Feeling Weird in the Archives

Dani K. Inkpen

“History should make you feel weird.” So proclaims a widely touted slogan of history nerds. While there is much in the world foisting weirdness upon us today, too rarely do we intentionally seek the off-beat. History students should. “Weird,” though it has come to mean uncanny or bizarre, has its roots in the idea of the turning of events. The Old English wyrd meant the principle, power, or agency by which events are predetermined. In a word, fate. It may have come from older words meaning “to turn” or “to wind” thus referencing the Roman Parcae and their northern counterparts, the Norns: the three women, who spun, measured, and irrevocably cut life’s thread. Shakespeare’s “Weyard Sisters” retain this association in their scrying of Macbeth’s destiny. These are fitting associations for the study of the past. For is not history’s chief concern understanding how the threads of past events are woven into the ever growing, shifting, impossibly complex tapestry from which springs our present predicament?

But history should make you feel weird for less etymological reasons. The more recent meaning of “weird,” aligning it with the bizarre, is a good starting point for inquiry. Cultural historian Robert Darnton was on to this when he followed the trail of his own ignorance. He (understandably) didn’t get what was so funny to eighteenth-century Frenchmen about murdering and mutilating cats. “Our own inability to get [a] joke is an indication of the distance that separates us,” he observed, “the perception of distance may serve as the starting point of an investigation.” I tell my first-year history students: If you feel weird because you don’t “get it,” you’re in the right place to start learning.

Recently, I found myself feeling weird in a small room shaped like an uppercase E. Boxed in by looming rows of bounded journals, at the end of my worktable a young former Duke of Edinburgh was framed and mounted, his orca sleek hair dissolving into the black shadows surrounding him. Next to her husband’s portrait, an even younger Queen Elizabeth II, gowned and crowned, alighted from a royal Rolls-Royce at the doors of Lincoln’s Inn on December 9^th, 1957. I was in the heart of Empire. To my left, on another rectangular wooden table, an old-fashioned ice axe with a smooth wooden shaft rested casually as if its owner would soon return for it. I later learned it belonged to Andrew (Sandy) Irvine, a young mountaineer who was lost on Chomolungma (Everest) with George Mallory in 1924. He wasn’t coming back for it.

I was in the library of the Alpine Club of London. The Alpine Club, first of its name, founded 100 years before Elizabeth arrived at the Lincoln Inn. Before me sat a large, royal blue binder with a black spine and black corner lapels. “Original letters” its cover stated, “Farrar, Freshfield, Adams, Reilly, Whymper.” These were storied names in the history of mountaineering. Indeed, so many stories have been pinned to these names that recently scholars and mountain history enthusiasts have rightly demanded other stories about other people. Toward the back of the volume, after pages of dizzying swirls and swooping curlicues the Victorian script gave way to a neatly printed letter:

LETTERS BY THE REV. CHARLES HUDSON AND EDWARD WHYMPER RELATING TO THE MATTERHORN DISASTER OF 1865

The Matterhorn Disaster. The triumph and failure that is said to have shuttered the “Golden Age” of Alpine Mountaineering in July 1865. Edward Whymper (1840-1911), Rev. Charles Hudson (1828-65), Lord Francis Douglas (1847-65), Douglas Hadow (1846-65), Michel Croz (1830-65), and the father (1820-1888) and son (1843-1923) guides both named Peter Taugwalder, had summitted the technically challenging mountain, but only three survived. The others plummeted to their deaths after the young Hadow lost his footing and dragged Hudson, Douglas, and Croz off the mountainside. All would have perished had the rope not snapped, sparing Whymper and the Taugwalders a mutilating 4000-metre fall.

“Disaster Strikes just after the first Ascent of the Matterhorn,” (1865) drawn by Gustave Dore. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

The neatly written letter before me was penned by Frank Smythe (1900-49), a mountaineer of no little renown in his own time, which explained that two letters were given to him by the “late Rev. Pat McCormick (son of Canon G. McCormick), Rector of St. Martins in the Field, London.” The first Victorian letter was written by Charles Hudson to (then) Rev. G. McCormick. Hudson was a man of Muscular Christianity who had served as an army chaplain in the Crimean War. He had dashed off the letter at 5 a.m. on July 13, 1865 from the Monte Rosa Hotel in Zermatt immediately before the doomed party departed for their climb. It is a typical, last-minute missive, nowadays shot off as a text message. “My dear McC, We and Whymper are just off to try the Cervin [Matterhorn]. You can hear about our movements from the Landlord of the Monte Rosa Hotel. Follow us if you like.” He expected they would spend a night on the mountain and return the following morning; a second night was possible but unlikely. Like most of us who enter into the mountains or step into the street in the morning, he did not consider that an eternity of nights was possible. He was thinking, instead, of a mutual friend. “Please keep an eye to Campbell as long as you are with him, and take him to the Riffel in case you go there. We expect to be back tomorrow.”

