This Cold Heaven – Seven Seasons in Greenland –

Gretel Ehrlich

“Gretel Ehrlich’s seven seasons in Greenland have given her perhaps the finest appreciation ever of the natural savage beauty. Greenland is the largest island on earth. All but five per cent of it is covered by a vast ice sheet, an enduring remnant of the last ice age. yet despite a seemingly uniquely hostile environment, it has been continuously inhabited for thousands of years.

Ehrlich mixes stories of European anthropologists who have recorded the ways of the Inuit, with artists who have lived briefly on Greenland’s fringe in order to try to capture its extraordinary pure light. And her own travels across this most unearthly landscape in the company of men and women who have a deep bond with it make this Cold Heaven an unforgettable and timeless tribute to the far latitudes, the realm of the great dark, of ice pavilions, polar bears, and Eskimo nomads.

Greenlanders retain many of their traditional practices. Some still hunt on sleds made from whale and caribou with packs of dogs; others fashion harpoons from Narwhal tusks; entrance shamans make soul flights under the ice. The modern population lives on the edge of a stone- and ice-age world and has reached a unique understanding wit it.

Greenland has been a place of magic ever since St Brendan, the sixth-century Irish monk, awestruck with wonder described one of its glaciers as ‘a floating crystal castle the colour of a silver veil, yet hard as marble and the sea around it as smooth as glass and white as milk’. It has lost none of its power to enthral: Gretel Ehrlich has discovered the marvels behind the veil.”


Kenmerken

ISBN

9781841157221

Uitgever

Fourth Estate

Uitgave

2002

Oorspronkelijk

2001

Talen Engels
Landen Groenland

Beschrijving

hardcover, met stofomslag, 377 blz, in goede staat

7.95

1 op voorraad