#i love you arctic exploration horror i love you horror about snow and ice and winter

[thrustin-timberlake]

my singular gripe with the magnus archives is that there’s never a statement that explores fears around the cold. there’s never a statement about the suffocation of snow and the isolation of winter as looking out over the landscape and seeing a wasteland of white. nothing about that kind of slow, agonizing death that you’re aware of the entire time. no tie in with the dark or the buried or the lonely. alexander j newall i can tell you are from a place that does not freeze

[entwinedmoon]

John Torrington: Lord Have Mercy on the Frozen Man

(Previous posts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

What do James Taylor and heavy metal band Iron Maiden have in common? They both saw a picture of a dead guy and thought, “This would make a great song.”

When John Torrington got his close-up in newspapers and magazines across the globe, his well-preserved, tragic visage inspired a renewed interest in the Franklin Expedition in various forms of media. He started cropping up in literary works, and some artists tried to capture how he may have looked in life. Surprisingly, he even had an impact on music.

I’ll admit that impact has been rather small. Over the years, there have been plenty of songs inspired by the Franklin Expedition—from traditional tunes like “Lady Franklin’s Lament” to Stan Roger’s rousing “Northwest Passage”—but the Franklin ice mummies don’t get as much attention in this particular artistic medium. There are about three songs I know of that are about (or assumed to be about) the mummies, and it’s John Torrington who gets all the attention once again, what little attention there is.

Of course, there aren’t a lot of songs out there about mummies in general, so it’s not so surprising that music isn’t where Torrington made a big splash. While music can be about anything and everything, one of the most popular topics for songs is romance, and people just don’t think mummies are particularly romantic, (except for Hozier. Please, please, please, someone get Hozier to write a song about the Franklin ice mummies).

The first song I have for you, and the most famous of the three, is by another well-known JT—James Taylor. Yes, the James Taylor. The man who’s seen fire and seen rain also saw pictures of John Torrington and became inspired to write a song, “The Frozen Man,” which appeared on his 1991 album New Moon Shine. Taylor explained once at a concert that he’d seen pictures of a man’s frozen body, preserved in the Arctic for over a hundred years, in National Geographic. He didn’t say the name John Torrington, but he didn’t really need to; it’s obvious who he meant.

However, there is a slight problem with his explanation. Try as I might, I have never been able to track down an issue of National Geographic with an article featuring pictures of Torrington, Hartnell, or Braine. And yet there have been several people—not just James Taylor—who’ve said they saw pictures of the mummies in National Geographic. I even purchased a digital subscription to go through the archives, and while I did find a small blurb about the lead poisoning findings, I never found any full articles and definitely not any pictures. Maybe I just wasn’t looking at the right issue, but I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that this is an example of the Mandela Effect, because there have been multiple people claiming to have seen pictures of Torrington in National Geographic but I can’t find the issue everyone seems to be referring to. If anyone out there has the issue people are talking about, please let me know.

But back to the song now. You can peruse the lyrics of “The Frozen Man” here, or you can listen to it below:

https://youtu.be/0aoxmfge4AE

The titular Frozen Man in this song is not Torrington himself but a Torrington-like fictional sailor who became frozen, and because it’s fiction, he’s brought back to life a hundred years after his death. Owen Beattie would sometimes have people ask him if there was a way that Torrington could have been revived. Torrington looks so close to life as it is, how hard could it be? But realistically there’s been too much internal decay of the cells for Torrington to ever be brought back to life, no matter how advanced our technology might become. But who doesn’t love the fantasy of bringing back someone from the past? It’s a popular trope—Captain America, Futurama, and even the ridiculous and regrettable Encino Man all use the same idea. There’s a great review of the song through a science fiction lens on Tor.com that explores this in detail. I myself have had quite a few ideas for stories that involve a reanimated Torrington—as a child, these were called nightmares, but as an adult I like to call them novels.

