from antiquity to present and touching on multiple fields: science, geography, literature, and political sociology. The tone is erudite but not dry or overly academic. Highly recommended!