To say ‘we leave for the north tonight’ brings immediate associations of austerity and dearth: uplands and ice-fields, adverse weather, isolation; thrillers about night journeys, encounters in mountain passes, manhunts over wild country.

In the summer of 1936, W.H. Auden stayed at the school house at Hallormsstadur in Iceland, where he spent a morning playing through a collection of German songs:

Really they choose funny things to cheer themselves up with. How about this for a soldier’s song,

Die bange Nacht is nun herum

Wir reiten still, wir reiten stumm

Wir reiten ins Verderben.1

‘Dreadful night is all around / We ride in silence, silently / We ride to our destruction.’

Auden went on to describe other songs in the volume: expressions of a stark aesthetic of violence and anticipated death. It had belonged to a German married to an Icelander, who had also left behind Nazi racial propaganda.

What Auden found in the German hussars’ song is a consistently disturbing element in the literature of the north and of the high mountains: the grim consolation of those – from Grettir the Strong to Dougal Haston – who are narcissistically aware of the imminence of their own deaths. This male narcissism, ineluctably masochistic, is central to the aesthetics of the mountaineer or explorer as much as of the hussar. To move north (all snowlines are, in metaphor, norths; all ascents northward progresses) is to strip the self bare; to accept the ascesis of the climber, to dispense with material and social consolations. The aestheticising of self-deprivation and the fetishisation of manly self-control ultimately destroyed Scott’s Antarctic expedition, or so Francis Spufford suggests in his classic study of Ice and the English Imagination.

The Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge is the nearest thing in England to the shrine of a secular martyr. It was built in the 1930s by a generation schooled by A.E. Housman’s poems to find aesthetic consolation in the deaths of young men. Its inscription claims for Scott little less than beatitude as reward for leading his men to their deaths: Quaesivit arcana poli videt dei. ‘He sought the secret of the poles that he might see the secrets of God’ – a questionable assertion by any standard.

The Norwegian Polar Museum in Tromsø, in an oxide-red warehouse reflected in water which moves like mercury, documents instead a process of acclimatisation in the north, an attentive dialogue with its people and its necessities. It also celebrates an explorer-martyr; but Roald Amundsen, who died trying to rescue an arctic expedition in trouble, fell victim not to his own romanticism but that of others.

Throughout the 1930s, Auden himself had observed, even delighted in, strategies of male self-dramatisation. His own earliest works, particularly the saga-charade Paid on Both Sides, derive much of their poetic impulse from imaginings of doomed upper-class toughs and their laconic heroics. Auden made an equivalence between and among the heroes of the Icelandic sagas, paperback thriller-heroes and schoolboys, mapping ancient Iceland onto the Pennine fells around the Spartan public school at Sedbergh. Auden’s individual voice as a poet emerged from the violent poetics of saga and thriller, the grim consolations of the north. The motto of Sedbergh School became a talisman, a secret password shared with his friend Christopher Isherwood: Dura Virum Nutrix, ‘hard nurse of men’ (though he may have thought of it as ‘nurse of hard men’). He wrote it on the title-page of Isherwood’s copy of his 1927 Poems.

Auden’s father’s fascination with Iceland, which had initially led Auden’s own imagination in this direction, was in the democratic tradition of William Morris. But by the time of Auden’s own visit to Iceland in 1936, his revulsion from the National Socialist claims on Icelandic literature led him finally to renounce the sagas and the life they implied:

The grim consolation offered by the hussars’ song which Auden found at Hallormsstadur is in a tradition which descends from the self-fashioning of saga heroes, an aesthetic which assures a Junker class of the validity and dignity of their brief lives:

Die bange Nacht ist nun herum.

Wir reiten still, wir reiten stumm,

Wir reiten ins Verderben.

Wie weht so scharf der Morgenwind!

Frau Wirtin, noch ein Glas geschwind

Vor’m Sterben, vor’m Sterben.

‘Dreadful night is all around. / We ride in silence, silently, / We ride to our destruction. / Wind of dawn is bitter, rising! / Bring us one more glass of wine / Before we die, before we die.’

In the following verse, they sing that the green fields will not blow red with roses and poppies, but with the untimely blood of the hussars, while the third offers the toast (the wine now nastily commingled in metaphor with the young officers’ blood) to the German kingdom. The last verse is about departure, not the ‘loath-to-depart’ of private soldiers, but the eager death-hunt of the officers:

Auf, in den Feind wie Wetterschlag!

