An amazing journey through myth and history in search of a lost world

To the ancients, Thule was a land beyond the edge of the maps, a northerly dreamland. It was a mystery for thousands of years, long thought to be an icy Eden, a place of exquisite beauty and unequaled purity. The lost world of Thule captured the imagination of poets, artists, explorers, and, most recently, writer Joanna Kavenna, who set out on a harrowing and exhilarating voyage of discovery. Her journey took her to Shetland, Iceland, Norway, Estonia, Greenland, and Svalbardinto the Arctic wilderness, over frozen seas and ice mountainsin search of this most haunting of northern places.

As she travels, Kavenna finds traces of earlier writers and seekers: Richard Francis Burton, William Morris, Anthony Trollope, and Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen. But she comes to discover that a darkness also inhabits Thule. She finds ice-bound relics of the cold war. She unearths the story of the Thule Society, an offshoot of the Nazi party, devoted to the "purity" of the Nordic peoples. Part diary, part detective trail, The Ice Museum is a wonder voyage through landscape and myth, reminiscent of Lucy Jago's The Northern Lights and Barry Lopez's National Book Award-winning Arctic Dreams.

"The fourth-century B.C. Greek explorer Pytheas claimed to have sailed six days from Scotland and discovered a land he named Thule. From Pytheas's brief, oft-disputed account of a land of short winter days where the sea turned into a viscous mass sprang an entire mythology of a magical, northern realm hidden beyond the edges of civilization. Kavenna's discursive book takes a thoughtful stroll through the different myths of Thule, examining how it became symbolic of everything from the Victorians' lost Arcadia to a polluted fantasy of racial purity for the proto-Nazi Thule Society. Kavenna, who's written for the Guardian and other British papers, follows the mark of Thule from the beer halls of Munich to the imagined Thules of the Shetland Islands, Iceland, Greenland and beyond. While frequently rhapsodic in regard to the epic landscapes, Kavenna resists the urge to attach too much import to her travels, not forcing the mythological on the everyday (unlike many Thule hunters, including fantasist Richard Burton). Although Kavenna's voyages don't solve the mystery as such, they provide fodder for a bracing account of humankind's dream of exploration and of the explorers 'determined to discover, to shade in the blanks on the maps.'" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

The author set out on a harrowing and exhilarating voyage of discovery from Shetland, Iceland, Norway, Estonia, Greenland, and Svalbard in search of this most haunting of northern places, the mysterious lost world of Thule.

Joanna Kavenna has written for The New York Review of Books, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph,The London Review of Books, The Guardian, and TheTimes Literary Supplement, among other publications. She currently holds a writing fellowship at St. John's College, Cambridge.