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Something Understood

Religion & Ethics

Ethical and religious discussion that examines some of the larger questions of life

Ethical and religious discussion that examines some of the larger questions of life, taking a spiritual theme and exploring it through music, prose and poetry

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Something Understood: The White North Has Thy Bones

The White North Has Thy Tiny Bones

04/01/2015

The White North Has Thy Bones

BBC Radio 4 - Something Understood, The White North Has Thy Bones

Samira Ahmed reaches for the far north and how it has been perceived, dreamed and desired.

Samira Ahmed reaches for the far north, exploring how it has been perceived, dreamed and even desired. Why such enchantment for these snowy wastes, where death awaits so many?

Samira Ahmed reaches for the far North, exploring how it has been perceived, dreamed and even desired. Why is there such enchantment for these snowy wastes, where death awaits so many?

She considers the Arctic obsession of the 19th century, where society clamoured for news of great explorers like Franklin and swooned at thoughts of their fate. Tales of being frozen solid, cannibalism and insanity.

Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote a short poem for the memorial to Franklin which stands in Westminster Abbey, "Not here: The white north has thy bones; and thou, heroic sailor soul, art passing on thine happier voyage now towards no earthly pole."

But this is not simply the land of explorers. Samira hears from the people who inhabit the apparently uninhabitable. There's the Inuit. What is their relationship with the environment and the creatures they share it with? 

Beneath the ice flows lie submarines, fearful, lying in the dark. What of the men who live beneath these freezing waters, and what of life in the Soviet labour camps of Siberia?

With music from contemporary composer Gavin Bryars, and readings from Jules Verne and Philip Larkin, this is a journey into the far north - which represents a sublime paradise for many and, for so many others, a hell.


Produced by Kevin Dawson
A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.

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