Fridtjof Nansen - Later Life

Later Life

On 17 January 1919 Nansen married Sigrun Munthe, a long-time friend with whom he had had a love affair in 1905, while Eva was still alive. The marriage was resented by the Nansen children, and proved unhappy; an acquaintance writing of them in the 1920s said Nansen appeared unbearably miserable and Sigrun steeped in hate.

Nansen's League of Nations commitments through the 1920s meant that he was mostly absent from Norway, and was able to devote little time to scientific work. Nevertheless, he continued to publish occasional papers. He entertained the hope that he might travel to the North Pole by airship, but could not raise sufficient funding. In any event he was forestalled in this ambition by Amundsen, who flew over the pole in Umberto Nobile's airship Norge in May 1926. Two years later Nansen broadcast a memorial oration to Amundsen, who had disappeared in the Arctic while organising a rescue party for Nobile whose airship had crashed during a second polar voyage. Nansen said of Amundsen:

He found an unknown grave under the clear sky of the icy world, with the whirring of the wings of eternity through space."

In 1926 Nansen was elected Rector of the University of St Andrews in Scotland, the first foreigner to hold this largely honorary position. He used the occasion of his inaugural address to review his life and philosophy, and to deliver a call to the youth of the next generation. He ended:

We all have a Land of Beyond to seek in our life—what more can we ask? Our part is to find the trail that leads to it. A long trail, a hard trail, maybe; but the call comes to us, and we have to go. Rooted deep in the nature of every one of us is the spirit of adventure, the call of the wild—vibrating under all our actions, making life deeper and higher and nobler.

Nansen largely avoided involvement in domestic Norwegian politics, but in 1924 he was persuaded by the long-retired former prime minister Christian Michelsen to lend his name to a new anti-communist political grouping, Fædrelandslaget ("Fatherland League"). There were fears in Norway that should the Marxist-oriented Norwegian Labour Party (Arbeiderpartiet) gain power it would introduce a revolutionary programme. At a Fædrelandslaget rally in Oslo (as Christiania had now been renamed), Nansen declared:

To talk of the right of revolution in a society with full civil liberty, universal suffrage, equal treatment for everyone ... idiotic nonsense."

In between his various duties and responsibilities, Nansen had continued to take skiing holidays when he could. In February 1930, aged 68, he took a short break in the mountains with two old friends, who noted that Nansen was slower than usual and appeared to tire easily. On his return to Oslo he was laid up for several months, with influenza and later phlebitis, and was visited on his sickbed by H.M.K., Haakon VII of Norway.