Many years ago, I read about an opera troupe that was performing Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel in small Alaskan towns near the Arctic Circle. The children of each town were asked to paint a backdrop of a forest. However, this was in the days before satellite dishes and the Internet, so one group of Inuit children had to imagine what a forest looked like. I’ve always wondered what they came up with. If they’d had gold and jewels instead of poster paints, perhaps they would have created a tree like Uncle Resak’s.
I should also say a word about the general background of the novel. While everyone knows about the gold deposits in Canada, there are also diamond mines in the Far North. And centuries ago the Danish began to explore the Arctic territories. Jens Munck was a real explorer who died in 1628 trying to find the Northwest Passage for the ambitious King Christian of Denmark. The Thirty Years War, which began in 1618, drew his attentions and finances elsewhere, or perhaps the Danes would have claimed northern Canada just as they control Greenland to this day.
While this is an alternate history, I want to emphasize that the Sogdians are not an imaginary people. The beginnings of their city Afrasiab, which became known as Samarkand later, date back to the seventh century B.C. Clever and energetic, the Sogdians dominated the Silk Road for centuries, so that their tongue became the language everyone used for business transactions. Led by merchant princes, they established a network of trading posts that stretched all across Asia. And their music and dance became all the rage in medieval China, and these are often depicted in the art of the T’ang dynasty. Some of them even rose to high positions in the Chinese government, and one of them, An Lu-shan, nearly toppled the government when he raised a rebellion. As for the Arctic itself, I am fortunate to have a wife, Joanne Ryder, who not only took me up to the Arctic to see the Aurora Borealis firsthand but also has written several books about the environment and the creatures who live up there. The Wastes themselves are an exaggeration of the pressure ridges that were shown in a BBC Two program, Top Gear: Polar Special, which a friend kindly provided me. The narwhals are in the National Geographic special Masters of the Arctic Ice.
These are some of the sources consulted for this book:
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Asarpay, G. “Nana, the Sumero-Akkadian Goddess of Transoxiana.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 96, no. 4 (October–December 1976): 536–542.
Bayliss, Clara Kern. A Treasury of Eskimo Tales. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1922.
Cribb, Joe, and Georgina Herrmann, eds. After Alexander: Central Asia before Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Ghose, Madhuvanti. “Nana: The ‘Original’ Goddess on Lion.” Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology 1 (2006): 97–112.
Juliano, Annette L., Judith A. Lerner, and Michael Alram. Monks and Merchants: Silk Road Treasures from Northwest China. New York: Abrams, 2001.
Masters of the Arctic Ice. DVD. National Geographic, 2007.
Nuttall, Mark, and Terry Gallaghan, eds., The Arctic: Environment, People, Policy. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000.
Rasmussen, Knud. Eskimo Folktales, trans. W. Worster. London: Gyldendal, 1921.
Rink, Dr. Henry. Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood and Sons, 1875.
Rosenfeld, John M. The Dynastic Arts of the Kushans. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
Sims-Williams, Nicholas. Bactrian Letters II. London: Nour Foundation with the cooperation of Azimuth Editions, 2007.
Vaissière, Étienne de la. Sogdian Traders: A History, trans. James Ward. Leiden: Brill, 2005.