O Reiterlust, am frühen Tag

Zu sterben, zu sterben!

‘Fall like thunder on the foe! / O knightly joy / To die at dawn!’

Auden’s earliest heroes had spoken and felt like this; but, by the time he found this German song, he was painfully aware of the dangers of such Junker consolations.

The young Osip Mandelstam unexpectedly reflected the mood of the officer class of pre-Revolutionary Russia, in an early poem (1912) which juxtaposes wild riding with the neoclassical palaces and villas of Tsarskoe Selo:

The aberrant poetry of this fighting gentry finds a visual equivalent in the houses built by the northern warrior aristocracy in the neoclassical cities of northern Europe. Neoclassicism – a metaphor as much as a style; Stoic, anti-Christian, elitist – has roots in the Napoleonic empire, but also in the revival of Greek antiquity and the discovery or rediscovery of ancient precedents for a fighting elite, especially in the Homeric poems. While the Empire style stretched from Naples to Gothenburg, it was adopted most completely in the northern kingdoms: the railings of the bridges are formed of the crossed spears and laurel wreaths of ancient heroes. Baltic north, ice on canals, snow on rostral columns. The young Mandelstam hazarded a snowy, violent definition of St Petersburg:

The heavy weight a northern snob must bear –

The ancient burden of Onegin’s anguish;

The wave of a snowdrift on the Senate Square,

Smoke from a fire, a bayonet’s cold flash …4

In the country houses of the northern elite there was, by the time of the Renaissance, an established tradition of military decoration. In the great castle of Läckö in Vänerland in Sweden, remodelled and decorated in the seventeenth century for Count Magnus de la Gardie (he who lent his name to M.R. James’s most vengeful revenant), there are already two rooms which anticipate the starkly bellicose grandeurs of the neo-Homeric nineteenth century. The Room of the Champions is decorated with over-life-sized warrior figures. The effect of scale is deliberately uncomfortable: they are too big, and terror attends depictions of colossoi, like Giulio Romano’s Room of Giants at Mantua. These are the ancestors, the founding killers of Swedish legend: GOTH, SWEDE, VANDAL – their descriptions taken from Wolfgang Lazius’s De Gentium aliquot migrationibus, published in Basel in 1557.

No grace attends their depiction: they stare blankly ahead, full face, their weapons advanced in plane beyond their feigned niches. Ancestors; ambiguous household gods. They are a threat from the past of the sagas and the Vikings, the legendary times when the kings of the Swedes harried the Roman Empire as Gustavus Vasa had harried the Papacy; a reminder of the Homeric routes by which the de la Gardies rose to be the lords of Baroque castles.5

The Knights’ or King’s Hall in the same building is poised at the intersection of the violences of past and present. The grisaille ceiling is composed of trophies of arms, austere in colour and design. The window embrasures are lined with small emblem-panels whose mottoes enforce a soldiers’ morality of riding your luck and seizing the moment. The main walls are entirely covered with vast canvases of the sieges and battles of the Thirty Years’ War. The frosty colours, grim emblems and painted battlefields are a powerful statement about the aesthetics of the master of the castle. This is the great room, the hall for public entertainments. There are no Italian depictions of the Olympian glories of the master’s family; only a northern realist’s calculation of their military strength.6

Rosersberg in Sweden, an earlier castle partly recast in the neoclassical 1800s, has within it the grim descendant of the war-rooms at Läckö. The Marble Hall (marmorsalen) is spectacularly empty, dominated by a vast marble bust, as violent in scale as the giant ancestors at Läckö. Almost all of one wall is filled with a painting of a naval battle. High up on the walls, there are regular profile medallions in white marble, and below these, the only decoration is a series of trophies of arms, modelled in three dimensions and gilded. The shields and helmets look neither classical nor mediaeval. Their archaic appearance is meant rather to evoke the Goths, Huns and Vandals of national origin-legend.7

All neoclassical rooms can have an aspect of empty grimness, in spite of gilding and chandeliers – particularly if one imagines them in the flat light of the Baltic autumn, or the searching brightness of light reflected off snow. But this room contains the compacted essence of the cold, drawing the frosted air into itself and enclosing the winter in its marble and gold. This space itself is a memorial of the bitter cold which drove the warrior ancestors southwards on their campaigns, ice at nightfall staunching the wounds on the battlefield.

