“As I moved with stiff legs along the reefs I slipped into the water.It was cold beyond belief–thevery quintessence of deathly Arctic ice, so cold that it seemed to sear and bleach the skin.” Fired up by the accounts of exploring parties in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers of the weird and supernatural began to construct a literary Arctic and Antarctic in which terrors lay undiscovered in the ice and gateways to bizarre hidden worlds were waiting. From James Hogg’s lurid North Pole narrative of life amongst polar bears in ‘The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon’ to tales of mad science and ghostly visitations among the wind-blown expanse of the southern continent, this new collection showcases a wealth of neglected material and an overlooked niche of literature obsessed with the limits of human experience. Pulp tales of alien forces emerging from the ice and a battle between hunter and invisible man-eating duck creature drift alongside modern horror from indigenous Arctic voices to show the extent and endurance of the lure of these sublime landscapes. John Miller is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the editor of the Tales of the Weird anthologies Tales of the Tattooed: An Anthology of Ink (2019) and Weird Woods: Tales from the Haunted Forests of Britain (2020). INTRODUCTION There is a longstanding conception of the Earth’s polar regions that there is nothing much there but vast expanses of featureless ice, fear- some weather, a few solitary wandering bears in the Arctic, huddles of penguins at the other end, above them the glorious Auroras (Borealis at the north; Australis at the south) and very few—if any—signs of human culture. The poles in this tradition represent the absence or even negation of civilisation and politics: the last great wildernesses where nature continues in its purest form. It’s an alluring narrative, even if (as we shall see) it isn’t true. When Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein(1818) reaches its climax among the far north’s “eternal frosts” with the angst-ridden scientist pursuing his creature on an “almost endless journey across the mountainous ices of the ocean”, the Arctic setting is an exploration of intensities of the heart and mind as much as it is an account of a physical place (which Shelley in any case never herself visited). The same pattern holds at the far south. Edgar Allan Poe imagines a similar landscape to Shelley’s in his 1833 Antarctic tale “MS. Found in a Bottle”. As Poe’s unnamed narrator takes refuge on the ghostly vesselDiscovery, he records the ship running further and further towards “stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe”. The narrator experiences a deepening sen- sation of horror at what might await, but nonetheless acknowledges that “a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death”. At Poe’s historical moment in the early nineteenth century, when little was known of the Antarctic continent (and like Shelley, Poe was writing about a place he’d never seen), the narrator’s horror is balanced by the glamour of the unknown, the apprehension that he is “hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge—some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction”. The Romantic imagination of the poles works through an intriguing mixture of emotions: the dread and the desire which reinforce rather than oppose each other, and which together emphasise the dual function of extremity as existential as much as geographical. Shelley’s and Poe’s early depictions of polar regions remain influ- ential, even after two centuries of Arctic and Antarctic exploration have threatened to bring such flights of literary imagination back to the ground of sober fact. Conventionally, the poles remain the blank space on which literary and cinematic fantasies—some of which are very odd indeed—can be imposed. H. P. Lovecraft’s formative ver- sion of weird fiction draws on polar regions to a significant extent, mainly the Antarctic world which in “At the Mountains of Madness” (1931) appears as a “frightful gateway into hidden spheres of dream”. Dan Simmons’sThe Terror(2007) shows the allure of Arctic horror lingering into the twenty-first century, even if the novel’s supernatural elements rely on a historical setting in one of the far north’s great mysteries. The disappearance of Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedi- tion to navigate the Northwest Passage—the long-sought sea route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans—was a real-life Victorian horror story. What dire fate befell the crew after the two ships, the Erebusand theTerror,were abandoned in the ice in 1848? The evi- dence of cannibalism that was presented by an 1854 search party was rejected with jingoistic indignation: British gentlemen donoteat each other, not even the common s