What I like about this song is how it explores the emotional toll that reviving Torrington—or other Frozen Men—would have on the poor man out of time. Everything he’s known—his family and friends—are all gone. He remembers dying—haunting memories he’ll always carry with him. Now he’s back, but at what cost? Just because you could bring someone back doesn’t mean you should. If we did have the technology to bring back Torrington, would it be right to do so? Or would it be a mercy to leave him as he is? In “The Frozen Man,” we see that it’s kinder to leave the dead be.

The next song on my list is of a very different style, and while it’s assumed to be about Torrington, I haven’t been able to definitively verify that. The song in question is “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Iron Maiden, from their album Somewhere in Time. It came out in 1986, the same year Hartnell and Braine were exhumed and autopsied, but since songs don’t usually get written, recorded, and released in a couple of months, this song is probably about Torrington, if it’s about any of the Beechey Boys. I say if because while it’s said by some that “Stranger in a Strange Land” was inspired by Torrington, the exact origin of the song is pretty vague. Adrian Smith, guitarist and singer for Iron Maiden, said that he had written the song after speaking with someone who had found a frozen body in the Arctic. But who did he talk to? Unfortunately, I can’t find much concrete information about the song’s inspiration. I suppose I could try asking Adrian Smith, but I’m not sure how to reach him, or if he’d respond to the weird woman asking about that one song about the dead guy from thirty-three years ago.

You can take a listen below, or read the lyrics here.

https://youtu.be/q7IdqkaGyU8

Like “The Frozen Man,” this song deals with a Torrington-like fictional explorer who died in a “land of ice and snow,” and his body became preserved in the ice. Unlike “The Frozen Man,” however, this Stranger doesn’t become revived. Instead, his spirit is trapped in this icy land where his body has been frozen for a hundred years. This is more fantasy than sci-fi, verging into horror—he’s haunting the land where he died, trapped and yearning to be freed. The pictures of Torrington are remarkable but incredibly creepy, and he does look like a supernatural being that could be haunting the Arctic (after all, I had no problem thinking he haunted my closet when I was growing up). Torrington looks frozen in time (perfect name for a book about him), so it’s not such a stretch of the imagination to think he’s been frozen in more ways than one, body and soul. In this song, his body is found, but it’s not clear if that frees him from his icy prison or not. The song ends repeating the chorus, focusing on the loneliness of the desolate land and dying so far from home.

The third and final song I have for you today is not as well-known as the previous two. And there’s no question about who the subject is—the song is called “John Torrington.” This song is by Canadian musician Matthew Mutch, from his album Steeltown Pilgrim. I stumbled across this song earlier this year when looking for John Torrington videos on YouTube. Mutch is not a big name like Taylor, and it’s hard to find much information about him, but he wrote a brief explanation for his purpose behind his song on his website, (where you can also find the lyrics):

“My interest in the history of arctic exploration and the search for the northwest passage brought me to write this—my homage to not only John Franklin and his crew, but to all the many brave 19th century travelers and adventurers who risked their lives to unlock the mysteries of the frozen north.”

The song starts off with a spoken-word introduction about the Franklin Expedition to explain to anyone unfamiliar with the topic the background behind the song. You can listen to the song here:

https://youtu.be/Gcc41yHDcYA

This song features a spectral Torrington haunting Sir John Franklin. It’s not a scary type of haunting per se, but he appears as an ominous warning to Franklin about the sad fate awaiting him and the rest of the crew. Torrington as a harbinger of doom is a trope that I’ve seen a lot in Franklin-related literature, something I will go into more in depth in another post. The song, while named after Torrington, is less about him and more about the death of the entire expedition, with him serving as a canary in a coalmine.

These three songs are all different, but they all focus on Torrington (or a Torrington stand-in) in death and in some form of afterlife, whether it’s a spirit haunting the land or his shipmates or if it’s a second chance on life through some technological marvel. Because there’s not much known about his life, most people focus on his death, as that and his mummified image are what have made him notable in the saga of the Franklin Expedition. Perhaps because we know so much more about his death, it can be hard to imagine him in life.

But there are some who have tried.

Next: Torrington as depicted in art—from attempts at reconstructing what he looked like, to Torrington in a graphic novel and more.

<<Back | Next >>

Torrington Series Masterlist