Following Hudson’s letter was one written in Edward Whymper’s thin, sloping hand, scribbled less than seventy-two hours later. Within that brief window, rendered insignificant by the space between two pages in a binder, everything had changed. Two letters, written by expeditionary comrades to the same person, from the same place, within days of one another, were separated by little time and space. Yet the fates of these two men had inserted an unbreachable gulf between them. In this letter, Whymper pleaded with McCormick to join him in the search for Hudson’s body. He was to follow a party of guides who had already gone up and he “wished particularly to have an Englishman” with him. Was this because in this moment of crisis and psychological vertigo he craved the comfort of his mother tongue? The familiarity of elongated vowels and clipped consonants? It seems that the Alps he and his countrymen had so emphatically declared their playground suddenly felt hostile and alien to him.

Whymper was haunted by the Matterhorn. Already a black sheep in Victorian English mountaineering circles, he took to drink, earning his living from his family’s engraving business and later writing guidebooks. Mountaineering writers often quote Charles Dickens’ opinion on the Matterhorn disaster; mountaineering, he declared, “becomes ghastly when it implies contempt for and waste of human life—a gift too holy to be played with like a toy, under false pretenses, by bragging vanity.” Whymper was tarred with “bragging vanity.” Historians portray a haughty showboater, more bluster than talent, and saddled him with the legacy of colonial mountaineering in places like the Rockies where he allied himself with the empire-loving Canadian Alpine Club and Canadian Pacific Railway. Together, they promoted Indigenous Homelands as the next peak-bagging playground for foreign and settler mountaineers. I am one such historian. Writing critical histories of him and his ilk, I never particularly liked his character.

Yet, here in the archives, reading his letter to McCormack, Whymper was stripped of his arrogance and later deeds. He was a young man who had encountered violent death, was shaken by it, and sought consolation. I thought of my own experience losing a university friend in B.C.’s coastal mountains.

The next letter thrust me into the future. On April 27, 1911, his seventy-first, and final, birthday, Whymper wrote a letter Sir W. Davidson, an acquaintance at the Alpine Club. Whymper was looking to offer gifts, rather than to receive them. He beseeched Davidson to present a portrait to the Alpine Club of his friend the Chamonix guide, Michel Croz, who had fallen alongside Hudson in 1865. Whymper hoped to commemorate Croz, whom he considered the best of guides. He related a story from the descent from the Grand Cormier, when the Herculean Croz had lifted Whymper’s 160 lbs by the collar. It was perhaps not surprising that Whymper, having been ostracized by the club for most of his life was not offering the portrait himself. He was an outsider, an old man, trying to honour a friend long dead. “Tears do not often come out of my eyes,” he closed, “but when I think of the miserable end of this grand Guide, they come out.”

The final letter was dated 20^th June 1912 and addressed C.H.R. Wollaston, Alpine Club: “Dear sir, I am much obliged by your letter of the 19^th instant, and for enclosing Mr Sidney Spencer’s letter, which I return herewith, as requested. I was already thinking of asking Mssrs Spooner & Co., whom my brother knew, to make me an offer for the negatives. Your faithfully, MMWhymper.” The voice I had been listening to, and beginning to feel an understanding of, was abruptly gone. Snuffed out as quickly as had been Charles Hudson’s. I felt weird.

With an uncertain glance at Irvine’s ice axe, I left the archives and entered the streets of Hackney. A narrow, curving lane brought me to an iron-fenced park, shaded by enormous sycamores. Beneath the trees, on a lawn littered with peeled bark, people picnicked, laid on their backs, yakked at their cell phones. Two men in hoisted-up tennis socks rose, kissed gleefully, and exited the park hand-in-hand. Everyone here was the hero of their own infinitely rich, entangled story. I struggled to reconcile this with the extreme reduction of life encountered in the archives. An absurdly improbable napkin littered at my feet looked up at me. “No human is an island,” it observed. Indeed.

Napkin wisdom (2025). Photo by author.

Taking a cue from my own pedagogical playbook, when I asked myself what I can learn from this weirdness, I realized I was being presented one of history’s great gifts. As a self-identified feminist, Indigenous-ally, and promoter of anti-colonial history, I am well-positioned to dislike Edward Whymper. Yet, in the span of a few pages, the condensed extraction of forty-six years, I was offered a jarringly different perspective. A more existential vantage, from which I observed that history is ultimately about death and life. The historian asks the dead about how they lived. Rarely do we think about our profession in such macabre terms. Perhaps we should. The pages in the blue binder at the Alpine Club preserved Whymper’s immediate reaction to violent death. They also preserved traces of his own. In doing so, they reminded me that history has the potential to reveal to us what Nick Cave has called our shared predicament of an imperilled life. To be alive is to be in danger of death. If you let them, the archives will force you to confront this. They may even invite you to extend a radical compassion that recognizes this shared condition across chasms of time, geography, culture, gender, and political and spiritual persuasions. This compassion does not deflate politics (I still think Whymper was a bit of a dick for his imperialism) but it is a valuable skill: the capacity to feel for someone radically different from one’s self. This skill won’t be emblazoned on student resumés and it’s not going to sell history departments to universities working under increasingly dire financial prospects. But it is important for life, perhaps especially so in an age of polarization and cognitive automatization.

And so I share these letters with my students. And I present them with the pitiless flattening of the archives. And I let them sit with the weirdness. And I hope it will help them begin to find a way to learn.

Dani Inkpen is a settler historian of science and environment who specializes in histories of mountain places. She has written on the history of glaciology, the history of mountaineering, ice humanities, and J.R.R. Tolkien and science, and co-authored efforts to understand mountain systems from multiple knowledge perspectives.