Entry Three: Svalbard
There is a map at the edge of Europe, where the white of the paper bleeds into the white of the sea. That map is Svalbard. An archipelago scattered in the Arctic Ocean, midway between Norway and the North Pole, a geography that feels like it belongs as much to the imagination as it does to the world.
The place is older than our names for it. Once called Spitsbergen, its jagged peaks drew Dutch whalers, English sailors, Russian trappers. Later came the miners, hacking coal from the permafrost, building towns that stand even now, half-inhabited, half-ghost. Longyearbyen, Pyramiden, Barentsburg: outposts at the edge of human endurance. Their stories mix hardship with absurdity, survival with stubbornness.
Between those towns lies a wilderness almost untouched. Polar bears patrol the ice. Walrus and seals haul themselves onto floes. Migratory birds wheel in great numbers. The land is stark, treeless, yet alive with motion. And above it all, in summer, the light never dies. Midnight looks like noon. Noon looks like midnight. It is a place where the ordinary rhythm of time dissolves.
And Svalbard, for all its remoteness, has its peculiar rules. You cannot be born here, pregnant women must leave before their due dates. You cannot be buried here, the permafrost refuses to let the dead rest. If you wander too far from town, you must carry a rifle, for the polar bear has the final authority. There is even a vault here, buried in the rock, where the seeds of the world are kept safe against catastrophe. A place both fragile and eternal, a reminder that survival is never simple
Svalbard is not without its quiet struggles. Nearly half of its people come from beyond Norway’s borders, drawn by the promise of work and frontier life, yet many have no voice in shaping the place they call home. A recent change in the law requires foreign residents to first anchor themselves on the Norwegian mainland before they can cast a vote in Longyearbyen. For some, it feels like belonging deferred, a reminder that even at the edge of the world, the lines of power and silence remain.
Photo by the Arctic Circle
For me, Svalbard has always carried the weight of myth. As a child, I devoured Jack London’s stories, Burning Daylight, The Sea Wolf, tales where the frontier was both a test and a revelation. Later, my fascination turned northward in other ways. The first time I saw the northern lights in Iceland, the sky seemed to open like a door into another world. Years later, I traveled with my son to the Faroe Islands, those remote rocks in the North Atlantic, famous for their steep cliffs and their sheep, a place where the sea writes every rule of life.
All of it was preparation, though I didn’t know it then. Svalbard was always there, waiting, a frontier not only of geography but of imagination. A place where the known world falls away and something larger takes its place.
“The land is so harsh and the winters so long, that only the hardiest of souls dare venture out. Yet this same land, if you let it, will shape you, will change you.”
