Review: A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter

5 stars for A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter.

My interest in the Northern Arctic and Polar Night is highly piqued after re-reading Dark Matter by Michelle Paver. The author shared titles of books she referred to in writing Dark Matter; this was how I am introduced to "A Woman in the Polar Night". Keen to find out more, I bought the book. I am a sucker for books mentioned in the books I read. In fact, I am keen to get hold of some other books quoted until I realise that it is next to impossible. Not for lack of trying, some of these book are simply not available for sale. I shall touch more on these later on under (*).

I am surprised that A Woman in the Polar Night is the only book ever written by Christiane Ritter, an Austrian, the first European woman (from central Europe) to spend winter so far north. What is even more surprisingly is that she was born in 1897 and died in 2000 at the of 103. Our lifetimes actually overlapped! This book was a bestseller throughout Europe and has never been out of print in its original language, German.

In her book, the author shares why she joins her husband for a year on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen, and how acutely aware she is of the perils of living in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, two hundred and fifty miles away from the nearest human settlement (their nearest neighbour being sixty miles away in another hut). Initially horrified of the freezing cold and bleak landscape filled with nothing but stones and rocks and ghastly anxious about the lack of vitamins (which in all likelihood will lead to scurvy and death), she eventually settles into the rhythm of life and begins to cherish the beauty and simplicity of the far north.

In the memoir, the Austrian Ritter talks about her encounters with seals, polar foxes and polar bears among others such as the eider ducks, gulls and other wildlife. She shares the indescribable enchantment of the Arctic night and the bewildering magic light of the Aurora. She recounts her experience with pack ice, iceberg and ice floes and why the need to gather everything such as driftwood, planks, raw rubber, and even clothes washed up by storms on the foreshore - everything is valuable and might be useful.

This classic memoir tells of the author's emotional transformation and inspiring journey to freedom, happiness and fulfilment in the adventure of a lifetime.

P/S:
While a bear post was often mentioned in author Michelle Paver's Dark Matter, it is only from reading this memoir that I truly grasp the purpose of the bear post - a tall wooden post bleached snow- white - that was set about two yards from their Grey Hook hut's window.

A "bear post" in the historical and literary context of Spitsbergen (Svalbard) is a wooden post or stake traditionally set up outside remote trapper cabins to lure, position, or spot polar bears so they could be shot for food, skin, or self-defense.

A quick search in Google confirms the historical Use of Trapper Bear Posts as follows:

(1) Luring Predators: Early Arctic trappers and hunters used these bleached driftwood or timber posts to hang bait or blubber, enticing curious or hungry polar bears close enough to the cabin to be targeted by firearms.

(2) Gunsight Alignment: The post acted as a fixed reference point or killing marker in the snow, making it easier to aim accurately during the blinding whiteouts or pitch-black months of the polar night.

(3) Literary Symbolism: In Arctic fiction and memoirs—such as Michelle Paver's ghost story Dark Matter (set in Spitsbergen) or Christiane Ritter’s A Woman in the Polar Night—the weathered bear post also serves as a haunting, atmospheric relic of human survival and the grim predator-prey dynamic on the ice.

(*)
Under the Pole Star is a 1937 book detailing the Oxford University Arctic Expedition, 1935-6, written by expedition leader A.R. Glen and assisted by N.A.C. Croft. Sadly, this book is an out-of-print, antiquarian title from 1937. Copies are exclusively available through specialized rare book dealers and collectible marketplaces only.

The Diaries of Thorleif Bjertnes is a historical non-fiction record documenting the brutal realities of an overwintering trapping expedition in the high Arctic. His diaries were preserved in the archives of the Svalbard Museum. In Year 2000, his daughter compiled and published them under the title The Diaries of Thorleif Bjertnes: Nordaustlandet 1933-1934. Unlike romanticized versions of Arctic exploration Bjertnes' journals provide a raw look at the intense psychological and environmental strains of polar survival. The diaries explicitly describe the harsh trapping life, interpersonal hostility, and the "Arctic Dread". Sadly, finding a commercial copy of this physical book is incredibly difficult as it was never mass-produced for the public.

I found out that the material colloquially referred to by author Michelle Paver and historians as "The Diaries of Thorleif Bjertnes: Nordaustlandet 1933-1934" is actually an archival record rather than a widely distributed retail book. The original handwritten journals, logs and photos belong to the family estate and are officially held in the physial vaults of the Svalbard Museum Archive (Catalog Reference: A-1005 - Thorleif Bjertnes) in Longyearbyen, Norway. While a limited, privately bound translation/transcript was compiled by his daughter, Lee Carmody, to donate alongside the museum's permanent collection, it did not receive a standard ISBN print run for commercial online storefronts like Amazon or AbeBooks.


