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Part travelogue, part history, part memoir of a life-long affair with the northern lands and seas, traveller and scholar Charles Moseley describes a haunting world where the voices of the past are never quiet. From his account of the last days of the Viking settlements in Greenland to his own experiences on the melting glaciers of Spitsbergen, he reminds us how deceptive human ideas of permanence are, and how fragile are the systems of these starkly beautiful lands. The pull of the poles is more than magnetic. It reaches into our soul. 'So what I write, discursive, anecdotal, unsystematic as it is, is in a sense a notation, the shards, of a 40-year-long love affair with the purity, the clarity, of that world of cold seas and light and ice...Memories crowd in of Olaf the Peacock, and Hallgerd Hoskuldsdottir, of Melkorka the Irish princess captured and enslaved, memories of Ngal and his patience, of Gunnar Hamundarson's fatal love for Hallgerd, of Skarp-Hedin's twisted smile, and of Grettir and his grim fate - their ghosts were all around me when I first went to Iceland...' 303pp.