Product Description
This book is a collection of seven papers presented at a special session on Voyages and Exploration in the North Atlantic at the 19th International Congress of Historical Sciences in Oslo, Norway, in 2000. This session was in commemoration of the 1000th anniversary of the first Nordic voyages to the mainland of North America, but the papers also extend the story of Atlantic exploration far forward into the 1800s. ... Read more

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A revised guide to Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden including essays on each country's history, culture, food and drink, and suggesting more than 2000 hotels and over 800 restaurants, cafes and bars. Details of sightseeing trips are given, as are guides to shopping and nightlife. ... Read more

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This guide features essays on history, culture, food and drink and the best day trips to fjord country, waterfalls, forests, and more. It includes extensive details of city sightseeing and shopping information. ... Read more

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Over the history of polar exploration towers one titanic father figure - Fridtjof Nansen. That a little known researcher in neurology from Bergen Museum was able to put together one of the first great journeys of exploration of our time is a tribute to the extraordinary force and magnetism of his personality. That he should show such extraordinary innovation in the use of sledges and skis, such attention to detail in areas such as diet and the make of sleeping bag is equally extraordinary. Although Nansen's success is overshadowed by the epic voyage of the Fram, his journey across Greenland in 1888 (eight attempts before him had failed) remains one of the most astonishing on record. Even the Eskimos were to regard his achievement in awe: '...now you will travel to the unknown world out there, you will possibly forget us among all the people, but we will never forget you.' On his return Nansen became a living legend - a third of the population of Oslo came out to greet him and he was awarded a sinecure for the rest of his life. His Greenland journey and the ensuring lecture tour inspired a surge in exploration across Europe.This, the first modern edition of The First Crossing of Greenland, removes the technical appendices, the historical sections on previous attempts to penetrate the ice field, and the detailed account of the Eskimos. The record of the incredible journey, however, remains intact. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Do not buy from this publisher
Do not buy from this publisher. The book looks like it was printed from Google Books on a home printer. It is missing half the book and all the pictures and the pages and paragraphs are not formatted properly. If you own a printer you are better off printing the PDF from Google Books. I am forced to return this book, even though I've been looking forward to reading it for weeks.

Skiing Across Greenland
Fridthof Nansen in this book did more to bring skiing to the larger world than any other individual. Until his Greenland crossing on skis, few outside of Norway, or Scandinavia at the most, had heard of skiing, although of course it had existed there for centuries. The early chapter of the book on skis and "skilobing" (skiing) is a marvelous account of the sport, and particularly of Sondre Norheim and the Telemarkers who revolutionized it as recreation.
Nansen writes the book in what can only be called a charming tone. He makes the crossing of the icecap seem easy, and indeed, most of the harrowing detail of the expedition relates to the efforts of the party after being dropped off at sea on the east coast of Greenland, through the ice floes with great difficulty, to an eventual landing and a hard climb up to the central ice plateau. There is also considerable detail given about the way of life of the Eskimo and Danish inhabitants of the Greenland west coast, where Nansen and his party overwintered after the crossing.
A classic of "cold exploration" and a lively style and good read after more than a century. ... Read more