The attitudes fostered by these surroundings are inevitably bellicose: as in the English Regency, and certain Scottish houses such as Cairness in Buchan, the game with antiquity has turned deadly serious. The virtues of the Homeric or Viking heroes have replaced any belief-system based on compassion or reconciliation with self or others. The soldiers’ songs which complement the aesthetic of these austere houses are expressions of this northern male mythology, which is far from dead as a mode of being even now: how alone, how much in love with their own deaths, are the fictional English spies of the twentieth century, the haunted protagonists of Graham Greene and John le Carré.

In our own time, this tradition has been reinvented, in writing by and about high-risk, high-altitude mountaineering. In the cinematic mythologies of the elite male of the twentieth century, sport, fighting and heroic death on the mountains are juxtaposed, elided, conflated. Ethan Hunt, the agent played by Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible II, is shown at the beginning of the film indulging in insanely risky, unsecured rock-climbing, and standing on the summit to take the call which sends him to covert war.

The Scottish poet and novelist Andrew Greig recalls his first attempt at winter climbing in Glencoe, a training-run under the tutelage of a very experienced climber, setting off hung about with equipment which makes him feel ‘like a deep-sea diver in a paddling pool’. As the climb proceeds, he experiences moments of terror and adrenalin-elation, and makes daft mistakes:

This is an equivalent for the old Icelandic death-boast, the moment of hard acceptance in the face of disaster, which is also a complex game with the idea of one’s own death. Greig’s climbers (in his non-fiction as well as his fiction) endlessly list those who have died on the mountain, those who have been ‘blown away’ by adverse weather during the winter climbing.

Another German soldiers’ song, about the wild geese whose migrating cries are the essence of the sadness of the northern autumn, echoes these grim consolations: unguessable future, imminence of death. Other armies march on obscenities, on assertions of their own virility. The writer of this song, Walter Flex, was born in 1887, inheritor of Prussian belligerence and of neoclassical stoicism, but inheritor also of all the melancholy of the German nineteenth century, of all its minor-key lieder of solitude and parting and regret. He was killed in 1916, and is remembered as a patriotic poet, a poet working within a very northern tradition of hussar self-fashioning. This song of the migrating geese really was sung by the German army throughout the Nazi period and, hesitantly (because of that malign association), revived since the 1960s among national servicemen.9

On the one hand, singing this song while on the march is partially comprehensible as an act of romantic self-dramatisation; on the other, it remains a hermetic act, as inscrutable as the death-boast of the saga-hero, the initiate mountaineer’s synonyms for death.

Wildgänse rauschen durch die Nacht

Mit schrillem Schrei nach Norden;

Unstete Fahrt; habt Acht, habt Acht,

Die Welt ist voller Morden.

‘The wild geese murmur through the night / Crying shrilly, moving northward, / Beware, beware this dangerous flight, / For death is all around us.’

Already the singers are identified with the geese: both can die from a gunshot, both are on a dangerous journey. But my friend Dirk Sinnewe’s regiment sang the second line as ‘Mit stillem Schrei’, with silent cry, which is even more unearthly, more of an approximation of the eldritch quality of the cry of the migrating geese.

The second verse imagines the geese as a grey squadron, like the singers in their grey uniforms – the birds are moving through the clouds of the autumn sky as the singers are moving toward the smoke of the battle. Then the third verse emphasises the sad separation between the geese and the soldiers: the northbound geese traverse the sky, moving away from the fate of the soldiers, who may be dead when the geese return at the end of the winter. At this point, an element of nostalgia for the remotest north enters the song – the old, ambiguous desire to follow the migrations, despite folklore and children’s books which remind us that those who go away with the ‘Heaven Hounds’ return damaged, unsettled, mad. The last verse further sunders the fates of the soldiers and the geese:

‘We are a grey troop like you / And travel for the Kaiser / We travel never to return, / Cry “Amen” for us in autumn!’

The song is melancholy enough as it is, but to anyone who knows the desolate sound of the autumn migration, it is unendurable. As I write this, the geese have been passing in high skeins for two weeks, ‘Gabriel’s hounds’, the summoners of the dead, first heralds of the winter dark fastening on northern Europe. I write to my friend in the still-sunlit courts of Cambridge:

This is my annual October warning that the wild geese and the winter are heading for the flatlands.

Schubert’s cycle of songs Winterreise, to words by Wilhelm Müller, is the essence of northern winter, a grim consolation which questions the very possibility of consolation. It is the first-person narrative of a young man who has been rejected by his lover and sets out on a solitary, self-wounding journey into the cold countryside beyond the city walls. As he passes deeper and deeper into the frozen land – frost-flowers on the inn window, frozen tears, rime on his hair, the cry of the crane above the snow – he begins to cut loose from reason, the prisoner of his own romantic metaphors, indulgent in contemplation of his own suffering.

