The Ice Museum by Joanna Kavenna

historian Herodotus, who denied the existence of Ocean altogether. Herodotus thought Homer or some earlier poet had invented the name Ocean. It was absurd, he wrote, that the mapmakers added a fiction to their maps, showing Ocean running like a river round a perfectly circular earth.
    The Romans believed that nothing could be beyond the reach of their empire, even the strange land of Thule. It was inter-civilizational one-upmanship, thinking they had outdone the Greeks by solving the mystery of Thule. But the Romans stopped too soon, at the first remote land they found in the torpid ocean. As the Victorians sailed through the stormy northern ocean, Shetland seemed too far south to be Thule. It was too much like home for the Victorians, who were sailing north in search of the unheimlich —the German word which means uncanny but which contains within it the sense that the uncanny is anything ‘unhomelike,’ anything unfamiliar. Shetland was a beautiful island of cliffs and peat scapes, but the Victorians found it insufficiently strange to be Thule. They were brutal where Thule was concerned, refusing to let national sentiment intervene in a myth trail. But they were thorough, so they enjoyed the detour, as a nod to former empires.
    They arrived in Lerwick, the main town on Shetland; they walked dutifully around the port, looking at the houses with crow-stepped gables. They made careful notes in their diaries. The bogs stretched across the low hills; the snowy quartz-veined rocks shone against the yellow fields of oats and barley. There were willows and maple planes, hanging their shade over the broken ruins of cottages. There were ducks and geese everywhere, gulls more numerous than the cocks and hens, and salt-fish lying piled on the sands. The industrious women crowded the markets, some carrying crates of peat, some spinning yarn and knitting stockings.
    I arrived in Lerwick under a cold sky, the wind blasting through the sallow streets. The town was a series of stone houses, a main street and a road snaking towards the harbour, where the sea splashed against the docks. Beyond the outskirts stood the dark green cliffs, and the long valleys stretching inland. The mist hovered low on the rocks around the town, on the matted grass hills, breathing across the plains. There was an old fort at the end of the main street, with a set of cannons pointing out to sea, pointing towards the passenger ferry I had arrived on, still looming above the buildings, waiting to leave. The wind whipped in from the sea, racing between the buildings, ripping at the awnings on the boats in the harbour. A gaff-rigged boat moved past, its sails stretched by the wind.
    There was a bar called Thule by the quayside, which looked like an extension to a prison, its exterior dank and salt-stained. It sat on the harbour road, a torn notice taped to the window, addressed to Norwegian sailors. VELKOMMEN TIL THULE! the notice read. Welcome to Thule. An ancient land, and now a bar, far more convenient for the weary sailor recently arrived on a ship from Norway. Inside were chrome walls and stools, in Scando-minimalist design. A Nordic home-from-home. Hammering on the window, I persuaded the barman to open the door, and asked him why the bar was named Thule. He propped himself up against the frame, looking tired. Perhaps it was too early in the morning, perhaps the wind was whipping my words away, but he was reluctant to talk. ‘Don’t ask me, I just work here,’ he said.
    He was a strawberry blond, pulling on a jumper as he stood in the doorway, squinting in the cold light. The skin around his eyes creased into intricate lines as he spoke. He grimaced at the wind, which gusted against the door, almost slamming him back inside. I raised my voice, as the wind became a howl echoing around the quayside buildings. ‘What do you think?’ I tried to shout. ‘Do you think Shetland was Thule?’
    He shrugged again. ‘I really