Storytelling as a means of survival in colder climates

Iona Lee reflects on her residency in Greenland in July 2026

I arrived in Greenland on Monday evening, hopping from grey Edinburgh to gloomy Reykjavik and on through to a bright blue Nuuk – the world’s northernmost capital. The plane descended over an endless tundra of thick cotton clouds that I eventually realised was in fact not clouds at all, but an ice sheet. Miles and miles of snow. The sun shone loudly and barely let up for a week – not even in the middle of the night. The midnight sun and sleep deprivation made the whole experience a little surreal. Those big skies, big mountains, and big floating icebergs at the edge of the world.

After a brief taxi ride, I arrived at our accommodation to find my fellow residents sitting out on the decking in the cold bright sunshine, drinking tea with some locals who had come along to visit. I tried to fit the entire vista into my tired eyes, and asked warily if polar bears ever came into the city. A girl called Nunu said that they did – but only if they were really very hungry.

I was there to take part in a residency, and we had a packed schedule of workshops and events which started the following morning. It was a long day of writing workshops led by myself, a local writer called Paarnaq, and an Icelandic poet called Birgitta. At lunchtime, I wandered down to Old Nuuk – the oldest missionary settlement – and sat in the harbour to watch a kayaking competition that was taking place. People were flinging spears and paddling about in the dazzling water as a voice called out instructions over a tannoy.

That evening we attended a poetry reading in the local art gallery. While the space was being set up, I sat in the adjoining book shop and read about the myths and monsters of the Thule people, the ancestors of modern Greenlanders. It was notable how violent and threatening the creatures seemed to be, which I suppose personified the harshness of the environment and the relentlessness of winter. Several were also unfathomable in size – giant polar bears, giant wolves, giant men with giant heads. Human imagination casting shadows large enough to stalk the empty landscape and the long long night. Here were my favourites:

Qungussutariaq (The Smiling Merman): A smiling merman that appears beside your kayak, his sharp knife carefully concealed beneath the surface of the water. Erlaveersiniooq (The Entrails Eater):  A witch who resides in a hut in the middle of the wilderness, to the west of the moon. A beautiful young woman, or a grotesque old crone, she will try to seduce weary travellers and make them laugh, gutting them the moment she sees the hint of a smile and feasting upon their entrails. Ikusik (The Elbow Walker): A hideous zombie-like creature that drags its decaying body about on its elbows and – most upsettingly of all – can move surprisingly fast.

The Inuit culture is an oral tradition, full of rules (known as taboos), customs, and stories. While these are very old traditions indeed, many survived colonialism, and continue to thrive in the modern world. I noticed that women still often sport traditional tattoos on their faces and bodies, including lines on the fingers, which I later learned represent Sassuma Arnaa (The Mother of The Sea).

The story goes that Sassuma Arnaa was pushed out of a boat by her father, and as she gripped desperately onto the side he chopped off her fingers one by one. Sassuma  drifted down to the depths and her fingers turned into the creatures of the sea. She is a protector goddess, who looks after the animals that live in her long hair. If taboos are not followed properly – for example, thanking the animals you have hunted for giving up their lives – her hair will become matted and filthy, concealing the creatures and causing starvation. Only Angakkuit (Shamans) – the mediators between humans and the spirit world – are able to reach her in her dwelling at the bottom of the ocean, to appease her, to calm her, and comb out her hair. Sassuma Arnaa has transformed again: becoming a symbol for global warming and the devastating effects of overfishing.

The next day I was lucky enough to have my own encounter with a creature from the deep. After workshops on festival organisation, and musical composition, the Welsh poet Grug Muse and I boarded a boat on a mission to see a humpback whale. After an hour of riding into the fjord, the captain announced that he had spotted one, and we headed in its direction. It was so loud, the big beast, loud as the sun. It was like seeing an old god. Its spine slinked, arcing a wet back out of the water, flashing us the silver of its undertail, spraying, spuming, sighing, breathing immense breaths.

The overall theme of the residency was ‘warmth’, and we had many discussions on the subject and its tributaries. Back home there was a heat wave. Arthur’s seat was on fire, as were the Cairngorms. We talked about our changing relationship with warmth: how as kids, hot weather meant happiness; how now, it was more doom laden, filled with anxiety. That we felt untethered from time, from nature’s predictable rhythms. How one week felt like four seasons. A local artist said that the effects of climate change had been felt in the arctic for a long time, and that it seemed that us southerners were only noticing it now. We talked about the role of folklore and stories in an oral tradition: how they connect the generations to the landscape and its patterns. How we are strung on the same story. In Icelandic folklore, I learned, ghosts always repeat themselves. But there’s a scratch in the record. The stories are out of sync.