Imagine a few friends gathered in our drawing room on a late autumn evening to hear the Winterreise sung by one of our senior music students, with the university Master of Music accompanying him. The wind muttering outside, the windows spattered with rain like intermittent gunfire, almost the latest night in the year when you’d want to drive out to hear music in a remote house.

In the twenty-first song, the protagonist pauses by a remote cemetery and goes beyond the idea of suicide into something grimmer and stranger: an enacted death-in-life, an infinite prolongation of suffering. In the twenty-second song he declaims his celebration of the ghastly consolation of the evil weather. Once he has gone thus mad, his music changes horribly, as if Schubert had set himself deliberately to forget all his own skill and all the consolations of music itself, reducing the accompaniment to the most basic harmonic progressions, and the vocal line to a mechanical movement up and down the steps of the scale, using only the intervals of tone and semitone. This music achieves its arid effects with the most minimal of gestures – Schubert’s mimetic refusal of his own fertility of invention – as the singer’s madness deepens and the shifting and delusory midwinter around him grows more threatening.

The penultimate song moves the landscape suddenly northwards with the appearance in the sky of the parhelia, the three illusory winter suns: usually a phenomenon of the arctic icefields. The singer imagines himself into the polar night with the disappearance of the third sun. Im Dunkeln wird mir wohler sein: I am better in the dark.

The most disturbing thing about Winterreise is that it doesn’t end there: the last song gives us a hint of an afterwards. A beggar with a hurdy-gurdy appears in the empty landscape, like a messenger from the excluded ranks of the mad in the wintery paintings of Bosch or Breughel. His appearance is greeted with wonder by the singer, who asks that this psychopomp should lead him onward into the snows. In musical terms, this last song could be said to give up. The pianist’s left hand in every one of the song’s sixty-one bars strikes a bare fifth; the hurdy-gurdy tune in the right hand of the piano part moves up and down in tinkling thirds and fifths, interrupting the singer at the end of every verse-line. How much more this effect would have been felt, with a resonant fortepiano played in the cold, bare-boarded rooms familiar from German Biedermeier paintings. (Accompanied on an instrument built in 1802, in our sparsely furnished, uncarpeted room, some of the original effects survive.) The vocal line is supported by little more than the drone bass, but the singing voice elicits harmonics and overtones – icy ghost-music not notated on the page – out of the reverberations of the struck fifths. Even a glance at the score gives an uneasy feeling of emptiness, a page barely filled, cut to the bone. The words say nothing much: a blank description of the hungry figure in the snow, which shifts suddenly in the last couplet to a mad request to the Wunderlicher Alter (amazing old man) that he take the singer with him as his companion, playing the hurdy-gurdy to accompany his singing. As if carried on a gust of wind, the hurdy-gurdy tune sounds loud for a moment, then fades into a quiet discord resolving even more quietly into a plain minor chord.

This ending is as unconsoled, as rejecting of consolation as the German hussars’ songs; as the litanies of the dead young men in the mountaineering biographies. And behind these are the endurances in the sagas and the consolations offered to the warrior-chieftains of Homer, all the aureate laudations of the death-haunted Junker. Among the oral collections from Shetland in the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh, there is a single sentence coiled like a snake in the steel filing cabinet. In itself, it is the essence of a whole narrative of fighting madness, northern weather and bad magic:

1 W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland (London: Faber, 1937; reprint, 1967), pp.142–3.

2 Ibid., p. 117.

3 Osip Mandelstam, Stone, trans. Robert Tracy (London: Collins Harvill, 1991), p. 113.

4 Ibid., p. 127.

5 Lief Jonsson, ed., Läckö: Landskapet, borgen, slottet (Stockholm: Carlssons, 1999), pp. 395–7.

6 Lars Sjöberg and Anneli Welin, The Splendour of the Baroque: Läckö Castle (Stockholm: National Museum, 2001), pp. 32–5.

7 Håkan Groth, Nyklassicismen i Sverige (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1994), pp. 138–57.

8 Andrew Greig, Summit Fever (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1985), p. 33.

9 It was sung to me by my friend Dirk Sinnewe in 1997 in Warwickshire, where it seemed to draw Baltic cold with it, even under the heavy-leaved oaks and chestnuts of summer.