"It's amazing what you can do with angelica..."

[shewhomust]

The latest foodie travel destination, according to Saturday's Travel supplement, is Greenland. Writer Tim Moore makes the food sound good, and the landscape even better:

Ilulissat means 'the icebergs' in Greenlandic, and what a sight they were through the treble-glazing: sometimes a fleet of Tolkienesque dreadnoughts, sometimes a Henry Moore retrospective on the run, lined up on a massive iced horizon thickly buttered with sunset, or picked out by a full moon and the free-form green swooshes of the northern lights.

But I am not even remotely tempted to visit, as he did, during the winter months, when a little superficial frostbite is an only-to-be-expected souvenir of your trip.

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I would love to know why he finds dreadnoughts Tolkienesque...?

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Not all dreadnoughts, only these particular ones: isn't he suggesting that if Tolkien made a dreadnought, it would be a massive lump of ice? But I don't know what puts dreadnoughts and Tolkien together in his mind at all. There's Eärendil, of course:

From gnashing of the Narrow Ice
where shadow lies on frozen hills,

Despite which I think of Tolkien as a very inland writer. There's the Grey Havens, admittedly, but he doesn't hang about by the sea, does he?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

The sea is a means of travel, of taking people away; it's not a realm in itself, to him. Not in the work I'm familiar with, anyway. No sense of the coastal, even: he turns his back on it, perhaps, because it leads to partings and he wants to hold us here? I dunno: something in me wants to embark on a whole thesis that he has no sense of the liminal, that everything in Tolkien sits at the heart of what it is. But the rest of me saying "Nah, let's not go there," so...

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Oh, go there, please!

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

But...think of the fjords!!

Heh. I always wanted to use the word 'fjord' in context.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

But in summer they'd have water in them...