The word gnål is Norwegian for “nagging,” and the mountain Gnålberget, in the South of Spitsbergen, the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago, is so named for the birds that nest high on its peaks—hundreds of them, kittiwakes and guillemots mostly, squawking and calling and shrieking and chattering incessantly during the summer months, a cacophony that floats down from above and covers the landscape like a noisy dew. On the ground below, the voices of individual birds blend into a monolith of vague chatter, until all that’s left is the static of busy life above you—a counterpoint to the sense of desolation that this arctic landscape can sometimes give off.
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I’d come back to Svalbard as part of the Arctic Circle residency—my second trip, eleven years after my first time here in 2013. Once more I spent two weeks on the tall ship Antigua, as we sailed around the western coast of the island, making regular landings amidst the glaciers and ice floes and the rocky moraines.
Landing at Gnålodden, as the promontory beneath the mountain is called, is tricky; there are plenty of visible rocks out there, and even more just below the surface, making a low tide landing a particularly treacherous affair. But once on land, the ground is surprisingly lush and colorful beneath the nagging mountain, green and orange with lichen and small, dense foliage.
On shore we approached a hunter’s cabin, one that had been in use for decades, and still was. These structures dot the main island of Spitzbergen: small, wooden affairs with usually just one or two rooms. We were well above the tree line here, and so any wood on the island has either been brought here or washed ashore, and cabins like this are often made of wood recycled from other structures, combined with tar paper and anything else salvageable. Everything about it had a feeling of hodge-podge and ramshackle, but also of tightly fitted craftmanship, a fortified misfit against the elements and the bears.
When she first arrives, everything is desolate and empty. Of her initial impressions, she writes that “with the best will in the world I can find it neither beautiful nor gripping.”
It did not take dominion anywhere; it stood small and tight against the bird cliffs that loomed above it and took no notice of it. The top of the outcropping was robed in fog. Outside of the cabin, a few whale vertebrae were piled decoratively in the moss-covered rocks. Its windows were covered in neatly fitted wooden boards to protect against storms; the door itself was barred on the outside, to keep curious bears away when it’s not in use.
These simple structures belong to no one really (they are maintained by the Governor of Svalbard’s office these days), and they have endured for decades—each maintained and improved upon by a series of travelers, each its own Ship of Theseus bulwarked against the elements. As harsh as winters are here, these structures last simply because they are too vital to let go to waste. This particular hut had been built in 1907 or 1908, and it had been used over the years by a number of hunters and trappers, including—perhaps most famously—the hunter Wanny Woldstad, a semi-legendary figure in Norway as the first woman hunter of polar bears, who overwintered there numerous times in the 1930s. Now that hunting bears is outlawed, the huts survive as exotic tourist hotels (many can be rented for the night), and as emergency refuges should one find oneself lost in a storm.
As I stepped inside, moving through the front room with its small stove and bare tables, and into the back room with its meager, summer camp-esque bunks, tinned provisions and handwritten instructions for use, I was thinking not just of Woldstad, but of Christiane Ritter, and the year she spent in a cabin just like this, over ninety years ago.
Ritter’s book chronicling that year, A Woman in the Polar Night is one of those special, classic memoirs that works subtly, evocatively, in ways that often seem obvious but are nonetheless effective. Published in 1938, it was a bestseller in its time and has never been out of print in Austria—long praised by generations of readers, I’ve come to understand it to be one of those books that seems like it’s showing you one thing, only to feint at the end and reveal something else entirely.
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When she was in her early thirties, Christiane’s husband Hermann had come to Svalbard as part of a scientific expedition; something changed in him and he decided to stay, becoming a fur trapper during the endless winter months. He turned his back on much of his life when he moved here, but after two seasons he invited his wife to join him for the winter. It took him multiple times (“Leave everything as it is and follow me to the Arctic,” he telegrammed repeatedly), before he finally persuaded her, as her fascination with a place remote and beautiful grew within her.
