North by North

Seven centuries of cartographic convention has placed north at the top of maps, and by logical extension at the top of the world. This convention has been closely aligned with another, known as the Mercator projection. Devised by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1659, this system of map-making has been uncritically handed down through the centuries to the present time and continues to be the cartographic standard in many parts of the world. Mercator’s projection not only points northward but exaggerates northern landmasses at the expense of the south. For example, it magnifies Greenland to be approximately the same size as Africa, which is actually fourteen times larger.The Greenland example is one of many northern amplifications and conceits that belittle the south. The specific contrast with Africa was presented with deadpan humour and devastating effect in a 2012 episode of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. Cartographers for Social Equity lobby President Bartlet’s White House to withdraw all Mercator maps from US schools and replace them with Gall-Peters maps.The Gall-Peters projection represents with greater fidelity and accuracy the relative proportions of the world’s landmasses. The Cartographers for Social Equity fail in their representation but, coincidental or not, five years after the screening of The West Wing episode Gall-Peters maps began to be phased in at schools in two American states.North and south are cardinal directions and polar opposites that refer to exact locations at either end of the globe. Within ice-bound regions, the North Pole defines the Arctic, an old term derived from Latin and Greek to mean north. By contrast, its antithesis—the Antarctic—is a negative term that means opposite to north. It is defined by the South Pole. This linguistic preference suggests that north is the one while south is the other.Northern primacy and southern inferiority similarly applies to the geographical use of the term “sub”, literally meaning below north. Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, is an official term that defines all African regions south of the Sahara. The cartographic sub-Saharan regions embrace around 80% of the African continent, forty-six of Africa’s fifty-four countries, and are home for more than one billion people.In the feature article in this issue of M/C Journal, Alice Gaby et al. note that the practice of orienting north in maps and other cultural artefacts has the effect of defining all other directions as subordinate to and dependent on the north. Yet to orient, as Edward Said established in his influential treatise Orientalism, is to look to the east and not to the north. Europe’s objective in the orient, Said argued, is ongoing subjugation through cultural othering, an attitude and ideology that carried seamlessly to North America as the occident’s most conspicuous achievement in expansion and manifest destiny.Medieval European maps did orient to the east—not the north—towards Jerusalem and the birthplace of Christ, but also in the direction of the rising sun, while early Chinese maps oriented to the south. According to Gaby et al., the Celtic term for north, clēth, translates as “north-left”—meaning facing east.True north is north’s most accurate marker, but it is never certain above sea level because of the shifting polar icecaps. Rather, true north remains locked in the icy nether at the bottom of a frozen ocean. It is plotted at ninety degrees north but then terminates and disappears. Every direction at true north becomes south. Except for the relentless insistence of the compass, which indicates that north is further still, back along 72.62 degrees longitude west at the magnetic north.The potency of the north, therefore, might be said to derive from its telling—its narrative—more so than the provability or otherwise of its existence and location. This takes shape in stories that range from the very old and the epic to those that are smaller and more local. Across millennia, beliefs in the north have guided direction and underpinned human certainties of what is here and what is not. This ontology is central to the understanding of north and its apparent ubiquity.As metaphor, north registers extremes, for example, in a good deal of contemporary screen culture: in the most northerly settlement on earth in Fortitude, which aired for the first time in 2015; in Canada’s deep north in Cardinal, which premiered in 2017; and among the expanding seasons of Nordic noir from Denmark’s The Killing (three series 2007-12) and Sweden’s The Bridge (four seasons to 2018) to the British production of Wallander (situated in Sweden, four seasons to 2016), and tracing an influence into the deep south of Australia’s Jack Irish and The Code (Nordic) and Argentina’s “eco-thriller” Cromo, which screened in 2017 (SBS).The English writer C.S. Lewis is credited with coining the term “Northernness”, which he says was inspired by his reading of Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods as a teenager. “Pure ‘Northernness’ engulfed me”, recalled Lewis, with a “vision of huge clear spaces above the Atlantic in the twilight Northern summer” (King 194). The imputation here is that northernness is of the earth and of the heavens, which Lewis subsequently resolved, unconvincingly, in his concept of human joy and faith.In the 1960s, the French-Canadian geographer Louis-Edmond Hamelin proposed a new term, “nordicity”, as a measure of northernness and polar values. Following on from this work, Daniel Chartier observed in 2006: “contemporary analyses produced in Europe, Scandinavia, English Canada and, more recently, Québec have shown, ‘North’ is first and foremost a discursive system, whose components, preferred forms, figures, characters, narrative schemata, colours and resonances can be traced historically” (1).Chartier acknowledges that north is “variable in nature, depending on the position of the speaker [viewer]”, while the “concepts of ‘nordicity’ and ‘winterity’” speak to the “idea of North”. That is, existing beyond the “theme of winter, ice and frost, beyond the descriptions contained in realistic novels” this “imaginary of North”, Chartier observes, “opens a vast critical terrain—a terrain that not only poses problems related to the specificity of the genres and forms in which it appears, but also creates the opportunity for reflection on the links between a territory and the imaginary ...” (1).Old Nordic sagas tell of a pagan north which initially drew Lewis into northernness. These sagas figure in Lewis’s best known work, The Chronicles of Narnia. They were also a standard conversation piece at Oxford between Lewis and his close contemporary and friend J.R.R. Tolkien. Among other influences, Nordic myths found expression in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy and its prequel The Hobbit.Revealing something of a Mercator preference, Tolkien’s setting is called Middle Earth, even though it is located on a northern continent. There are also intimations of a balancing landmass to the south—an equivalent to classical conceptions of the antipodes—projected as a Dark Land.Between 2001 and 2014, the antipodean filmmaker, New Zealander Peter Jackson, adapted Tolkien’s novels to the big screen. The films were so believable in their recreation of Middle Earth that Jackson’s locations are now among New Zealand’s top tourist destinations with international travellers especially. Operators unashamedly advertise that New Zealand is Middle Earth. Perhaps they have a case. After all, New Zealand was named by the Dutch mariner Abel Tasman (1632-1659) after the explorer’s home of Zeeland in the Netherlands, whose capital just happens to be Middelburg.The appropriation of Nordic legends and stories has a long history. “I am but mad north-north-west”, insists the Danish Prince Hamlet in Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, which was staged for the first time over four hundred years ago in London. Closer to our own time, “Thor’s hammer swung to geography”, wrote the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. “Compose in darkness”, Heaney recommended, “expect aurora borealis … but no light” (“North”).The duality implied here is the subject of Louise Kolff’s consideration of “Scandimania” and of what she calls north’s “underbelly” in this issue. As Kolff observes, contemporary Norway and Denmark are rated by their own people to be the “happiest” places on earth. Their underbelly, which might also operate as code for south, though that is not Kolff’s intention, manifests in violence such as the 2011 massacre of 92 people at Oslo and Utøya Island by a right-wing extremist. The mythologising of Scandinavia, Kolff concludes, “may also serve to legitimise a yearning for a simple, benign and progressive whiteness”.Benign or not, yearning whiteness is potentially treacherous in the context of the “extreme” and “black” metal scenes of Scandinavia, as Hoad and Whiting argue in their article: “understandings of ‘Nordic’ as an exclusory ethnic category marked by strict boundaries” come “into conflict with the Nordic region’s self-perceptions as a liberal democracy”.Further, Hoad and Whiting suggest: “Northern Europe’s reputation as a ‘famously tolerant political community’ can … be seen, on the one hand, as a crucial disconnect from the intolerant North mediated by factions of Nordic extreme metal scenes and on the other, a political community that provides the material conditions which allow extreme metal to flourish.” Nordicness, they go on to argue, is a “crucial form of scenic infrastructure–albeit one that has been both celebrated and condemned in the sites and spaces of Nordic extreme metal”.For the transatlantic poet Sylvia Plath, the “long blackness” of her north is experienced internally and with greater quietude but with no-less deadly effect: “I shall move north. I shall move into a long blackness. / I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman, / Neither woman, happy to be like a man, nor a man / Blunt and flat enough to fe

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