Read my toes

Francis Spufford

  • The Things That Were Said of Them: Shaman Stories and Oral Histories of the Tikigaq People told by Asatchaq, translated by Tukummiq and Tom Lowenstein
    California, 225 pp, £18.95, February 1993, ISBN 0 520 06569 7
  • Ancient Land, Sacred Whale: The Inuit Hunt and its Rituals by Tom Lowenstein
    Bloomsbury, 189 pp, £20.00, April 1993, ISBN 0 7475 1341 4

Seventeenth-century books of Arctic travels contained occasional reports of a kingdom in the far north of the Americas called Estoty: just out of reach over the icy horizon with its wealth, its monarch, its city of copper-roofed houses. Eventually the chimera-collecting eye of Vladimir Nabokov fell on Estoty. The horribly spry cast of Ada live in a Russo-American arcadia of the same name – a suitable metamorphosis of one kind of impossibility into another, perhaps. But the invention of Estoty also testifies to an aspect of European disappointment with the New World.

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[*] An essay on these issues by Martin Thom, ‘The Poet as Ethnographer’, appears in Poets on Writing, edited by Denise Riley (Macmillan, 1992).