When she first arrives, everything is desolate and empty. Of her initial impressions, she writes that “with the best will in the world I can find it neither beautiful nor gripping. The coast is comfortless, bleak, and stony.” Words she returns to again and again. Comfortless. Stony. “The scene is comfortless,” she writes a few pages later. “Far and wide not a tree or shrub; everything grey and bare and stony. The boundlessly broad foreland, a sea of stone, stones stretching up to the crumbling mountains and down to the crumbling shore, an arid picture of death and decay.”
In those early impressions, Ritter could not or would not see the life everywhere: the small, hardy plants like the hairy lousewort and purple saxifrage, or the bright orange sunburst lichen that decorates the glacial erratic rocks, to say nothing of the colonies of seabirds. But I get it. From a distance, Svalbard is imposing in its silent desolation: the jagged mountains that form its coast (the original name of the archipelago, now the name of its largest island, Spitsbergen, is Dutch for “pointy mountains”), covered in snow and rock and nothing else. From the water, you may only see a lone fulmar gliding alongside your ship, and may think that there is nothing alive at all on the island. You have to get close to hear the chattering, to see the low, lush carpet of plant life, to begin to see how life works—and even thrives—here.
“The men seem alien beings to me. Is it just levity, or does their serenity spring perhaps from a deeper wisdom that we Europeans have lost?”
Upon her arrival, even the familiar has been made strange by this cold wasteland. Ritter’s husband has become, it seems, nearly unrecognizable to her. Upon arriving at the cabin where they’re to spend the winter, Ritter is met with a cracked stove that belches so much soot that it turns the hearts and diamonds of their deck of cards as black as the spades and clubs. But Hermann is jovial, unconcerned. “I am struck dumb by the stove, and possibly even more by my husband,” Ritter confesses. “In Europe he had always been so touchy about soot and about stoves that didn’t work. How Spitsbergen has changed him.” Nor are they alone; another hunter, a Norwegian named Karl with little interest in learning German, also shares their hut.
Unhappy and bewildered, Ritter has trouble finding her place in this landscape—though it is precisely in her estrangement from her cabin companions that she begins to wonder if there might be something yet for her. “The men seem alien beings to me,” she writes early on. “Is it just levity, or does their serenity spring perhaps from a deeper wisdom that we Europeans have lost?”—a wisdom that Ritter slowly, through tribulation, boredom, and scarcity, begins to discover.
*
On its surface, the book is deceptively simple. At first hating Svalbard and seeing only bleak desolation, she undergoes a change, learning a great deal about herself, humanity, and the wild in the process. This is a cliched appraisal of the book, but part of its charm is how clearly these beats are telegraphed, and how skillfully she delivers on what you already suspect is coming.
New wonders gradually begin to find her. A curious fox begins to hang around Ritter’s cabin—inquisitive, eager to form an attachment to these humans it’s found, it’s a hüsrev, or house fox, which Karl calls “Mikkl” (“the Norwegians call all polar foxes Mikkl,” she notes dryly). Scrawny and with an unappealing coat, the fox is unpromising to the hunters, so Ritter bargains with them to leave him be. Soon, he is a regular feature of the landscape: “On all our walks Mikkl now accompanies us like a faithful dog. Wherever we go, he suddenly turns up but acts as if he were not accompanying us, but going his own extremely individual way.”
After enduring her first storm, something shakes loose in her: “Confronted with such an Arctic storm, every human being becomes primitive again, small and full and foreboding.” Having successfully weathered it, she realizes, for the first time she says, “that in the solitude of an all-too-powerful nature things have a different meaning from that we attribute to them in our world of constant reciprocal relations between man and man. It dawns on me that in many cases it may be more difficult for a man to retain his ordinary humanity in the Arctic than to sustain his life in battle with the elements.”
She is overcome at one point with rar, an untranslatable word that connotes a kind of Arctic madness, where she is bewitched by the overpowering full moon.
It is this humanity, separate from her physical existence, that seems to strip away from Ritter as she forges on through the endless night of winter. She suffers through storms, long periods of isolation while her husband and Karl are gone hunting, the anxiety about not having enough food to make it through the winter, and the steady diminishing of anything approaching creature comforts.
