The Land of the Long Night

The Land of the Long Night is a book by Paul Du Chaillu (1831-1903) on his travels in northern Scandinavia and the Arctic regions, written during his shift from African to northern European subjects in the later phase of his career. The book draws on Du Chaillu’s extensive travels in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the northern reaches of those countries during the 1870s.

The long night of the title refers to the polar winter, when the sun does not rise above the horizon for weeks at a time in the far northern latitudes. Du Chaillu describes the experience of the long winter darkness, the various practical adaptations that the indigenous Sami people and the Scandinavian settlers had developed for life in the polar regions, and the natural history of the Arctic landscape.

Du Chaillu’s Land of the Midnight Sun of 1881 was the major nonfiction work that came out of his Scandinavian travels and that established his reputation as one of the leading nineteenth-century Anglophone writers on northern European subjects.