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The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Literary Collections / Letters; Science / Earth Sciences / Geography; Travel / Europe / Iceland ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The glaciers of Iceland cover 11.1% of the land area of the country about 11,400 km² out of the total area of 103,125 km² and have a considerable impact on its landscape.Many Icelandic glaciers lie above volcanoes, such as Grímsvötn and Bárðarbunga, which lie under the largest glacier, Vatnajökull. The caldera of Grímsvötn is 100 km² in area, and Bárðarbungu is 60 km². When volcanic activity occurs under the glacier, the resulting meltwater can lead to a sudden glacial lake outburst flood, known in Icelandic as jökulhlaup, but jökulhlaups are most often caused by accumulation of meltwater due to geothermal activity underneath the glacier. Such Jökulhlaups have occasionally triggered volcanic eruptions through the sudden release of pressure. The Icelandic word for glacier is jökull. ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Westfjords or West Fjords (Icelandic: Vestfirðir, ISO 3166-2:IS: IS-4) is the name for the large peninsula in northwestern Iceland. It is connected to the rest of Iceland by a 7 km wide isthmus between Gilsfjörður and Bitrufjörður. The Westfjords are very mountainous; the coastline is heavily indented by dozens of fjords surrounded by steep hills. The cliffs at Látrabjarg comprise the longest bird cliff in the northern Atlantic Ocean and are at the westernmost region of Iceland. The Drangajökull glacier is located in the far north of the peninsula and is the fifth largest of the country, but the only glacier of the region.The lack of flat lowlands in the area makes it unsuitable for agriculture, but good natural harbors in many of the fjords and closeness to fishing areas are vital for the local economy. The Westfjords are sparsely populated; the total population in 2007 was 7,380. The capital, (and largest town) is Ísafjörður (pop. ~ 3000), which serves as a center for commerce, administration and transportation in the region. ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The fishing town Ólafsvík is situated on the western end of the Snæfellsnes peninsula in Iceland. The town has 1,008 inhabitants (December 31, 2004).Because of its situation at the entrance of the fjord Breiðafjörður, the town was the first town in Iceland to receive a license from the Danish king to do commerce. This event took place in the 17th century.Today, the town has a thriving fishing industry and commerce as well as services for farmers in the area.The nature around Ólafsvík affords numerous recreation opportunities, such as hiking trails, long sandy beaches, and snowmobiling on the volcano Snæfellsjökull. ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Seyðisfjörður (Seydisfiordur) is a village in the Eastfjords of Iceland at the end of the fjord of the same name. A road over Fjarðarheiði mountain pass connects Seyðisfjörður to the rest of Iceland; 27 km to the ring road and Egilsstaðir. Seyðisfjörður is surrounded by mountains on all sides with most prominent Mt. Bjólfur to the West (1085m) and Strandartindur (1010m) to the East. The fjord itself is accessible on each side from the town, by following the main road that leads through the town. Further out the fjord is fairly remote but rich with natural interests including puffin colonies and ruins of former activity such as nearby Vestdalseyri, from where the local church was transported. ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Vatnsfjordur is a nature reserve located north-west of Breiðafjörður on the Hjarðarnes coast of north-western Iceland.Vatnsfjörður was legally declared a nature reserve in 1975 and is part of the land owned by the of the head estate Brjánslækur. In accordance with nature reserve regulations, conventional utilization of the land is permitted and there is considerable sheep farming in the area which covers approximately 20 hectares of mostly rough vegetation . At the western boundary of the nature reserve is the river Þverá; from there the boundary runs north to the ancient glacier Gláma, roughly following the watershed past Hornatær mountain and the Dynjandisheið moor. From Gláma it falls south to Þingmannaheiði moor and southwest to the Hörgsnes tip, which marks the mouth of the fjord in the east.Lakes and ponds are numerous on the reserve with Lake Vatnsdalsvatn being the largest, with an area of two square kilometers. ... Read more

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The eighteen articles in this book focus on and critically explore several manifestations of the ways in which places assume historical and cultural meaning. Many places we get to know come to us (and we to them) loaded with historical significance, but the ideological and aesthetic construction of the past in relation to the present also often involves concentration on certain places, be they local, native, or foreign. Such places and they can be anything from a city square to a piece of wilderness to a whole country are constantly reconstructed by cultural reiterations, renovations or contestations. Places are among the keys to our cultural identities, but this means they are also gateways of the imaginary. The authors scholars from Italy, Romania, Slovenia, Iceland, and Britain demonstrate and discuss how important ideas are grounded on physical sites, be they circumscribed by national interests, urban encounters, historical figures, traumatic events, or mythic notions of landscape. A number of articles dwell on Iceland as a place of the utopian imaginary, as fleshed out for instance by William Morris. ... Read more

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Hotter summers and milder winters have already made most of us aware of what scientists say is a trend towards extensive global warming. Most of the experts accompany their predictions with dire warnings of the resulting rising sea levels and spreading deserts. Trausti Valsson's approach to the problem of global warming is a refreshing look at the advantages that will ensue. With the melting of the sea ice in the north, shipping routes will regularly include the passage north of Siberia and, slightly later, a north-west passage through the Canadian Archipelago. This means that countries bordering the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans will become "closer" to each other and that ships too wide for the Panama and Suez Canals can easily transport oil and other cargoes via the shorter routes over the Arctic Ocean. The warming climate and melting ice will make oil and mineral resources in northern areas easily accessible for exploitation and will make the far north comfortable for human habitation, replacing the living spaces around the central areas of the globe that will become too hot for habitation. Valsson recognizes the fact that the world's climate has changed many times in the past and that the present warming trend is not new. However, he underlines the importance of the international agreements for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which are largely to blame for the current warming trend. He also promotes the view that even in the face of the very many negative consequences, we need to maintain a positive attitude towards the changes that are coming upon us, a refreshing view which he presents through text and a wealth of informative maps. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (15)

Interesting, Informative Read, but Not Without its Faults
This book is far from what the title makes it out to be. Expecting a chronicling of the life of a Viking woman who comes to North America, I was surprised to find a detailed history of Greenland and Iceland with just a few sprinklings of Gudrid in between. I'm a huge fan of the old Norse world and loved reading these, but sometimes the random tangents the book took were just too hard to uninteresting to read.

Towards the end of the book, the author starts to ramble and at one point writes for 15 pages about the types of weaving done by Icelandic women; going into minute details about every single part in the process of turning wool into cloth. The final chapter of the book only begins to mention the Norse pagan religion, something that probably should have been addressed right from the beginning. Then, after what seemed like an eternity, Brown once again mentions her titular character, only to end the tale 2 pages later.