But in comfort’s stead, strange pleasures. She is overcome at one point with rar, an untranslatable word that connotes a kind of Arctic madness, where she is bewitched by the overpowering full moon: “No central European can have any idea of what this means on the smooth frozen surface of the earth. It is as though we were dissolving in moonlight, as though moonlight is eating us up.” Succumbing to it, she confesses a desire to “stand all day on the shore, where in the water the rocking ice floes catch and break the light and throw it back to the moon.” It’s all very romantic, but also deeply serious: her husband and Karl have to keep her under strict supervision to keep her from wandering out of the hut and dying of exposure.
These are the experiences from which revelation is born. “And I suddenly realize,” she writes in the book’s second half, “that civilization is suffering from a severe vitamin deficiency because it cannot draw its strength directly from nature, eternally young and eternally true. Humanity has lost itself in the unnatural and in speculation.”
*
It was my second time in the Arctic, having first come to Svalbard in 2013, and I had begun to feel like I understood a bit more about Ritter’s experience. I had come, perhaps, to try to once again draw some strength from nature, replenish something missing in myself. It is impossible to be in such a place and not feel as though it will change you. Far from any cell signal, in an utterly stark environment where survival is hardscrabble and precarious, everything seems stripped to its most basic essence. True, we were well-outfitted, our needs ably met, without any fear of danger. And yet, everywhere there were reminders of the scarcity of the landscape.
Outside the cabin I watched a dogfight between a fulmar and a skua, the white bird and black bird twisting and diving in a desperate ballet. Fulmars are a species of Arctic gulls: their beaks have a similar curved beak to North American seagulls, but their bodies are a good deal stubbier. They hunt for fish in the sea, bringing them back to nests on these bird cliffs. The skua, meanwhile, also known as a parasitic hunter, will wait for a fulmar to land a catch, then harry it, attempting to steal its food—Ritter refers to it alternately as a “black robber gull” and simply “a Satanic bird.”
Understandably, they took no notice of us. Other than perhaps the foxes, nothing in the Arctic has the time or resources to stop and open itself up to you. The world around you is busy gathering up resources, whatever and wherever, or husbanding what it has against the coming cold.
“The Arctic does not yield its secret for the price of a ship’s ticket. You must live through the long night, the storms, and the destruction of human pride.”
And perhaps because the Arctic does not open itself to you, the revelations one has here, like the resources one manages to scrape and scrap together, must be husbanded tightly. At the end of A Woman in the Polar Night, Ritter makes clear that hers is ultimately an experience that cannot be readily communicated. “No,” she writes in the book’s final pages, “the Arctic does not yield its secret for the price of a ship’s ticket. You must live through the long night, the storms, and the destruction of human pride. You must have gazed on the deadness of all things to grasp their livingness.” Whatever kinship I’d thought I’d shared with her, she seemed to be telling me, was false. I hadn’t come close.
Having brought her readers through her long night’s journey into day, she here pushes them away. To know the Arctic, she maintains, one must—as few of us have—lived through its endless winter, at least once. “In the return of light, in the magic of the ice, in the life-rhythm of the animals observed in the wilderness, in the natural laws of all being, revealed here in their completeness, lies the secret of the Arctic and the overpowering beauty of its lands.” Ritter seems to unravel her own work: whatever the reader thinks they’ve been shown through the power and eloquence of her words, is, in fact, a mirage.
I had brought the book with me and read it on the deck of the ship we sailed on—a two week expedition at the height of summer, when the sun never set and instead moved in a low circle around the horizon. Finishing it, the thought hit me: If Ritter is so explicit that one cannot understand the Arctic from just a cruise, what was I—what were any of us—doing there?
*
I generally think of memoirs as being fundamentally the work of building a bridge between author and reader: the writer brings you through their experiences, and you take away something at the end. But Ritter, at the book’s end, pushes you away deliberately, and insists that whatever you think you’ve learned, whatever you think you’re going to take away, it’s not the Arctic.
Is the book a failure, then? No, not at all—I think, in fact, that it shows something else entirely.
