the cultural history of this region available to new audiences. Legends offer complex layers just like the digital maps do, as the narrator points out from time to time. At these moments Price boldly opts for multiplicity, so that valency lies with the reader as much as the teller. Reading these poems – noting subtle shifts in time and place and personhood – feels very different to following a surfaced highway.

In deliberate contrast to earlier expeditions seeking trade routes, the Greenlandic-Danish polar explorer Knud Rasmussen organised a “Literary Expedition” to the Arctic in the early twentieth century. While the First World War devastated central Europe, his small team travelled north by sled up the Greenlandic coast and across the icy expanses of Nunavut, gathering traditional knowledge from the people he encountered. He was told a version of the Sedna story, which is included in the five volumes of material he published later. He describes gatherings in a song tent – the sweat of close-packed, anticipatory bodies; his vision dimmed in air thick with smoke from blubber lamps. “From the very first, the tunes are riveting and carry us away,” he wrote. “I can understand more clearly than ever, how difficult it is to take the songs of the Eskimos [sic] out of their own context. For the words of the songs are only part of the whole intended effect.” It was not only due to the smoky dimness of the venue that Rasmussen found it difficult to record the songs in his notebook. He later acknowledged that his own “neat written language and... sober orthography... couldn’t bestow sufficient form or force” on the singers’ words. Yet Rasmussen had briefly worked as an opera singer in Copenhagen; he was no stranger to words moving between page and performance. Subsequent translators of Rasmussen (such as Tom Lowenstein, whose text I quote here) echo his concerns. How to evoke the powerful musicality and temporality of the original? The tale is passed on, and in the telling inevitably altered. The singer

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