B Virgils' Hell and Frans Josef Land
Frederick Jones
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Abstract
This paper traces some of the network of patchy continuities from Virgil and Ovid, through Dante, Gustave Doré, the Arctic explorer (and later painter) Julius Payer (later von Payer), to the contemporary Austrian novelist Christoph Ransmayr. It will be travelling from Virgil’s Hell into the remotest regions of the far North, and back into the not too remote time when it could reasonably be supposed that at the North Pole there was perhaps land, or perhaps even open unfrozen water behind the barrier of pack ice. Its final destination will be the Hell of Ovid’s ultimate earthly residence on the inhospitable shores of the Black Sea. In particular it argues that there is a distinctive dotted line of influence running from Virgil’s account of the Underworld in Book 6 of the Aeneid, through Dante’s transformation of Virgil’s Underworld into a Christian Hell, Doré’s realisation of the latter in visual terms in his illustrations, Julius Payer’s conceptualisation of the newly-discovered Franz Josef Land in his illustrations of the discovery, and Ransmayr’s novelistic transformation of that discovery. In passing, I comment on the strange compulsion of the far north as manifested in the world of toys and adventure stories.
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