In October 1913, Ludwig Wittgenstein left Cambridge and moved to Skjolden village on the Sognefjord in Norway, where he planned to build a hut and live, hermit-like, at the foot of a mountain, working on logic. The cottage was unfinished when Wittgenstein abandoned it in 1914 to join the Austrian army, and he returned for only occasional stays thereafter. A well-known curio of Wittgenstein's biography, the Norway journeys form the seed of Ivar Oxaal's new monograph. Oxaal proposes that Wittgenstein's Nordophilia was more than just eccentricity. It tapped, he believes, a Northern romanticism widespread in the Anglo-German fin de siècle and offers clues to the “existentialist puzzle” (xii) of Wittgenstein's famously recondite Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

As Oxaal shows, Wittgenstein's Nordic fascination was piqued by a 1912 expedition to Iceland and then pursued with characteristic obsession to the inlets north of Bergen. It is a strange episode in twentieth-century philosophy, easy to dismiss as a whim: Ray Monk's biography Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York, 1991) chronicles the northern visits but treats them as mere excursionary backdrops to Wittgenstein's evolving thought. They do not, for Monk, hold any great relevance.

Oxaal wants it otherwise—and he may be right. Wittgenstein's Norway, after all, recurred over decades, with trips in 1921, 1936, 1937, and 1950. On the Trail of Wittgenstein's Hut divides into four sections that track the philosopher from his Vienna days, where a vigorous anti-Semitism seems to have little fazed him (Wittgenstein's Judaism is a secondary theme for Oxaal); to his student years in England, where he combined philosophical interests in logic and mysticism; through his first and longest Norwegian sojourn; and finally to a postwar meeting with Russell in The Hague and the 1921 publication of the Tractatus. The book takes numerous side trips as well, and an Appendix describes the author's own journey to Skjolden.

Some of Oxaal's connections are quite suggestive. For example, the temporal proximity of Fridtjof Nansen's polar expeditions, Kaiser Wilhelm II's Norway junkets, and Wittgenstein's interest in Scandinavian travel does hint at the wider European allure of the icy north, a turn-of-the-century intrigue that Oxaal explores.

Unfortunately, the book never manages to draw out the implications of its leads. Evocative and wide-ranging, On the Trail of Wittgenstein's Hut ultimately treats in fetishistic fashion the Norway that it wants to grant biographical and historical heft. In part, this is because of a lack of focus. A detective's brief rather than a historical narrative, the book discerns many inklings of influence without ever finding compelling evidence that Wittgenstein's Norway affected Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Indeed, some of the links—between the philosopher's yen for the north, Viennese anti-Semitism, Spinozan philosophy, George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda, and Henryk Ibsen's dramatic poem “Brand”—seem more notional than factual, a point the author admits in his occasional resort to supposition. An example: “The present author believes that Ludwig had given [Eliot's Daniel Deronda] to a probably naïve Pinsent [his Iceland traveling companion], as an indirect way of communicating or confessing his Jewish background” (107).

Although rural Norway is its primary location, On the Trail of Wittgenstein's Hut travels far from Scandinavia: across the Anglo-German world from Prussia to England; through British imperials lands; from the North Pole to the South; and finally, to the Netherlands. This peregrination uncovers fascinating tidbits of Wittgensteiniana—most of them dealt with in cursory fashion through summaries of one or two secondary sources—but few distinct revelations about “The Historical Background of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” promised by the subtitle. At times even, Oxaal seems more concerned to recount his own search for the philosopher's motives than to tell of Wittgenstein's quest for northern light.

A scholar of both the British Caribbean and Austria who spent his childhood in Norway, Oxaal is uniquely qualified to track the Nordic footsteps of a Viennese thinker, indicate their wider European origins, and suggest their potential philosophical relevance. As a model of the omnivorous curiosity needed for cross-cultural intellectual history, the book might hold promise. For it to succeed, though, Oxaal would need to be more scrupulous in sifting the significant from the titillating, the definitive finding from the speculative hunch. As it is, the author wends his way to Wittgenstein's hut but blazes no new paths to the philosophy that made it famous.