I’m getting my days mixed up. The week felt like one long day, or a day repeating itself, the sun never setting. The grass was full of sunshine yellow dandelions and fluffy little wind flowers called Arctic cottongrass. Ravens croaked. The sound of boat engines hummed in the distance. Trump was in the news, threatening to invade Greenland again, but I was doing my best to ignore it. The only reminder was the occasional ‘Make America Go Away’ hat. I felt very far from everything. We found a bar that felt like home, with red leather seats and threadbare carpet, dart boards and billiard tables. I played pool with a very drunk Canadian man named Jarred, who boasted that he made 40 thousand Canadian dollars a month on the supertrawlers. We left the lonely man in the bar at midnight, though the light quality made it feel like the next morning, like I had been playing pool for a very long time.

We spent another evening in the art gallery, doing something similar to what we might call a ceilidh, with everybody doing turns – sharing their animations, beading work, reading essays, or holding talks with the public. I decided to read Tam O Shanter, having recently memorised it, and a gallery-full of mildly bewildered people smiled politely at me.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to perform in Robert Burns’ cottage in Alloway. It was deep dark January. Goose-pimpled. Breathing frozen mist. I was standing in the very room where he most likely wrote what I consider to be the best poem in the Scots tradition. I was reminded of just how dark it would have been. My skin thrilled, imagining how scary and exhilarating recitations must have been in a world before cinema and electric lights. Imaginations must have illuminated. Ghost stories in a glowing cottage, with the darkness watching from the window.

The next evening, we gathered around a Qulliq – a traditional crescent-shaped oil lamp carved from soap stone, and watched as our hosts burned arctic hare droppings and seal oil. For millennia, these would have been the primary source of light and warmth in the winter. Nowadays, they are only used in ceremonies, but have become a symbol of Greenlandic resistance.

In the past, the Inuits spent the summer in tents and created semi-subterranean single-room stone huts for the winter, with roofs made from whale bone or drift wood, and packed with peat sod. Much like a Scottish bothy in midwinter, those dwellings must have been full of smoke and stories: storytelling as a means of survival in colder climates, storytelling as a source of warmth.

Just eighty years ago, nearly seventy percent of Greenlanders lived in small communities of fewer than two-hundred people. The culture had been semi-nomadic, and largely reliant on hunting. Today, the majority live in cities. After the Second World War, the Danish set out to modernise Greenland, transforming the economy from one of subsistence to one of industry, introducing commercial fishing and factory labour. Danish was the primary language of education. Entire communities were forcibly uprooted and resettled in larger towns like Nuuk, being placed in large, multi-storey concrete apartment blocks.

Around the Qulliq, we sat as a group, each taking turns to sing songs from our native countries: Icelandic fimmundarsöngur, Faroese chain dance songs, and a Greenlandic song sung with the ancient quilaat drum about a crow that falls in love with a herring gull and drowns. I sang Twa Corbies in response. Our hosts wore traditional masks and one explained that they were used to scare children. He said that children needed to be trained to react to fear in Greenland – not to freeze, but instead to laugh, to fight, or to run.

I left Greenland on an early morning flight to Copenhagen, my head full of half-musings on daylight, humpback moons, cottages at the bottom of the ocean, and the night sky. Scientists were putting a giant mirror in space for 24/7 daylight. A billionaire had crashed a rocket into the moon. America had brought drilling equipment ashore without permission, and were poised to puncture that seemingly endless tundra and dig dig dig for black oil. I fell in and out of sleep, tucked into my wee corner of the plane, the mountains and glaciers far below. Greenland had felt like a place where humans were on equal terms with nature and the supernatural, and where ancient tradition and modernity lived side by side.

Through reading and talking to the people I had met there, I got the sense that it was a place where alliances had to be formed, rules had to be followed, and the wild had to be respected. Where you went against the rhythms of the vast and devastating world at your own peril.

With gratitude to the Edwin Morgan Trust’s ‘Open The Doors’ Fund, the Scottish Book Trust’s Author’s International Travel Fund, and the Society of Author’s Access Fund.