The title, A Woman in the Polar Night, doesn’t actually suggest a book about the Arctic, but rather a story about Christiane Ritter herself, and how the landscape changed her. And it’s clear that by the end of her memoir, Ritter has learned a great deal about herself; through her ordeal she’s gained perspective on her life back in Austria and the kinds of things that were formerly important to her.
Too often, I think, memoirs work via a trick: promising that there can be one event, one epiphany, or one period in one’s life, that changes one forever.
But the reader, by contrast, has learned very little about this woman. Many of the basic biographical details one might expect in a memoir are absent. We don’t really understand why her husband decided to leave his family to become a trapper on the edge of the world, or what might have been happening in their marriage that led both to his departure and his subsequent invitation for her to join him. Her description of her decision to join him is purposefully generic; there is almost nothing specific about their lives to give context here.
As Sara Wheeler notes in her foreword to my Pushkin Press edition of the book (translated by Jane Degras), the couple had a teenage daughter at the time, but she is mentioned only once—in passing—in the entire book (during a raging storm, Ritter finds an unexpected calmness by thinking of her, writing only “I think of my child at home and it gives me peace.”).
Instead, it seems, it’s a world entirely contained within the Arctic. Once she leaves the outside world, it no longer seems to exist at all. This is the dream we all harbor, in one way or another: that we can disappear into nature, so thoroughly and completely that the rest of the world shades away entirely. Depleted and left vitamin-deficient by civilization, we want to shed our old lives, be consumed by rar, opened up by desolation and hardship so that our humanity strips away, our bare self is revealed, and we are healed and returned somehow newly whole. That Ritter can evoke this in her readers while withholding both the woman and the polar night of her book’s title is where its true measure of genius begins to reveal itself.
Ritter’s book, I now believe, is about motion itself. To get to Svalbard, you have to fly through Oslo, and before arriving in Longyearbyen, I’d seen a retrospective of Mark Rothko’s work at Norway’s National Museum there. I’d honestly never thought too much of Rothko before, whose works I’d largely ignored, the sort of de rigeur canonical artist whose work, I thought, is largely more appreciated than felt. Every museum has to have a Rothko or two, just some big painting with some large swaths of color—most often two rough squares of differing colors that overlap on one edge creating a third band of color—hanging in a bare white room so the board of trustees can check that box.
But thinking about the structure of Ritter’s delicate masterpiece in Svalbard, I began thinking more about his works, and specifically started to see them as something of analogs of A Woman in the Polar Night. It’s a book which is not about the polar night, nor is about a woman—rather, it depicts the gestural blur that takes place when a person and a place push up against one another, a new and strange color formed at the meeting point of two indistinct and abstract things.
Too often, I think, memoirs work via a trick: promising that there can be one event, one epiphany, or one period in one’s life, that changes one forever. That there is a before and an after, and that a life can follow an easy chronological arc. The more obvious truth is that we are always being pieced together, bulwarking ourselves against the elements as best we can, a mix of loose bits fitted as tightly together as we manage. By blurring the poles of the usual narrative arc of a memoir, Ritter foregoes that chronological progression in favor of pure action—the closely observed responses to amazing encounters and unexpected stimuli that do not finally add up to a definition of a person but do offer a blaze of movement.
I agree with Ritter, that the Arctic does not yield its secrets for the price of a ship’s ticket. But as we sailed on to the next destination, I began to understand that this had never been my goal, to get the land to yield up any of its secrets to me.
Back on deck, I watched a fulmar skim along the edge of the slate gray water. I’d like to believe that I have something to tell you about fulmars—about their habitat, their species, their status in a changing polar world. That I’m in a position to speak authoritatively on where I’ve been and what I saw. Or perhaps, about who I was when I arrived here, and how this place changed me.
But what I can describe for you instead is about the elegance of an animal skimming the surface of the sea, its eyes purposeful yet removed, the minimal amount of effort expended to glide just feet above the ocean. The way its solitary flight suggested isolation and desolation, despite the fact that this bird would soon return to the vibrant and chattering cliffs of a land rich with life. How it could see, in a way I could not, the teeming life just beneath the surface of the water. The effortless beauty of this one bird about its business in an unforgiving place. The quick and silent grace of a figure against a landscape at once implacable and always changing.
