Holsteinsborg, also known as Sisimiut, is a Greenlandic town marked in the novel by the grave of an expedition member who died on the Barren Glacier in 1966. The grave links the place to the book’s two intertwined histories: earlier scientific work at Gela Alta and the later deaths that prompt renewed scrutiny of what the expedition uncovered.

The Grave and the 1966 Expedition

The town enters the investigation through an X-ray examination in Moritz Jaspersen’s consultation room. Three images clipped to a light box invite Smilla, Moritz, and forensic expert Dr. Lagermann to read the human body as a kind of universe; the scene then makes that metaphor concrete by recalling a dead expedition member buried in Holsteinsborg’s permafrost. Someone excavated a grave with a jackhammer, covered it with stones, and poured cement over it to keep Arctic foxes away.

The X-rays identify one of the dead as Marius Høeg, who died on the Barren Glacier at Gela Alta in July 1966. Holsteinsborg is therefore not the site of his death, but the place where the remains were interred. That distinction makes the grave a material link between the remote glacier and the human institutions that later investigate the expedition.

The 1991 Deaths and Medical Records

Holsteinsborg also belongs to the geography of the 1991 deaths through the forensic discussion of botulism. The explanation establishes how deaths could leave no clear external sign: the suspected toxin attacks the peripheral nervous system and can paralyze the lungs, while diagnosis depends on excluding other causes and testing blood and suspected food.

The account says that five people were found on the same day, August 7, 1991, and that toxin was identified in blood samples sent for analysis. The report was held in Godthåb, with a copy in Copenhagen. Together, the report and the older grave place separate episodes of death within a shared Greenlandic record, one preserved through burial and the other through medical documentation.

A Place within Colonial and Scientific Networks

Holsteinsborg’s significance reaches beyond its graves and records. The novel situates Greenlandic places within systems shaped by Danish administration, corporate activity, military access, and scientific expeditions. The state’s representation on a company board and the government’s ownership of a share of its stock illustrate how public authority and private enterprise could overlap; the account also describes a hierarchy that restricted access even to a chief accountant.

Smilla’s account of schooling describes another institutional reach. When children moved from a village school to Qaanaaq, teachers who did not speak Greenlandic presented education in Danish as the route to further study and a way out of Arctic hardship. The resulting policy framework cast Greenland as Denmark’s northernmost county and promoted the designation of Inuit as Northern Danes. Her description of later struggling to retrieve ordinary words in Greenlandic shows how that pressure could persist beyond school, as a gradual weakening of language and memory.

Landscape, Development, and Meaning

The book’s Greenland is not rendered as an untouched landscape outside modern power. Smilla rejects the image of North Greenland preserved as an ethnographic dream of innocence: her mother could use a kayak built by older methods while also relying on a sealed plastic container as a hunting float. The juxtaposition resists the idea that Inuit life should remain a museum image for outsiders.

In a later reflection on development, Smilla describes the Greenland Star oil platform near Nuuk as a vast, recently built structure of linked pontoons, then interprets development as a means of coercion that no longer needs to rely primarily on direct military violence. This argument broadens the meaning of places such as Holsteinsborg: they belong to a country whose local histories are bound up with centralized administration, resource interests, and outside scientific attention. The grave in the permafrost gives that broad political history a human scale, while the records surrounding the deaths show how knowledge about Greenland is made, kept, and controlled.