Polar bears come! Everyone dies!

[akashiver]

The above is a fairly accurate description of James Hogg's "The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon" (1837). The short story, which seems to have earned its own Wikipedia entry, features a Scottish whaler who gets stranded on an iceberg and floats through the northern half of the world scaring Chines fishermen until he lands in the long-lost colony of Greenland. He then gets into a complicated romantic quadrangle involving his wife, his two concubines, and a polar bear (I kid you not) and accidentally destroys the remnants of a Christianized Viking colony.

You're a wacky, wacky man, James Hogg.

Anyway, my motivation is very weak today. The Peter Wilkins section needs revision and I need to get a couple pages down on Coleridge by the end of the day. And I need to figure out what's going on with all the polar bear love.