Fanciful representations of the North Pole as an edenic clime, however nonsensical
they might appear in the light of modern science, are fairly common in early mythology.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, writing contemporaneously with Frankenstein, stages part of
the first canto of The Revolt of Islam in such a polar paradise derived from Indian
sources. The oxymoronic combination of fire and ice is a conspicuous feature of the
edenic paradise of Xanadu in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," published in 1816 and read
that summer in the Geneva circle as Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein. A strongly
ironic version of this coexistence of opposites informs the Creature's plans for his
self-destruction in the penultimate paragraph of the novel (III:WC:47).