FRIDTJOF NANSEN (1861-1930), a Norwegian polar explorer, scientist and diplomat. In 1922 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work as a League of Nations High Commissioner on behalf of refugees after the First World War.

This is a book published in the series NORWEGIAN HERITAGE. A series of books about a range of Norway’s best-known national icons. The respective titles deal with significant figures within arts and literature, science, sports and society, as well as the country’s many natural wonders, important historical periods and cultural topics. Each book offers the reader an updated introduction to readers who wish to familiarize themselves with a given subject.

See www.norwegian-heritage.no for more titles and information about the series.

The books are published in Norwegian and English.

HANS OLAV THYVOLD

FRIDTJOF NANSEN

EXPLORER, SCIENTIST AND DIPLOMAT

TRANSLATED FROM THE NORWEGIAN
BY JAMES ANDERSON

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Contents

A Special Boy

A Taste of the Ice

Across the Mountains

Across Greenland

A National Hero

Across the Polar Sea

A Nation is Born

War, Refugees and Famine

Legacy

Appendix

The difference between the possible and the impossible is that the impossible takes a little longer.

FRIDTJOF NANSEN

As the hero of a novel, Fridtjof Nansen would almost certainly have been rejected by any decent publisher. And even the most daring of Hollywood producers would have wondered if the bounds of credulity weren’t being stretched by this sort of character:

Young scientist, ground-breaking and artistically endowed, also a terrific athlete, performs mind-boggling feats of courage – including fighting polar bears – in terrain where no human being has previously set foot, becomes a national hero of somewhere that isn’t a nation by leading its people to self-respect and independence, and then, later in life, girds up his loins to save millions of people in remote lands.

The Nobel Prize.

The End.

Fridtjof Nansen’s funeral turned Norwegian National Day into a day of mourning. On 17 May 1930 Nansen’s coffin is carried to its final resting place at Lysaker after the ceremony in the University’s auditorium.

He has barely turned three, but Fridtjof Nansen has already found his feet as a photographic subject. Throughout his life he deliberately tried to appear as deadpan as possible in photographs.

But this really is the life of Fridtjof Nansen in a nutshell, and he is still the one person who, more than any other, has shaped Norway’s identity – from families going on a Sunday skiing outing to diplomats mediating in distant conflicts. It is extremely hard to imagine the Norwegian nation without Fridtjof Nansen, the only person ever to have been portrayed on our banknotes twice.

His personal authority eclipsed that of all his countrymen, including Henrik Ibsen and King Oscar II. Many wanted to see him as president, or even as King Fridtjof I. Instead, Nansen the republican became the most important figure in the transformation of an imported royal family into a popular monarchy whose roots penetrated deep into the soul of the Norwegian people.

The story of Fridtjof Nansen is, as stories from history often are, about being in the right place at the right time. But it says something about the breadth of his life that the right place spanned the lonely polar ice and the killing fields of Armenia, and that the right time covered half a century.