The best books to read if you want to get to know Greenland

A passenger in Chicago O’Hare International Airport pressed a battered paperback copy of this book into my hands as I boarded my plane. I was in my early and impressionable twenties, on my way back to the UK, and had no idea that my life was about to change. It’s that kind of book. I knew next to nothing about Greenland, and even less about Denmark. Smilla’s Sense of Snow introduced me to the people, the culture, and the messy history that connects the two countries all wrapped up in a thrilling page-turner. I inhaled it on the flight home, and thus began my journey to Greenland.

Marie Herbert’s book is exceptional as it documents a period of time in the life of an Arctic explorer’s wife. Marie didn’t stay at home when her husband Wally Herbert travelled to the far north of Greenland to live with the Inuit. She went with him. In addition to the incredible insights Marie records about Inuit life in the harsh Arctic during her time on Herbert Island, The Snow People is a very personal book for me. Marie Herbert wrote the acknowledgments for the book in May 1973. I was born in August of the same year, and thirty-seven years later I would stare at the same island from my kitchen window when I lived in Greenland. A truly magical and, for me, prophetic read.

My copy of Génsbøl’s nature guide is well-thumbed. I often used it to find out what I was eating. That’s right; it is a nature guide, packed with fabulous illustrations–better than photographs–that allow for easy identification of the flora and fauna of Greenland, but I also used it to identify what I was eating when invited to an Inuit hunter’s kaffemik–a celebration of culture, tradition, and food wrapped up in a birthday or child’s confirmation party. The guide is an indispensable companion for anyone travelling to the Arctic, and Greenland in particular. But it is equally enjoyable, perhaps even more so, when sitting in a favourite armchair with a favourite beverage in familiar surroundings, dreaming of the far north.

I tracked down a 1973 hardback edition of this book because I fell in love with it. The publication date, the year of my birth, was an added bonus. I borrowed Lowenstein’s translation of material collected by Knud Rasmussen, the famous polar explorer, from the library. As soon as I read the preface, I knew I had to own it. It’s an owning kind of book. Inuit poems are raw like the environment they are birthed in – the words and the people. Some might call the poems simplistic, but having lived in the Arctic, I know that even the simplest things can be challenging, and often life-threatening. The poems in this book capture another world that is so very far removed from our own and yet startlingly vibrant and important. 

Not only is Vaughan’s book full of history and exciting and romantic names, it is the perfect introduction to a fabulous part of the world, and a snapshot of what once was, and what might never be again, as the Arctic is subject to constant change–climatically and politically. This is another well-thumbed book of mine. It is a go-to book for facts and details. It’s not a page-turner, but more of a returner–I imagine many readers, like me, returning to this book with a query to be answered, or a historical itch to be scratched.