‘The Arctic sublime’ was a Romantic subcategory in its own right because of the period’s fascination with Arctic vastness and awe-inspiring icescapes. This chapter examines some of the famous representations of the Arctic sublime, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Das Eismeer, but also lesser-known texts that illustrate the intense contemporary engagement with northern climes. The sources that were available to the public and helped create an image of the Arctic were not only literary or artistic representations but also travel accounts and stories of shipwrecks. The chapter traces the patriotic celebrations of explorers braving the deadly terrors of the Arctic as well the discourse that developed around the optical mirages and illusions in high latitudes. The latter are particularly pertinent as they fitted into a Burkean sense of sublime psychological disruption and disorientation. The chapter shows how the public could – virtually – occupy the Arctic and experience the thrill of its sublime landscapes in books and at exhibitions, while the actual Arctic remained enigmatic and unconquerable.

The chapters in this book have examined how the memory of the colony ‘at the end of the world’ became an enduring reference point in the Western imagination. I will now summarise the key findings and offer a final synthesis of the central ideas. The Norse colony in Greenland was remembered as a lieu de mémoire – a cultural heritage proudly seen as an extension of Christian Europe, marking an outpost of civilisation and the success of colonisation. Its loss was seen as an amputation. In the centuries after communication was discontinued, Greenland took on an important role in the collective memory of the West and the idea of ‘Greenland’ as a land of wealth and violence was constructed through an array of historiographical, scientific, and popular texts. In this way Greenland was more than a geographical entity; it became a conceptual space.

The chapter examines one of the most intriguing fiction stories about Greenland’s ‘lost colony’: the Scottish author James Hogg’s The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon (1837). The analysis shows that Hogg’s novella is loosely based on The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Using this template, Hogg’s story gives narrative form to the colonial anxieties about isolation and succumbing to nature. The story starts out as a romance only later to turn into an account of gritty hardships that ends in final tragedy. Offering an alternative explanation of how the European colonists vanished from Greenland, the settlers (whom the protagonist finds and joins) are eventually overcome and devoured by polar bears. In the last section of the chapter, it is argued that Hogg uses the ‘lost colony’ narrative as a mirror for communities in remote parts of Scotland. This exemplifies how the image of the settlers of Greenland were used in fiction to raise present concerns. Hogg’s novella is the first of many nineteenth-century stories imagining an encounter with the vanished settlers. Such storylines story will be further examined in the chapters that follow.

The first part of the chapter examines how the loss of the Christian colony became a prism through which it was possible to reflect on the two globalising European projects of the nineteenth century: colonialism and Christian mission. The ‘lost colony’ in Greenland came to function as a mirror for contemporary anxieties about the danger of settling far from European metropoles. Analysis of available sources shows that this fear was fed by anecdotal evidence that the European Greenlanders had lost their Christian faith and descended into savagery. The second part of the chapter explores a series of significant themes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary representations of the Christian mission in Greenland. As the old colonists had been Christian and new missions were now making progress, a ‘fall-and-restoration’ structure became embedded in several texts. The most notable example is the British poet James Montgomery’s Greenland (1819), a text neglected in modern criticism despite the fact that it enjoyed significant popularity in the Romantic period.

The Prologue gives an overview of historical knowledge about Norse settlements in Greenland. The purpose is to outline the factual backdrop against which we must evaluate the tales and legends about the vanished settlers. A short summary of the history of the settlements preserved in Icelandic sagas is provided. The sagas tell us south-eastern Greenland was settled as a westward relocation of Icelandic farmers, a migration first promoted by Erik the Red. It is of particular interest in this section of the book to unravel why the first colonisation of Greenland came to an end in the fifteenth century. Thus, the major current theories for the demise of the settlements are outlined and the scientific debates are explained and appraised. Although the mystery of when and why the Norse Greenlanders abandoned Greenland has never been conclusively resolved, a number of factors appear to have been important triggers, such as change towards a colder climate. Yet there is today a growing consensus in the scientific community that the Greenlanders’ inability to sell their walrus ivory led to the settlements becoming unsustainable.

The chapter focusses on post-1721 developments, analysing the Dano-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede’s struggle to fit the new observations he made in Greenland into the framework of established ideas promoted in the texts he had read prior to his arrival. The transition from reading about Greenland in books to observing the land in situ led to a crisis of representation as the archive of knowledge that had been stored up over the centuries became difficult to reconcile with experience. The most significant error perpetuated in several texts was the idea that the Eastern Settlement was located on the east coast. Rather than dismiss the many expeditions that sought to reach this fabled settlement as irrelevant to the colonial project that eventually developed on the west coast, the chapter proposes that the search for the settlers and their resource-rich lands is significant for understanding Denmark’s political, religious, and commercial ambitions in Greenland. Attention is also paid to the maps Egede drew of Greenland as they are visual records of how traditional perceptions were allowed to coexist with new empirical data.

