Into the Unknown: Northbound to the Knowledge and Death

Keisuke Nakajima (Johns Hopkins University)

This paper examines travel narratives to the region of the Far North and its association with death, which makes it a privileged place for acquiring the knowledge of the past. I first analyze Herodotus’ engagement with Arimaspea by Aristeas of Proconnesus. The Far North is depicted as an enigmatic place where reality merges with fantasy, known with unknown. The complex mixture of eye witness and hearsay makes the North mysterious and ambivalent (Bolton 1962, Gagné 2021), hence an appropriate place where life (i.e. familiar), merges with death (i.e. unfamiliar). Aristeas’ presumed death (Hdt.IV.14) and Issedonians’ life in the vicinity with the dead (Hdt.IV.26), frames his journey as a katabasis.  I continue by diachronically tracing this association of the North with the dead by examining Odysseus’ necromancy near the city of Cimmerians in the Odyssey and Dinias’ journey to Thule in Antonius Diogenes’ The Wonders Beyond Thule, known to us via Photius’ Bibliotheca 166. Odysseus and Dinias both travel north in search of knowledge and meet dead/ half dead informants (Teiresias and Dercyllis). I also examine how in Ovid’s exile poetry the author incorporates imagery of the polar region describing Tomis, in order to express his “living-dead” status (Hinds 2023, Ingleheart 2015, Williams 1994). Finally I discuss the northbound journey of Elsa in the 2019 film Frozen 2. She expresses an Ovidian anxiety of leaving her life in the familiar and venturing into the unknown. The Enchanted Forest is reminiscent of the land of the Cimmerians and that of Issedonians, and her final destination, the glacier Athohallan, is Underworld-like as it provides access to the past/the dead, where Elsa goes through quasi-katabasis and indeed dies. Elsa’s journey, therefore, follows Odyssean, Aristean, Dinian and Ovidian footsteps.

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Hinds, Stephen. “Ovid’s Exile Poetry and Zombies”. In Ovid, Death and Transfiguration, 251-266. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2023.

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