Women Write About Svalbard: Christiane Ritter, Cecilia Blomdahl, and Line Nagell Ylvisåker

 

Christiane and Hermann Ritter in front of their house on Svalbard 

I’ve been dreaming these days about the polar regions, the Arctic in particular.  In the midst of attempting to digest a good deal of difficult news, which seems to fly at us from all directions but mainly emanates from Washington D.C., I don’t want to forget about climate change. The melting glaciers of Greenland, Svalbard, and Antarctica concern us all. Long after this sinister administration is gone, we’ll be living through the consequences of denying scientific research.

I'm thinking about the environment as I work on my current project, a memoir about my travels up in Arctic Norway last summer. But I've also been paying attention to those who have traveled and lived up in the high North. I’ve been researching the Norwegian explorers, Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen; the Sámi members of expeditions to Greenland and Antarctica; Tromsø’s role as an Arctic research center. And then, of course, there’s Svalbard. I visited the archipelago briefly once decades ago when I worked on the Norwegian coastal steamer one summer, and the memory of the polar ice north of Ny Ålesund is still powerful.

Which brings me to two books I’ve recently read, and another I've only read about, written by women who lived or are living on Svalbard. Books that couldn’t be more different in scope, format, and tone, but that taken together say something about the ways in which woman have experienced the North and also projected themselves into it. 

A Woman in the Polar Night, by Christiane Ritter, is a translation from the German that originally came out in 1938 (in 1954 in England). This short memoir has stayed in print in her native Austria ever since but was a forgotten classic when Pushkin Press reissued it in 2024. It’s the account of a year that Ritter, then in her early thirties, spent with her husband, Hermann, a naval officer who went to Svalbard on a scientific expedition and stayed to become a trapper and hunter. He telegraphed her to come and join him and in 1934 she did, leaving behind her teenage daughter and the comforts of life in Vienna.

Ritter tells us almost nothing about that old life. From the moment she arrives, she is fully present in the overwhelming world of Svalbard, which at first shocks her with its emptiness and desolation, even at summer’s tail end: “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.”

But as the months progress, her experience changes. The stove is primitive and sooty; the menu relies too heavily on oily seal meat, the polar night descends unmercifully. While the Aurora and the stars whirl around dark sky, the shack can feel alternately cozy and claustrophobic. Ritter feels at times small and afraid, especially when left for days alone in the cabin she and Hermann share with a younger Norwegian, Karl, when the men are out hunting. But if her descriptions of the effort of daily existence are precise and sometimes humorous, her writing about the mountains, fjords and especially the ice, the snow, and the changing light as autumn becomes winter and winter becomes spring begins at times to rise to an exultation that we commonly associate with saints in the grip of an ecstatic vision of God and the universe. At one point Ritter displays hints of an Arctic madness—she becomes, Karl’s brief formulation, rar, the Norwegian word for “strange.”

Some have called A Woman in the Polar Night a feminist text, and there’s some truth to that. There’s more talk of domesticity and its value in bare circumstances than of conquering the wilderness; there is also an ecologist mindset that might remind us of Susan Griffin’s Women and Nature and other core works of eco-feminism with their emphasis on interconnectedness. Ritter finds a kind of freedom in Svalbard from social expectations and civilization itself. The men, in fact, share the cooking, and she must pitch in with chopping up frozen meat and shoveling snow. But some of what Ritter experiences is the non-gendered self expanding to meet the extraordinary landscape and cosmos.

Swedish photographer Cecilia Blomdahl’s 2024 coffee table book, Life on Svalbard, couldn’t be more different in scope, format, and mood. A Woman in the Polar Night is austere and poetic; Christiane Ritter relies on her pen to create indelible imagery. There are only a few sketches and black and white photographs. She’s modest to a fault; we could wish we knew more about her. What kind of art does she make and how does she support herself? Why is her husband in Svalbard and is he ever coming home? What does she think about the political situation in Central Europe and the rise of National Socialism?

Blomdahl inhabits another world entirely, that of a content creator across multiple social media channels. She’s on Instagram, she’s on Tik-Tok, she’s on Facebook, and she’s on YouTube, where she’s made 500 videos of her life near the main town of Longyearbyen. One of them from a few years ago, explaining “THIS is why I live on a remote Arctic island with 3000 people and polar bears,” has garnered over 4 million views. Blomdahl came to Svalbard in 2016 to work in the hospitality field. She immediately took to the cold and extremes of light and dark over the course of the year. With her Norwegian boyfriend, initially a cook at the same hotel, she moved a short way outside Longyearbyen to a cabin with a view of seven glaciers. From there she discovered photography as a way of communicating with hundreds of thousands of people across the globe, who also dream of cold, remote places, but perhaps don’t actually want to go there. They would rather watch Blomdahl in snowsuits on her snowmobile, or in her long underwear reading a book, or in her swimsuit braving an icy dip. She’s often photographed from behind, staring at the landscape, her brown hair flowing, or sitting on the porch or inside the cabin, with a steaming cup of coffee, demonstrating hygge in the midst of wilderness. Svalbard is there, in full view, but as she says in one video, “Svalbard is a feeling, it’s a lifestyle, not just a place.” Her viewers write comments praising her positivity. They seem to love the combination of gentle reality show superimposed on a harsh but stunning northern landscape.

 

Life on Svalbard has many gorgeous photos but the English text is oddly flat. I believe she writes in English much as she speaks, with only a slight Swedish accent, using pedestrian phrases that come from the tourist industry. Blomdahl wants to convey the ineffable, but the words that come out only grasp vaguely in that direction. There is much that is “breathtaking” or that “takes your breath away.” And although there are also possible dangers—avalanches, walruses, polar bears—there are many domestic pleasures. Cecilie and Christoffer have GPS to find their way to even more remote cabins on the island of Spitzbergen. They get shipments from Ikea to remodel their kitchen. They visit with friends and drink coffee. They play with their dog Grim. With snowmobiles, cars, boats, wi-fi, and their vast audience, they are living a European lifestyle in a place that once was only for the toughest-minded survivalist.

 

Although Svalbard is one of the places most at risk in these times of climate change, and although much of the research that goes on in Longyearbyen and farther north at the research station in Ny Ålesund has to do with rapidly melting glaciers and warming seas, there’s nothing about that inconvenient truth in Life on Svalbard. We don’t learn much about the archipelago’s history as a whaling station or its mining operations, or about its connection with Norway and its political structure. It’s an innocuous book, with glorious visuals, but unreal somehow. Blomdahl mentions the presence of researchers but doesn’t explain what they are studying. The couple’s friends may also be from the hospitality field—after all, you have to have a job or an income to be allowed to stay in Svalbard—but mostly they are engaged in leisure activities. Don’t get me wrong, Cecilia Blomdahl’s photographs are striking, but they are oddly detached from the lives of most people on the archipelago.

Christiane Ritter’s book was written before an understanding of the effects of climate change on glaciers, but for Cecilia Blomdahl there’s really no excuse. After all, in 2015 a devastating avalanche hit Longyearbyen during a strong winter storm. Houses were damaged, people were evacuated temporarily, and one man was killed. The story of the avalanche and its aftermath are told in a 2020 book My World is Melting – Living with Climate Change in Svalbard, by the Norwegian journalist and longtime Svalbard resident, Line Nagell Ylvisåker, who is also the editor of Longyearbyen’s newspaper. Although the book was translated to English in 2022, that edition is only available on Svalbard itself. In lieu of my own take on the book, I offer for now a review I found online by a Dutch meteorologist, Daan van den Broek, who is based in Finland and travels often to Svalbard.