Books at Bedtime: Journey of an Iceberg
Saturday, December 13th, 2008
At this time of the year, people often travel for the holiday season. Getting in cars, planes, or trains, people now traverse continents and oceans easily. But what if you were an iceberg from the north pole who wants to visit kin in the south pole? That is what the story of Lulie the Iceberg is all about. Lulie, whose name comes from the Greenlandic word, iluliaq, is an iceberg who hears from his friend, Kiki the Arctic Tern, that there are icebergs on the other side of the world. Lulie decides to visit them — an undertaking of massive proportion, to say the least! After breaking off a glacial ice field, he sets off on a perilous journey southwards to the Antarctic. He has many exciting encounters on the way and must make a decision that will affect his very existence in the dangerously warm waters near the equator.
Although it might seem a stretch of the imagination to believe an Arctic iceberg could make it to the Antarctic, icebergs can indeed travel great distances. In the glossary of the book, reports of iceberg sightings in North Africa and the Azores are mentioned. Perhaps now, in the age of global warming, these reports will only be all the more common. Lulie the Iceberg is, in fact, intended to educate children about polar environments. Princess Hisako of Takamado who wrote the book, in conjunction with illustrator, Warabe Aska, was inspired by her visits to the polar regions of Greenland. “I wondered where an iceberg calving off an ice sheet would want to travel once it was free to move.” The book, published a decade ago with proceeds going to UNICEF, has since been turned into a play and remains a delightful and informative work to this day.