Publisher: Pushkin Press Classics
Publication date: 6 Feb 2024

*** Favourite Quote 1 ***

The scene is comfortless. Far and wide not a tree or shrub; everything grey and bare and stony. The boundlessly broad foreland, a sea of stone, stones stretching up to the crumbling mountains and down to the crumbling shore, an arid picture of death and decay.

*** Favourite Quote 2 ***

We unpack. How many days it takes is difficult to say. For here there are no days because there are no nights. One day melts into the next, and you cannot say this is the end of today and now it is tomorrow and that was yesterday. It is always light, the sea is always murmuring, and the mist stands immovable as a wall around the hut. We eat when we are hungry; we sleep when we are tired.

*** Favourite Quote 3 ***

Once, while the men are indoors carving, I stand on the door sill and look southward where the sky is growing light. For days it has been hidden by cloud, but now it is lit by the most wonderful dawn. It is twelve o'clock midday when the sun rises. It rises half over the horizon, and then sets again and disappears. Only slowly and with a shudder do I grasp that this is the terrible moment when the sun has shone for us the last time this year. I run indoors to the men.

"That's right," they say calmly and go on carving. "It's the sixteenth of October today, and the sun won't come back to us before the twenty-fifth of February."

I calculate that the night will last one hundred and thirty-two days.

*** Favourite Quote 4 ***

The drama of the polar world sinking slowly into shadow is played out in utter silence and remoteness. The scenes are changed by sorcery.

*** Favourite Quote 5 ***

The extroverts among those who spend the winter here will always instinctively create for themselves a sphere of activity, and hence a sphere of reality that will save them when no impulse comes from without. Those who find their pleasure in meditation will withdraw into themselves, into regions of astonishing brightness; but those who are accustomed to yield to their inclination to idleness run the great danger of losing themselves in nothingness, of surrendering their senses to all the insane fantasies of overstretched nerves.

*** Favourite Quote 6 ***

We both know that ghosts are imaginary, but we both know also that imagination can become reality in the mind of a man who has lost all standard of reality in the loneliness and darkness.

*** Favourite Quote 7 ***

Rar is a strangeness that overcomes many who spend the winter in polar regions. Ishavet kaller, or "the Arctic calls", is what the Spitsbergen hunters say when one of their comrades, for mysterious reasons, throws himself into the sea.

*** Favourite Quote 8 ***

Up here one must be broadminded enough not to be pedantic. I see life too with other eyes. Forgotten are all externals; here everything is concerned with simple being. The hut is a covered hollow, without which we would freeze; the primitive food must be eaten, for it keeps us alive. And we can even play with sooty cards, although hearts and diamonds are as black as spades. They help us to pass the time of darkness, and that is their value.

*** Favourite Quote 9 ***

Gradually all our thoughts revolve around the pack ice. Strangely enough, my fear of the pack ice has vanished. I am beginning to think in exactly the same terms as the hunters. I, too, long for the pack ice, for the mysterious whiteness out there in the blackness, which brings precious gifts to the hunters cut off from the world in the winter night — bears, fresh meat, furs, excitement, incident, the chase, and... more foxes. Foxes that live on the drift ice, foxes that spend their lives creeping after the bears and eating whatever they leave behind uneaten from their meals.

*** Favourite Quote 10 ***

Bear hunting in Spitsbergen needs patience. It's a question of luck. The hunting of the bear itself is perhaps not the most difficult thing; it is being able to wait in solitude and darkness.

~ A Woman in the Polar Night
Christiane Ritter

@}--->>--->>-----

A rediscovered classic memoir - the mesmerizingly beautiful account of one woman's year spent living in a remote hut in the Arctic.

This rediscovered classic memoir tells the incredible tale of a woman defying society's expectations to find freedom and peace in the adventure of a lifetime.

In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to 'read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart's content', but when Christiane arrives she is shocked to realize that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, battling the elements every day, just to survive.

At first, Christiane is horrified by the freezing cold, the bleak landscape the lack of equipment and supplies... But as time passes, after encounters with bears and seals, long treks over the ice and months on end of perpetual night, she finds herself falling in love with the Arctic's harsh, otherworldly beauty, gaining a great sense of inner peace and a new appreciation for the sanctity of life.

*Blurb from Goodreads*

Add to:


Links to purchase: