Introduction : a brief history of polar exploration --
Explorers and survivors --
In search of the Northwest Passage --
"Scandinavian ascendancy" --
Shackleton's expedition --
1. Medieval Norse sagas and the Pagan prophetess --
2. Full of fruit : Hans Egede's Greenland --
3. Secret runes : searching for the colonists, 1800-2000 --
pt. 2. The long dark night --
4. Sir William Edward Parry : "The utmost regularity and good order" --
5. Comforts and good cheer : Nansen goes North --
Nothing to write about --
6. "I dread getting up" : Richard Byrd alone in the Antarctic --
7. "They are an epic" : Robert Falcon Scott and the South Pole --
"The poor soldier has become a terrible hindrance" --
"We will not at this moment raise the question" --
8. Ballooning to the North Pole : the Andrée expedition --
Raw brain and algae soup --
9. Eating each other : Adolphus Greely's Three Years of Arctic Service --
"A stern and frightful reality" --
pt. 4. Visiting the dead --
10. "A fate as terrible as the imagination can conceive" : Sir John Franklin's last expedition --
""A mere accumulation of dead weight" --
11. Interrupting his cold sleep : John Torrington --
"A curious and solemn scene" --
12. Arctic arsenic : Charles Francis Hall and the search for Franklin --
pt. 5. Women at the ends of the Earth --
13. Babies on Hudson Bay : the letters of Letitia Hargrave --
14. My Antarctic honeymoon : Jennie Darlington in Antarctica --
15. The fairyland of the Arctic : Isobel Wylie Hutchison in Greenland --
pt. 6. Literature on ice --
16. The loud misrule : Arctic imagery in English poetry --
Melting the ice : John Donne and James Thomson at the North Pole --
Hell freezes over : the albatross and Frankenstein --
17. Discovered by Pooh : children's fiction goes to the Poles --
Parodying the oles : the Snark and Pooh take on Franklin and Scott --
Ice maidens and snow queens --
Epilogue : The end of the road --
