Featured on PDR in the collection Eskimo Folktales (1913)

Knud Rasmussen (1879–1933), the child of a Danish missionary, grew up in western Greenland among the Kalaallit people, whose culture fascinated him from an early age. As a child, he learned to speak their language and, as he grew older, also learned from them how to hunt, drive dog sleds, and survive in harsh arctic weather. After a brief and not very successful career as an actor and opera singer in Denmark, Rasmussen returned to to the polar regions as an explorer and anthropologist, writing travelogues and ethnographies including the highly popular People of the Polar North (1908). By the end of his life, he was known as the “father of Eskimology”.