If you're a fan of Vikings, Norse Mythology or Nordic History, this book is a good read. But even die-hards will question the author's tangents and be begging for a more complete or compact story about Gudrid.

The Far Traveler
Delightful writing style. The author combines Icelandic archeology, history and her own interpretations of the life of a woman circa 1000 Ad.

19 cent book
Yep, I spent 19 cents for this book.Was it worth it?That all depends.If you're looking for trashy beach reading save you money.Having spent mine I decided to read it anyway.The book turns out to be a semi-scholarly attempt to define every day life, particularly that of women, in Viking times.The result is semi-interesting but not exactly a page turner.

A good read.
Very interesting book on a under reported part of European history in Iceland, Greenland & North America.

Spellbinding
Fascinating!!

I only wish more photos, diagrams and website links and/or information (on those specific archeological discoveries and digs) would have been provided, so that we could have researched it a bit more, and tracked any furhter progress.

The listings of the incredible array of artifacts found in these archeoligical digs would have also benefited by some drawings and photos.

That being said, this is a wonderful book that brings the action to life -- I can almost see the ship rise and fall with the waves. The natives (skraalings) and the landscape of the new world is rendered in vivid word pictures. The descriptions of the Viking farms in Greenland and the hazardous trips sometimes needed to be made to reach those farms, gives me a sense of the tremendous resiliency and resourcefulness of those heroic people way back then.

Exceptional -- but would definitely benefit from photos, diagrams, links, -- even a rendering of what Gudrid may have looked like. ... Read more

Product Description
Proceedings of the 10th Study Conference of the International Association for Scandinavian Studies' (IASS) on Scandinavian Literature, held in Reykjavík July 22-27, 1974. The focus of the conference was on the history of ideologies, moving from general overviews of the literary situation in each of the five Nordic countries, through discussion of specific movements and ideologies to analyses of ideas and ideologies in the works of individual authors. This volume includes all 17 of the papers that were presented on that occasion, in their original languages (English, French, German, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian). ... Read more

Product Description

For the last decade, Gretel Ehrlich has been obsessed by an island, a terrain, a culture, and the men and women who long for and love the complex frailties and treacherous beauty of a world defined by ice.

Greenland, the world’s largest island, 840,000 square miles in extent, is covered by the largest continental ice sheet in the world.

Only the rocky fringe of its coast is habitable. There, the Inuit, the Arctic’s first explorers, have survived and thrived in the harshest of climates. For the Inuit, an ice-age, ice-adapted people who first traveled from Siberia across the polar North six thousand years ago, weather is consciousness. In a world composed of ice and darkness, water and light, where skins of dog, seal, bear, even hare and eider duck, are sewn into clothes, tents, and sleeping bags as protection, where transport is by dogsled and kayak, the only rein for the uncontrollable force of weather is an unbending self-discipline. The blend of physical endurance and psychological perseverance required for daily existence first drew Ehrlich to this terrain.

Her guide, her inspiration, her companion in spirit was the great Danish-Inuit explorer and ethnographer Knud Rasmussen. Between 1902 and his death in 1933 he launched seven expeditions: to record the unknown history and customs of the nomadic Eskimos; to chronicle the skills, beliefs,and crafts that made life in this climate possible and a matter of grace. For Rasmussen, “all true wisdom is only to be found far from the dwellings of man, in great solitudes.” As she followed his trail, Ehrlich was to find the things that can open the mind to what is hidden from others. This Cold Heaven is at once a distillation of her many journeys, a path into a world divided into darkness and light and, finally, an attempt to capture the clarity that blinds us with surprise.Amazon.com Review
From the acclaimed chronicler of open spaces, Gretel Ehrlich, comes a stunning and lyrical evocation of a practically unknown place and people. Beginning in 1993, Ehrlich traveled to Greenland, the northernmost country in the world, in every season--the four months of perpetual dark (in which the average temperature is 25 degrees below zero), the four months of constant daylight, and the twilight seasons in between--traveling up the west coast, often by dogsled, and befriending the resilient and generous Inuits along the way. Greenland, unlike its name, is 95 percent ice--a landscape of deep rock-walled fjords, glaciers, narwhal whales swimming among icebergs the size of football fields, walruses busting through oceans of shifting ice. In the far north, the polar Inuit--the "real heroes"--still dress in bear and seal skins, and hunt walrus, polar bears, and whales with harpoons. The only constant is weather and the perilous movements of ice, the only transport is dogsled, and the closest village may be a month and a half-long dogsled journey away. The people share an austere and harsh life, lightened with humor and the fantastic stories of Sila, the god of weather, Nerrivik, the goddess of waters, of humans transforming themselves into animals, and interspecies marriages. Interwoven with Ehrlich's journey is the even more remarkable story of Knud Rasmussen, the founder of Eskimology, an Inuit-Danish explorer and ethnographer who took some of the most hazardous and brilliant expeditions ever, including a three and a half-year, 20,000-mile adventure by dogsled across the polar north to Alaska. Like Rasmussen, Ehrlich learns that the landscape of Greenland is "less a description of desolation than an ode to the beauty of impermanence."Alternately mind-expanding, gripping, and dreamlike, This Cold Heaven is a revelation. --Lesley Reed ... Read more

