The global North has been imagined as a no-man's-land, an icy realm of marauding Vikings, or an unspoiled cradle of prehistoric human life. As Bernd Brunner argues here, the North was as much invented as discovered, and here he reconstructs the encounters of adventurers, colonists, and indigenous communities that led to the creation of a northern mystique. Brunner also dissects the crackpot Nazi philosophies that tied the "Aryan race" to the upper latitudes, influencing modern pseudoscientific fantasies of racial and cultural superiority.