Moving Muskoxen as an Arctic Resource in the Twentieth Century

doi:10.1017/9781108555654.028

28 - Moving Muskoxen as an Arctic Resource in the Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 March 2023

Dolly Jørgensen

Edited by

Adrian Howkins and

Peder Roberts

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Adrian Howkins: Affiliation:
University of Bristol
Peder Roberts: Affiliation:
University of Stavanger

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Summary

The first written description of the muskox was published in 1744 by Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix, a French Jesuit and historian, within a description of ‘New France’ (the French colony of North America) in his multi-volume Journal d’un voyage. He describes an animal encountered in the area of Hudson Bay with long, beautiful hair and a musky smell in rutting season – and he gave it the name boeuf musqué.1 Musk was originally a label for the odour from the gland of a male musk deer, a native of Asia, which was used in perfumes, but animals with similar type odours were given musk names, like the muskrat and musk shrew. Charlevoix’s original descriptor for the animal stuck: it became muskox in English, moskusokse in Norwegian, myskoxe in Swedish, Moschusochse in German, and stayed boeuf musqué in French.

Keywords

Arctic animals muskox Greenland Norway Svalbard Canada Alaska Russia domestication

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of the Polar Regions , pp. 702 - 725

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108555654.028 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2023

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