Jørn Riel's Arctic Warmth

By : Henrik Wivel

The Danish author Jørn Riel´s extensive body of work reveals the route to the Arctic heart and thus to a humanism which modern civilisation has forgotten or repressed. Through his portrait of Eskimo culture and nature, cosmopolitan Jørn Riel presents a utopia which the modern world clearly needs and from which it can nourish its dreams.

Jørn Riel (b. 1931) has written numerous stories set in Northeast Greenland, and in one of them, Cirkulæret (The Circular, 1994), a loveable anarchist embarks on the grand tour round Greenland´s Northern Cap, from Ross Bay in the East, to Thule in the West. Lodvig is his name and the reason for his trip northward across the icy polar terrain is a government decree, issued by the administration in Denmark, the result of a political decision, that the small fishing stations of Northeast Greenland must be closed down. Lodvig is damned if he´ll sit back and take that!

   So instead of capitulating and enlisting under the grey flag of Danish civilisation, Lodvig the trapper sets off in the tracks of the great turn-of-the-century Arctic explorers, heading towards the consummate land of myth, Ultima Thule.

   It proves to be Lodvig´s final journey. A beautiful encounter with the Arctic environment and its ways, where Lodvig, with his sledge dogs and his tame croaking raven flying above him, achieves the impossible as it were, and single-handedly forges a route which no European has previously completed or survived. Having reached his goal, Lodvig too dies of exhaustion, while his soul flies off with the black croaking raven, up and over the Greenland mountain ranges. Rather a heroic nothingness than a tepid nonentity is Lodvig´s and the story´s moral.

   But Lodvig´s trek around the northernmost point of Greenland is not solely a romantic rebellion following in the footsteps of the great Arctic explorers. At a deeper level it is also an initiation into Eskimo culture and its age-old patterns. Because Lodvig rediscovers the routes which the first migrants followed when, in a long, debilitating and divinely beautiful 1000-year voyage, they inscribed Greenland in their magic circle as the "People´s Country". Lodvig´s journey is thus an act of final dissociation from Danish bureaucracy and it represents an identification with the Eskimo people who originally took possession of the Arctic regions from Alaska to Northeast Greenland and who have never recognised any boundaries other than those created at the hand of nature.

   Lodvig´s journey can be found as a kind of blueprint in a number of the long and short Arctic stories which constitute the qualitative core territory of Jørn Riel´s writing since he published his first book in 1970 . The journey northward provides a crystalline, clear reflector in which the true heroes of Jørn Riel´s stories are mirrored. In the smooth ice of reflection, human values are seen and seen again in the sparkling grin or the gleaming eyes of the grotesque mask with which the Arctic weather equips the people who live there. Jørn Riel is familiar with the mask, from the inside too, because he has worn it himself. As an 18-year-old, he took part in the Arctic explorer Lauge Koch´s expedition in Eastern Greenland and it was not until ten years later that he left the Arctic again. Jørn Riel worked as a navigator and radio operator in Greenland, based on Ella Island. And he has never returned to settle in Denmark, but lives in voluntarily nomadic exile elsewhere around the globe, as, among other things, a UN Field Officer: Sweden, Northern Italy, the West Indies, Africa, Asia Minor and South East Asia - most recently domiciled in Bangkok.

   The essential humanism displayed in Jørn Riel´s work exposes well-worn tracks which seem to have been covered over or partially repressed in Danish literature of the last 100 years. But what could be called "Greenland-tracks" in Danish literature actually draw an unbroken line from turn-of-the-century literary expeditions and heroic endeavours in Arctic conditions, and from the stories born of the yearnings and undertakings of that period. Discerning writers and explorers such as Mylius-Erichsen, Peter Freuchen, Knud Rasmussen and Johannes V. Jensen with Den lange Rejse (The Long Journey, 1908-22), together with the Icelandic sagas, constitute some of the principal literary groundwork for Jørn Riel. Contemporary with Jørn Riel - and later - other Danish writers have found inspiration in the environment and people of Greenland: Thorkild Hansen, the painter-poet Per Kirkeby and most recently Peter Høeg. All that is Arctic provokes the same visionary imaginative scope and sensibility of language in Jørn Riel as in these exotic and restlessly roving colleagues in the field.

   Cosmopolitan Jørn Riel has always, with touching passion, applauded the international life, wherever in the world he has come across it. But by virtue of his position outside the literary milieu in Denmark, he also lives in a kind of exile in relation to the Danish debate about literature and the arts; a discussion in which a vast amount of energy is exercised in order to put literature on a par with zeitgeist and good taste - meat is not to be eaten raw. But the fundamental good story has always proven to be remarkably durable. If one dons the raven´s fabulous suit of feathers and joins the grand tour from Northeast Greenland to Thule and onwards across the Arctic terrain, then, like Jørn Riel and his characters, one finds the way to a language which can make the snow gleam in the winter night and the ice glow with a warmth like that of the heart itself.

Translated by Gaye Kynoch