In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times (volume 1 of 2)

In Northern Mists is Fridtjof Nansen doing what he does best: venturing into the unknown. But this time, the explorer who crossed the Arctic ice turns his attention backward through centuries, tracing humanity's obsession with the frozen edge of the world. Nansen digs into antiquity and the early Middle Ages, sifting through medieval maps, sagas, and surviving accounts to separate what sailors actually knew from the monstrous legends that filled the blank spaces on ancient charts. The result reads less like a dry academic exercise and more like an explorer charting someone else's expedition through fog and fable. He writes with the frustration of a practical man confronting centuries of embellishment, yet also with wonder at how much was known long before Columbus sailed. This is the first volume of a two-part work, covering the period before Viking dominance of the northern seas. For anyone drawn to the romance of exploration, the history of how we learned to map the unmappable, or the mind of one of history's greatest adventurers turned historian.