I was earlier working on a review that I should have up by tomorrow, but good sense obligates me to spend some time on Son of Hel instead.
This novel will try to bring together a lot of different lore that has accumulated around St. Nicholas. To that end, I have started building a library of Santa Claus stories, folklore, and historical works. I am currently reading Brom’s amusing novel Krampus the Yule Lord, which I’ll review when I finish, and I have just received in the mail Gerry Bowler’s Santa Claus: A Biography, which chronicles changes in the conception of the jolly saint over time.
Also, just because I can, I am incorporating into the novel some archaic yet fascinating misconceptions about the North Pole. Before the Earth’s magnetic field was understood, it was once imagined that at the pole stood a “Black Precipice,” a massive mountain of lodestone. I have supposed that Santa has his military-industrial complex constructed on this mountain, which kind of makes sense, seeing as how he has an army of elves, elves can’t stand cold iron, and you can’t bring iron anywhere near the lodestone mountain.
See? Logic.
There was also a semi-famous man named John Cleves Symmes who believed very strongly, though entirely without evidence, that the poles had gigantic holes in them leading into the hollow Earth. A few conspiracy theorists still cling to this today, though it’s hard to know how serious they are because some online conspiracy-theorists are just in it for the laughs. I have long thought it would be fun to combine the Symmes’ Hole with the Black Precipice and imagine that the lodestone mountain is actually jutting out of the interior Earth, in the center of the hole.
As I have tried to envision the environment of the North Pole in this conception, I find that my imagination has failed and I have not dreamt big enough. The Arctic Ocean at the pole is around 13,000 feet deep.
According to Wikipedia, Symmes proposed that the holes were a full 4,000 miles wide. A little further checking, however, shows that his original theory proposed that the Earth is “open at the poles 12 or 16 degrees.”
Although a fundamental mistake in my math is more than likely, if a degree of latitude is approximately 69 miles, and if Symmes means the 12 to 16 degrees to be a radius, then the holes are actually only 1,656 to 2,2008 miles across.
He also expected to find a warm and habitable land with abundant animal and vegetable life located one degree north of 82º (why didn’t he just say “83º”?). That would make this habitable land, presumably existing somewhere inside the hollow Earth, about 14 degrees or 966 miles across.
If that doesn’t seem to jive with the hole-at-the-pole theory, you must understand that Symmes believed that the holes were gradual enough in slope that one could enter the hollow Earth without being aware of it, though it’s difficult to imagine how that would work.
Ignoring the notion of a gradual slope to an inner, concentric sphere, we can take these numbers and propose a gigantic, circular waterfall about 2,200 miles across or approximately 6,900 miles in circumference with the habitable but inhospitable Black Precipice in its center, 966 miles in diameter or approximately 3,034 miles in circumference with a height that probably rivals Mount Everest even above the surface of the Earth and stretches even further below it—more than a thousand miles, in fact, to reach the surface of the inner concentric sphere.
Instead of a habitable inner world as Symmes supposed, we must imagine an inner ocean or perhaps a vast network of waterways carrying the pouring ocean water from the Symmes Hole at the North Pole to the Symmes Hole at the South. This, conveniently, matches another, late Medieval hollow Earth theory. Thus the holes serve to circulate and refresh the oceanic waters, though this necessitates a water spout at the South Pole as vast as the waterfall at the North.
Again, the scale of these things is simply hard to imagine. The whole of the Arctic Circle, and perhaps more, must be shrouded permanently in an icy mist from this tumbling water. The noise must be constant and louder than a hurricane.
