Nonetheless, the 18th- and 19th-century representations of Greenland and Greenlanders of the island’s west coast had little of the one-sidedness that Said suggests in his Orientalism. As Hans Egede and later missionaries were actually steeped in Greenlandic culture and felt at home in the Arctic, their descriptions of the realities they experienced were highly heterogeneous34: despite their negative traits, which were particularly underscored in early accounts, the Inuit were portrayed as independent and individual human beings, while their culture was depicted in its own right through scientific discourse.35 Brought forth from the realm of myth and anonymity, Greenlanders were recognised by the writers as humans who, endowed with a certain morality, understanding and reason, could ←26 | 27→abandon the state of savagery and, through the mediation of Danes, become converted inhabitants of a European colony. Even those early accounts characteristically disrupt colonial univocality through regular recourse to indigenous knowledge (e.g. in animal descriptions), reliance on Greenlandic terminology and/or the incorporation of letters written by literate and baptised Greenlanders into European texts.36 Later accounts put ever more stress on the contribution that Greenlandic catechists made to the work of European missions and ever more vocally expressed an understanding of and sympathy for the people of Greenland and its culture.37 Some writers communicated authentic admiration for and amazement at Greenland’s nature and wondered at the abundance of its resources, which defied the sternness of its natural conditions.38 The writers of 18th-century accounts largely headed to Greenland with strong intentions of settling down for lengthy stints, considered the island their home and devoted considerable periods of their lives, if not their entire lifetimes, to this engagement.39 For this reason, although the images of Greenland and its inhabitants they produced were embroiled in the colonising project, they are hardly one-dimensional, diverging quite considerably from the first European representations of the American New World. The reports of missionaries imply that Greenland, rather than being “new” to the Danish settlers, was reinvented by them and integrated with their Enlightenment-inflected image of the world.
In the mid-19th century, attitudes to the yet-unexplored areas of Greenland changed: while in the first half of the 19th century they were shrouded in silence, in the second half attention was turned to the interior of Greenland ←27 | 28→and the regions situated north and east of the borders of the Danish colony.40 This shift resulted from the increased interest of the world’s superpowers in the last uncharted territories of the globe. Such preoccupations spurred scientific expeditions into the polar regions and fuelled the rise of a new discipline, which came to be referred to as “polar studies” and garnered prominence in Denmark as a source of the country’s international prestige.41 As a matter of fact, polar explorers and their accounts were primarily responsible for the discursivisation of the previously unknown regions of the Arctic and their inhabitants, a process which also effected a shift in the perceptions of Greenlanders and Greenland in general.42 As Western expeditions took on indigenous techniques of travelling by land in winter and their supplies grew dependent on hunting, the nomadic people that called themselves Inughuit became indispensable helpers of European leaders on the road. The two hundred or so members of this nomadic people were greatly admired, especially for their coping capacity amidst the extremities of the Arctic climate, which led to their idealisation as heroic superhumans.43 In keeping with the principles of 19th-century Darwinism, people who were ideally adapted to their environment came across as remarkable and easily lent themselves to idealisation.44 In stark contrast to the representations of Greenlanders from the colonised areas of West Greenland as verging on extinction, it became common practice to represent the Inughuit, called polar Eskimos, as “noble savages” – natural, unspoilt, primaeval people who had a symbiotic connection to nature and needed no help from others; people who enjoyed true freedom and independence and, as the evolutionist world-perception had it, stood at the very origin of humankind, representing Europe’s remote past.45 Moreover, ←28 | 29→successive accounts produced by polar explorers portrayed the Inughuit as if they had never met white people before; each encounter entailed a new beginning, with the Inughuit being discovered anew time and again.46 Reports from North Greenland stressed that although they were purportedly uncivilised, those “free children of nature” were immensely intelligent and resolutely indefatigable in coping with the unfriendly environment (their home as it were), which was later fixed as a staple element of their image.47 The emphasis that well-known polar explorers put in their narratives on the harshness of the natural conditions in North Greenland amplified the heroic stature awarded to its indigenous population as well as aggrandising the accomplishments of the Europeans whose pursuits were part of a broader national project aimed at augmenting the international glory and prestige of their homelands.48 It was precisely in the last decades of the 19th century that Greenlanders acquired an indisputably favourable image which has survived into our times, a romanticised image of “nature people” [Danish: Naturfolk],49 perpetuated as the Other for the outsiders who described them.50 This effect was produced, to a large degree, ←29 | 30→by the enormous popularity of Knud Rasmussen and his vivid expedition accounts.51
The life and work of Knud Rasmussen, one of Denmark’s most celebrated national heroes, stretched over the last two decades of the 19th century and the first three decades of the 20th century.52 Born on 7 July 1879 in Ilulissat [Danish: Jakobshavn], Greenland, to a Danish pastor and a half-Greenlander mother,53 Rasmussen grew up in a relatively privileged family as for the modest life standards of the Danish colony. With Greenlanders as his playmates in childhood, he naturally mastered the difficult Greenlandic language and the technique of driving a dogsled, skills which he later emphasised on a number of occasions to prove the edge he boasted over other polar explorers in the study of Inuit culture.54 As later researchers of Rasmussen’s life and work observe, his ethnic background and social status when ←30 | 31→growing up in Greenland were Danish, which is attested by the fact that at twelve years old he was sent to Denmark for schooling.55 He completed his education in 1900, when he passed his final high-school exams with considerable difficulty and started travelling as a reporter for the Danish dailies Kristeligt Dagblad and Illustreret Tidende. First he went to Iceland, where he met Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen (1872–1907), a future leader of the Literary