NT : What's On : What's On Extras : Fram: Fridtjof Nansen
Fram: Fridtjof Nansen
Tony Harrison on Nansen
‘I knew Nansen’s name, but that was all. As a kid I was interested in Arctic exploration. I remember the film Scott of the Antarctic with John Mills came out in 1948 when I was eleven; I saw that and I got quite obsessed with Arctic travel. So I knew the name ‘Nansen’ in the dim recesses of my memory… I know it’s silly, in a sense, that I have to find a justification for using verse, but I’m always looking for people outside the world of the arts who like poetry. Nansen was a great quoter of poetry, who loved the sagas and used poetry to seduce women, so I got interested in him for that reason, and then I began to think a lot about his ship…’
Fridtjof Nansen 1861 - 1930
‘The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes a little longer.’ Fridtjof Nansen
Nansen trained as a neuroscientist but first came to fame when in 1888 – to prove that skis were a better method than man-hauled sledge – he made the first crossing of Greenland’s ice cap. He had a scheme for reaching the North Pole by letting his ship get frozen into the ice and drift north with the current, and in June 1893 he set out in the Fram, built for the purpose. In March 1895, he left the ship and, with Hjalmar Johansen, skied towards the Pole with dog-drawn sledges and kayaks. By luck, the following summer, they met a British expedition on Franz-Josef Land and were taken back to Norway. By then they had travelled farther north than any human being before and survived 15 months in the Arctic. The Fram also reached home safely, its whole crew intact.
As well as becoming a Professor of Zoology and of Oceanography, Nansen furthered the cause of Norway’s independence from Sweden, and was Norway’s first ambassador to Great Britain. He negotiated help for thousands of prisoners after the first World War and, after travelling to the USSR to see the effects of the famine there, campaigned for private aid. The League of Nations appointed him its first High Commissioner for Refugees, and the Nansen Passport was issued to thousands of stateless Russians fleeing to the West, including Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, Chagall and Anna Pavlova.
In 1922 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work. Nansen also attracted the admiration of prominent public figures, including classical scholar Gilbert Murray and the celebrated actress Sybil Thorndike, both of whom make an appearance in Tony Harrison’s play.
