Fridtjof Nansen's specially built ship Fram departed Norway in 1893 and deliberately entered the Arctic pack ice. Its rounded hull allowed it to rise under pressure rather than be crushed as it drifted across the polar basin. Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen left the ship in an unsuccessful attempt to reach the North Pole.

Fram inspired Norwegian patriotic poetry and a broader literature of polar endurance shaped by Nansen's vivid expedition narrative. Poets adopted the ship as an image of purposeful surrender to natural forces: progress achieved not by overpowering the ice but by moving with it.