Eskimo Folk-Tales (Illustrated Edition) (Dodo Press)

Knud Johan Victor Rasmussen (1879-1933) was a Greenlandic polar explorer and anthropologist. He has been called the "father of Eskimology" and was the first to cross the Northwest Passage via dog sled. He remains well known in Greenland, Denmark and among Canadian Inuit. He went on his first expedition in 1902-1904, known as The Danish Literary Expedition to examine Inuit culture. After returning home he went on a lecture circuit and wrote The People of the Polar North (1908), a combination travel journal and scholarly account of Inuit folklore. The First Thule Expedition (1912, Rasmussen and Freuchen) aimed to test Robert Peary's claim that a channel divided Peary Land from Greenland. Rasmussen's "greatest achievement" was the massive Fifth Thule Expedition (1921-1924) which was designed to ".. attack the great primary problem of the origin of the Eskimo race". A ten volume account (The Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-1924 (1946)) of ethnographic, archaeological and biological data was collected, and many artifacts are still on display in museums in Denmark.