ah, found the quote i wanted.

"[Her] manners are those of an amused grande dame, but she embodies the unbodying Arctic; a poised paradox..the seductive attraction of frozen feeling, with that endless promise of more to learn, once fleshly distraction has ceased...The Snow Queen is the inverse of Gerda; her sterility, her intellect, her icy composure, all take their force from being reversals of conventional female qualities. It is mythically apt that her roles as anti-mother and anti-wife should be vested in the lineaments of beauty, all emptied to white: white furs, white hair, white skin."

(Francis Spufford, writing about Andersen's Snow Queen, in Ice and the English Imagination)

incidentally anyone with book recommendations, articles of interest, poems, anecdotes, illustrations and such like relating to the idea of "north" in the literary imagination (particularly relating to the north as superior, unattainable or other) might email von who is working on a stilgoe project dealing with all these and would like to gather as many sources as possible. (or on second thoughts, don't flood his mailbox. he is up to his eyes in thesis work. email me instead)