Ambiguity is the poet's crucible, the scholar's refuge, the pedant's scourge.
By using this phrase as the entry to an open-form discussion about the tyrannies of the historical text I was inviting my reader to read creatively, confessing that scholarship would not resolve the anomalies of Arctic narrative, and challenging academics to enjoy the discomfiture of knowing more questions than answers. Teaching a postgraduate seminar on Arctic texts in 1997 to people who, for the most part, had never been north of Sixty, I came quickly to recognize the pedagogical value of such ambiguity. It seemed reasonable if we could keep pedantry and poetics, scholarship and imagination, in harmony, the course would go well. And so it did. We gathered at the University of Ottawa as a seminar group on Wednesday evenings throughout the winter to examine certain texts in a critical fashion and to share our responses to the Arctic revealed by these considerations.