It’s one of those awkward moments in the course of my blogging. I’ve embarked on reading quite a long book, so I won’t have a review ready for a few days. And yet I must post something, to assuage my crippling sense of obligation. So I’ll talk about the book’s author, in general terms.

If you weigh your scoring in terms of the availability and ubiquity of various media through the course of history, you can make a strong case that Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930) was the greatest celebrity Norway ever produced (though St. Olaf is a strong contender).

Nansen was a noted zoologist before he started doing Arctic exploration. And when he ventured into the far north, it was into terra still incognita. Nobody knew what was up there. Land? Pack ice? Open sea? These were among the things he set out to learn. And he did it in a bold, groundbreaking, hands-on way. Later, he became a diplomat (he had a lot to do with Norwegian independence from Sweden and the decision to become a monarchy). Then, as a League of Nations official entrusted with the relief of hundreds of thousands of people displaced and orphaned by World War I, he saved countless lives. Remember Young Frankenstein, where Igor breaks a jar containing the brain of “Hans Dalbruck, Scientist & Saint?” It might have been a description of Nansen, as he was perceived in the public mind.

When the artist Erik Werenskiold set out to illustrate the saga of Olaf Trygvesson in the classic edition of Heimskringla, the Sagas of the Kings of Norway, he put Nansen’s face on the ancient national hero.

But Nansen had a very dark side. When he left the ship Fram to attempt to ski to the North Pole with one companion, the two men spent four months living in close quarters, utterly dependent on one another. They became close friends. But once they returned to civilization, Nansen reasserted his rank. They’d been addressing one another with the intimate pronoun, “du” (thee). But now he went back to “de” (you), as befitted men of different social classes.

He was an international sex symbol, handsome and athletic. Wherever he traveled, the most desirable women (often married women) threw themselves at him. He did not resist, though he was a husband and a father. Eventually he commenced an affair with the wife of his neighbor, the artist Gerhard Munthe. They divorced their spouses and married one another, something Nansen’s children never forgave.

So he was no Hans Dalbruck. I remind myself, however, that I’ve been protected from fornication all my life by shyness and lack of opportunity. If I’d looked like Nansen, what would I have done? Best to contemplate the log in my own eye.

One interesting sidelight must be mentioned. In his international relief work, Nansen had a faithful right hand man, a young fellow named Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonsson Quisling. Quisling would later achieve dark immortality, and give us a new word for traitor, when he led the Norwegian Nazi Party during the Occupation.

Life, as you’ve probably noticed, is messy.