The Introduction presents the themes, scope, and arguments of the book, and it gives an overview of its structure. There is also a note on terminology.

The chapter offers an analysis of an understudied episode in British and American popular fiction. Inspired by Greenland’s vanished settlers, a number of tales imagine isolation as a means to preserve the virtues and primordial purity of a white, ancestral past. These ‘lost colony’ stories are examined as partly compensatory fantasies that would offset contemporary concerns about cultural and racial decay for a culture under stress. They are narratives about communities – modelled on the idea of a lost European colony – that have been shielded from the corruption visited upon the Western world. Thus, the stories are often concerned with ethnic purity and eugenics. The last part of the chapter unravels the early twentieth-century press sensation that disrupted fantasies of ring-fenced whiteness in the Arctic. This was the discovery of the so-called Blond Eskimos in Victoria Island, who were purportedly the result of the old Greenland colonists having intermixed with the Indigenous population. The chapter concludes with an examination of how this new imagining of the fate of Greenland’s vanished settlers also impacted the writing of adventure tales for the popular market.

The chapter examines the rhetoric of imperialism in the period leading up to the Danish recolonisation of Greenland in 1721 (and its immediate aftermath). English privateer Martin Frobisher’s expeditions in the late sixteenth century first gave impetus to the search for riches in the Arctic. The slew of texts published in the wake of Frobisher’s expeditions provided the nation with the image of courageous Englishmen establishing claims to lands in the North Atlantic. The chapter analyses English writings that allude to Greenland in ways that constitute claims to land. However, these claims were not uncontested. The Danish crown sent out expeditions in the early seventeenth century, which were also documented in the medium of print. It is the aim to show how Danish endeavours can be seen partly as a response to English activity. A significant part of the chapter is therefore an inquiry into how Danish writers attempted to ascertain Greenland as a land belonging to the Dano-Norwegian crown.

Critical studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular adventure fiction often focus on novels about forays into Africa. It is the aim of this chapter to show that the Arctic provided an alternative arena for such stories. In the first half of the chapter, the notion that the European settlers migrated from Greenland to other locations is discussed. Based on geophysical and geoclimatic theories that a navigable sea with habitable islands existed near the North Pole, it was hypothesised that the vanished settlers could have found a new home furhther north in the Arctic. The second half of the chapter examines how fiction writers drew on contemporary science to create what can be classified as the ‘lost colony’ story. In this type of popular fiction, it is imagined that descendants of the old Greenland settlers or other Norse explorers had survived in a hidden land. In some of the tales, the ideas of imperialism and exploitation of the Arctic become pronounced, thereby returning us to the fantasies discussed in the early chapters of the present book.

The chapter discusses the period from the loss of communication with Greenland until the mid-seventeenth century. During this time Greenland existed primarily as a cultural memory negotiated in European texts. The focus is on the most central texts that established what we may call Greenland’s discursive terrain. It is examined how a dualistic perception of Greenland came to dominate European representations. These were the themes of wealth and violence. Central to the account of early colonial Greenland is the mid-fourteenth-century report by the church official Ívar Bárdarson, to which the chapter pays particular attention. There is also a discussion of how Inuit legends negotiated a memory of the European colonists. These legends may appear to provide an Indigenous account of the violent clashes between peoples in Greenland. Yet the Inuit legends were not only solicited and written down by missionaries, they were also disseminated by Europeans in print – in effect co-opting Indigenous tales as part of the West’s repertoire.

The chapter charts the cultural and literary responses to the British Admiralty’s decision to explore the Arctic after the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. The main impetus for launching these explorations was reports of vanishing sea ice. Because it was erroneously thought that ice had hemmed in the Eastern Settlement on Greenland’s east coast, hopes were raised that the Admiralty’s Arctic programme would lead to a recovery of the ‘lost colony’. Several studies have dealt with Britain’s early nineteenth-century ambitions in the Arctic, but the role Greenland played in these considerations has not received the attention it warrants. By collecting and juxtaposing diverse sources, the chapter produces a new perspective on British imperial thinking. Focus is on how the hope of discovering the lost European settlers of Greenland was expressed in several nationalist poems published around 1818. Among the poets examined in the chapter are Anna Jane Vardill and Eleanor Anne Porden, whose verses about British interest in Greenland are analysed.