***
1 Greenland and Greenlanders in Danish Discourse
In our age of Anthropocene, when no place on earth can any longer be called “virgin” and untouched by the human hand, historical narratives about both imaginary and real places which are secluded or practically inaccessible to travellers and, as such, resist the practices of direct representation, kindle more nostalgia than ever before. Although the Arctic and, in particular, North Greenland with its indigenous Inughuit population are certainly natural locations that anybody can reach with relative ease today, they are also cultural phenomena which have long been a predominantly discursive construction in the Western discourse. This is aptly grasped by Canadian author John Moss, who insists in his Enduring Dreams that “[t];he Arctic of outsiders is a landscape of the mind, shaped more in the imagination by reading than by experience and perception,”15 which highlights the prevalence of outsider views in representations of Arctic regions. The construct was fuelled by two entirely dissonant ways of perceiving the North.16 Namely, associations with ←21 | 22→its brightness produced representations of its virginal nature, purity and innocence, while associations with its darkness bred visions in which it was marked with peril, menace and devilishness.17 As noticed by Norwegian scholars Johan Schimanski, Cathrine Theodorsen and Henning Howlid Wærp, such representations of the North generated stereotypically ambivalent perceptions of the dwellers of northern areas as “the epitomes of purity, authenticity and naturalness,” on the one hand, and agents of “dark powers, dangerous and defying any control,” on the other.18 Alternately – or, for that matter, simultaneously – a paradise and a dystopia, the Far North has attracted and fascinated, but has also evoked fear and awe as the non-Western Other,19 serving ←22 | 23→as an antithesis to the familiar Western world. American anthropologist Ann Fienup-Riordan likens Western attitudes to the Arctic to Edward W. Said’s (1935–2003) definition of Orientalism and calls them “Eskimo Orientalism,”20 while Danish researcher Kirsten Thisted refers to them as “Arctic Orientalism.”21 Similarly to the Orient that was constructed as the antithesis of the West, the Arctic was imagined and represented as the opposite of the Occident which in the Nordic context denoted the Scandinavian countries.22
Within the European world-image, Greenland was first invested with meanings by old-Icelandic settlers. Eiríkr Þorvaldsson, called Erik the Red, called the newly found territory a “green land,” whereby he imposed meaning-producing expectations on the area and laid the imaginary foundation for its “discovery” by land-hungry Icelandic settlers, who arrived there time and again, starting in 985. They referred to themselves as Greenlanders – dwellers of that “green land.” This intellectual or metaphorical “reinvention”23 of Greenland by Erik the Red survived and thrived even when the island became known across Europe. Greenland remained a “green land” while Iceland, despite its more southerly location, remained a “land of ice.” The Inuit that “Greenlanders” encountered ←23 | 24→came to be called skrælingar, which can be translated either as “weaklings” or as “people wearing animal skins.”24
Over the following centuries, a variety of texts about the remote island and its inhabitants contributed to the production of a coherent discourse on Greenland. The development of such discourse was fostered by increasingly closer relationships, which intensified with the onset of colonisation initiated by the Danish-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede (1696–1758) and the continued Danish presence on the western coast that it brought about. As a result, several tropes appeared and became entrenched, reducing things Greenlandic to a kind of “tropological commodity”25 which, repeatedly used by writers of travel reports, made the texts similar in vocabulary and imagery.26 As convincingly shown by historian Hanne Thomsen, the dominant representations of Greenland and Greenlanders were linked to colonial policies of the Danish state,27 which is consistent with Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) theory of the power-knowledge nexus, in which, as Foucault claims, “the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power.”28 In the 18th century, the describing and interpreting of Inuit culture became the sole monopoly of professional missionaries, whose narratives painted the (largely baptised) Greenlanders as living proof of the progress and success of Danish missionary and colonial pursuits, while Greenland was primarily depicted in scientific terms within the frameworks of geography ←24 | 25→and natural history, aligned with the classifying and cataloguing spirit of the Enlightenment.29
In the 19th century, texts about Greenland authored by travellers, educated officials and scientists started to appear side by side with the accounts of missionaries. The prevalent representations of Greenlanders resulted chiefly from the locally anchored critique of absolute power in Denmark, a related criticism of the colonial governance of the Royal Greenland Trading Company in Greenland and the Zeitgeist-coloured European belief that traditional societies were doomed to perish in a clash with Western civilisation.30 The staple images of Greenlanders included, on the one hand, “a noble savage” embodied in a hunter pursuing the traditional, independent lifestyle and, on the other, “partly civilised” colony dwellers in need of support from others as they were too indolent and spoilt by too much contact with the West.31 Greenland was further discursivised in systematic geographical depictions and in the writings by officials and travellers affiliated with the colonial apparatus, which devoted a lot ←25 | 26→of attention to the potential industrial uses of the Danish “dependent territory” [Danish: Biland], about which Danish public opinion still did not know much.32
Eskimologist Erik Gant encapsulates the Danish “reinvention” of Greenland and Greenlanders in an apt commentary: “Strikingly, the scale is meagre indeed: virtuous Hyperboreans got themselves their own Hyperboreans, a harmless addendum to the monstrous history of European colonialism.”33 Representations, as an ideological process resulting both from expectations and imaginings concerning the unknown Other and from real cultural encounters