Customer Reviews (24)

Greenland's best portrait since Rasmussen
I've read this book twice, once as chosen reading before a month-long glaciology expedition to Greenland and again a year later during a hot summer, pining for the stark landscape. Greenland today is a land of strange idiosyncrasies, with ancient Inuit and modern Western cultures meeting with often mixed results. Ehrlich does not shy away from this, but embraces and explores what may seem alien at first glance. Some readers may turn away from customs that seem barbaric or disconcerting, but Ehrlich musters the courage to stick with it, and if you do too, you'll discover an incredibly honest, pure, and flexible people, mirroring the harsh landscape they inhabit.

It took a personal trip to Greenland to fully grasp what was laid before me in this book. Thanks to Ehrlich, I can't wait to go back.

Too Much of a Good Thing
I very much enjoyed this book.It was a fascinating look at a land steeped in tradition and culture, and I feel I got to know the people and their lives.
Ehrlich is a wonderful writer who knows how to turn a phrase.But...but....but--why I am only giving this three stars?It's because I felt the book was too much of a good thing.While the stories of the people she met and the Inuit ways are fascinating, do I really need to read 356 pages of how beautiful the ice was over and over and over and over?How many times do I have to hear that "ice is chaos", "ice is time", "the ice was like newly shampooed hair", "the sun was like a flashlight", "the ice was like broken dishes", etc.This gets tiresome very fast.Enough already!I get it-the ice is beautiful and it's cold. Too much of the same thing and too many metaphors detracts from the power of the whole.I wish Ehrlich would have put the metaphor-theasurus away for at least two consecutive pages.
I'm sure that to Ehrlich all of her endless trips across the ice are individual, but to me, they all sound the same.She could have cut out the descriptions of about 10 of the trips she made on the ice, which would have cut the book by 50-100 pages, and had a much more powerful account.Although I loved most of the book, I finally couldn't wait for it to end.She made something that was fascinating into an account that was, ultimately, boring and endless.

Excellent and well thought out book
Really interesting book regarding the Greenlander Inuit and one woman's journey through the region.I particularly like the inclusion of previous author's and explorer's interwoven in the story, as well as the raw authenticity of the author in terms of her experiences with the people, land and culture.

This Cold Heaven
I have enjoyed Ehrlich's writing style, very poetic descriptions about the ice and the people. She switches back and forth between her own experiences and historical expeditions, and the contrasts are interesting.

Eskimos as people, Greenland as a real place.
This amazing book opened my eyes to the Inuit culture and homeland in a most unexpected way. I really bought it hoping to learn something about Inuit kayak hunters, but that aspect of Inuit hunting life is not heavily covered in the book. Instead, the author takes us on many wonderful journeys by dogsled and gives the reader a most fascinating viewpoint - right behind the dogs. We experience the hard but thrilling life of the skilled Arctic hunter as described by an articulate passenger in the sled, and in that way we come to know the people of the north country in a most sympathetic way.

I recommend this book to anyone who loves beautifully written adventures. They are here. ... Read more

Product Description
A photographic essay records the short geological and ecological history of Surtsey Island (created by an eruption of a submarine volcano near Iceland in 1963), which offered scientists an opportunity to see what the world was like when life first began. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Covers the basics about Surtsey
This book was aimed to be read by a younger audience (kids ages 7-14). It covers information about formation of the island and the colonization of the island in a simple written manner. I also like the way it divides the book into 11 chapters and adds something about the poetic Edda at the start of each chapter to relay how mythology interplays with realistic events like the formation of such an island. But as an adult reader, I still had more questions after I finished the book.

The book does not go in depth about the geological nature of the island. Yes, the island was formed from a volcanic eruption, but what is the nature and quality of the land? Will it be settled by Man as it has been by birds and plant-life? What is the future of such an island? (The book implies at the end that it will be destroyed, but does not tell the reader the specifics of how/when/why). I was looking to answer such questions more in depth about this new island.

The stength of this book lies in its remarkable pictures. If only you could get some of these astonishing pictures as a poster and hang them up on your walls...You would stare at them in awe for hours!

As far as buying it...it would be worth your money if you have kids who like volcanos or like to read because they would be able to appreciate it more. If not, it would be worth getting it to read at a public library or a used book. I would not spend too much money obtaining it. ... Read more