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The New People was Rasmussen’s literary debut. Admittedly, he had written Lapland earlier (1901), but the book was published only six years later. Dedicated to “Mother and Father,” The New People is a revised and enriched version of the original diary in which Rasmussen recorded the Literary Expedition.200 The New People is thus a type of expedition account which Karlsen calls “a second-position report” [Norwegian: annenposisjonsberetning], in which the author is subordinate to his commander. Usually this entailed a delayed publication, which was actually not the case with The New People as Rasmussen’s book was released one year before Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen and Harald Moltke’s Grønland (1906), as the first literary narrative of the Literary Expedition.201 According to Knud Michelsen, the account was originally entitled The Last Heathens in Greenland (De sidste Hedninger i Grønland), but Rasmussen changed it into The New People after his encounter with the Norwegian explorer Otto Sverdrup, who in 1903 published the expedition account Nyt land: fire aar i arktiske egne (English edition: New Land: Four Years in the Arctic Regions, 1904).202 The likewise entitled actual account of the journey (Nye Mennesker) takes up the first, one-hundred-page-long part of the book, which is followed by two other parts: “Primitive Views of Life” (Primitive Livsanskuelser) and “Fables and Legends” (Fabler og Sagn), which contain Greenland’s verbal folklore (myths, fables, legends, tales, songs, depictions of customs, etc.), collected and translated into Danish by Rasmussen. In this book, I focus primarily on the narrative of the journey in the first part of Rasmussen’s work, which unlike its further ethnographic sections is narratively, thematically and generically ←66 | 67→diversified and yet offers a coherent story about cultural encounters with the Inughuit. The narrative does not cover either preparations for the expedition nor its stages from Copenhagen to Godthåb, Jakobshavn and Upernavik. Similarly, it does not mention the journey back home. The plot starts with their arrival at an Inughuit settlement on the island Agpat after crossing Melville Bay and ends with the narrator’s farewell to an old Inughuit woman called The Sinew. The major axis of the narrative is provided by the traveller-protagonist’s interactions with various members of the Inughuit community and by various aspects of their daily life, beliefs, customs and tales, which are predominantly quoted as being spoken by them. The story revolves around the actions and reflections of the narrator and his indigenous interlocutors, while the other Danish expedition members are scarcely mentioned in the text. The account is chronologically and thematically structured by the titles of the successive subchapters: “First Meeting with the Polar Eskimos” (Første Møde med Polareskimoer), “The Magician’s Last Great Inspiration” (En Aandemaners sidste store Inspiration), “A Tribal Migration” (En Folkevandring), “The Old Bear-Hunter” (Den gamle Bjørnejæger), “The Orphan” (Forældreløs), “Women” (Kvinder), “A Summer Journey” (En Sommerrejse), “The Dark Draws Near” (Mørket nærmer sig), “Hunting for Reindeer” (Efter Vildren) and “Weatherbound” (Vejrfast). This is followed by the section devoted to Inughuit beliefs and old fables.
Generically speaking, The New People is a first-person travel narrative, which rarely morphs into a personal diary. Published by Gyldendal in 1905, the book sported a graphic design which resembled fictional literature, as each chapter was preceded by Moltke’s artfully crafted plates and the volume contained no maps, photos or drawings of the route, which typically featured in such accounts.203 In his diary from the Literary Expedition, Rasmussen stated that he wanted to avoid producing a “travel description” as Mylius-Erichsen, the leader of the expedition, had taken the task upon himself.204 As a result, Rasmussen came up with a literary hybrid which defies any simple definition and vastly differs from his later writings, though it shares with them the theme of a journey into the unknown and the encounter of the European subject with the non-European Other.
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2 The Subject’s Preconceptions about North Greenland and the Inughuit
When I was a child I used often to hear an old Greenlandic woman tell how, far away North, at the end of the world, there lived a people who dressed in bearskins and ate raw flesh.
Their country was always shut in by ice, and the daylight never reached over the tops of the high fjelds.
Whoever wished to go there, must travel with the South wind, right up to the Lord of the wild northern gales.
Even before I knew what travelling meant, I determined that one day I would go and find these people, whom my fancy pictured different from all others. I must go and see “The New People,” as the old story-teller called them.
While I was growing up in Denmark, the thought of them was always with me, and the first decision I came to as a man was that I would go to look for them. My opportunity arrived, and as a member of the “Danish Literary Expedition to Greenland,” I passed the winter of 1903–1904 among these Polar Eskimos, the most northerly dwelling people in the world.
And it is from this sojourn, remote from all civilisation, that the following recollections date.205
This poetical introduction to The New People lays the foundation for establishing a relationship between the subject of the utterance and its objects: North Greenland and the Inughuit. The narrator, whose distinctive features include Europeanness, masculinity, middle-class membership and scientific aspirations as implied by his participation in the “literary” expedition, presents his motivations for undertaking a journey in order to meet the Other, which he then turns into the object of his narrative, thereby investing it with new meanings. His first step towards the discovery of the North-Greenlandic world is an imaginary feat, driven by the power of the old Greenlandic story-teller’s narrative, which the introduction evokes. This narrative breeds the concept of an origin in which the Inughuit are imagined – invented – as exotic Hyperboreans who inhabit the northernmost of all lands, situated on the fringes of the European world. Consequently, a journey to this place, which the narrator perceives as remote, is discursivised as ensuing from the cumulative influence of pre-existing, superimposed information, prejudgements and narratives about the Other.
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Telling a story of himself and the events preceding the journey in retrospect, the narrator begins with his expectations as to the remote, northern realm: it is forever locked in ice, knows no daylight and is inhabited by half-legendary, exotic creatures who, “different from all others,” do not resemble people he knows. This image of North Greenland and its inhabitants reproduces an entrenched stereotype of the island as the space of the Other and as “other” space: like Said’s Orient, the unknown Arctic Greenland, as perceived by a traveller who plans on going there, embodies that which Europe is not and exists first and foremost as a projection of his own ideas and expectations. That his perspective is rooted in European (Danish) culture is indisputable, yet the menacing, distant Other tempts him with its exoticism and remoteness, becoming the imaginary destination of his future journey. This journey will produce another narrative, one which the traveller is now presenting to the reader, wiser as he is from all his experiences on the journey. The new narrative will serve as a starting point for other travellers.206
For the narrator of The New People, the experience of North Greenland begins at an indefinite place in West Greenland in his childhood and is mediated by the tales of an indigenous Greenlandic story-teller, to whom people living far off in the North are as foreign and as exotic as they are to a European boy that listens to her stories. The character of an old Greenlandic woman is not only an evocation of an old memory. Importantly, she embodies native knowledge, which the narrator accepts and recognises as a worldview equally as legitimate