Discovering Greenland

In a remote corner of the far north, among the icy waters of the Atlantic, lies an enigmatic land, a place of fire and ice where the sun never sets. It is the legendary island of Thule, mentioned for the first time by the Greek explorer Pytheas, who set sail from Marseilles around 330 BC. Since then, the allure of this unknown land has attracted generations of sailors and explorers. Some of them, chasing the mythical Thule, have reached even further north, to a land that is today harsh, because it is almost completely covered by ice, but that was once covered with green meadows: Greenland.

In fact, Europeans colonized the island for the first time probably around the year 1000, at a time when Europe enjoyed a particularly favorable climate. The Danish Vikings, in search of new lands, found a Greenland of meadows and shrubs, which they called Grønland, “Green Land”. The Inuit, the local native population, called what is the largest island in the world, Kalaallit Nunaat, “Land of Men”. At the end of the Middle Ages, with the return of colder temperatures and the disappearance of most of the meadows, the Danish colony was abandoned, and only a few Inuit settlements remained. In 1721, Greenland became part of the Danish kingdom, remaining an isolated, largely unexplored region that seemed to interest no one. In short, the bellicose declarations of Donald Trump, who recently hypothesized an annexation of Greenlandic territory to the United States, were very far away.

It was only in the early twentieth century that the Danish government decided to establish a commercial colony there, which not by chance took the mythical name of Thule. It was from here that, in April 1912, the great Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen , accompanied by a cartographer and two Inuit hunters, set out on a journey on dog sleds. And it was from here that the great adventure recounted in North of Thule (Iperborea, 2025, pp. 256) began, a volume that contains the diary kept by Rasmussen during his crossing of Greenland.

The aim of the expedition was to document the habits and customs of the Inuit people , but above all to map the Peary Channel , a stretch of sea that separates the island from its far north, from the American continent which already at the time – with Trump still far to come – was making claims on Greenlandic lands.

The mission was undertaken with enthusiasm, and the explorers' motto, "Long live the fight for life!", resounded many times in front of the virgin nature, as cruel as it was extraordinary. This harsh land, which starved dogs and men, at the same time offered breathtaking views composed of light, wind and ice, so much so that Rasmussen wrote: " Greenland is truly the land of diversity. As soon as death leaves its grip, life begins ." The polar ice cap appeared as a white desert, a place to test oneself, perhaps reading a few pages of Flaubert or Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi in the shelter of the igloos. However, the survival of the four travellers depended largely on the knowledge of the Inuit , which Rasmussen collected meticulously , transforming his diary into a precious ethnographic document .

The stories narrated range from founding myths and legends to initiation rites, through hunting and fishing techniques, advice on how to cover ski edges with walrus skin and instructions for building an igloo. Thus, between the difficult practical problems of an expedition at forty degrees below zero and the discovery of unknown territories, Knud Rasmussen recounts his adventures through the eyes of the great explorer, bringing out Inuit culture and spirituality and recognizing in the struggle for survival not only a scientific value, but also an ethical and civil one.