Late Medieval philosophers, knowing from their study of Classical cosmography that the earth is a globe, often speculated about what lay at its poles. Most believed them uninhabitable, 'the darkling end of a failing world' in the bleak words of Adam of Bremen. According to Cardinal d' Ailly, 'at the Poles there live great ghosts and ferocious beasts, the enemies of man.' Opinion was divided, however, and if some Medieval philosophers believed the Arctic must be a hell, others believed it must be a heaven. Roger Bacon thought that north beyond a rim of ice at the Arctic Circle was a paradise where flourished the Hyperboreans: 'a very happy race, which dies only from satiety of life, attaining which it casts itself from a lofty rock into the sea'.

LRB 19 June 1986 | PDF Download