Thule


Thule is the farthest north location mentioned in ancient Greek and Roman literature and cartography. Modern interpretations have included Orkney, Shetland, northern Scotland, the island of Saaremaa in Estonia, and the Norwegian island of Smøla.
In classical and medieval literature, ultima Thule acquired a metaphorical meaning of any distant place located beyond the "borders of the known world".
By the Late Middle Ages and early modern period, the Greco-Roman Thule was often identified with the real Iceland or Greenland. Sometimes Ultima Thule was a Latin name for Greenland, when Thule was used for Iceland. By the late 19th century, however, Thule was frequently identified with Norway.
In 1910, the explorer Knud Rasmussen established a missionary and trading post in north-western Greenland, which he named "Thule".
Thule has given its name to the northernmost United States Air Force airfield, Thule Air Base in northwest Greenland, and to the smaller lobe of Kuiper belt object 486958 Arrokoth, visited by the New Horizons spacecraft.

Classical antiquity and the Middle Ages

The Greek explorer Pytheas of the Greek city of Massalia is the first to have written of Thule, after his travels between 330 and 320 BC. Pytheas mentioned going to Thule in his now lost work, On The Ocean Τὰ περὶ τοῦ Ὠκεανοῦ. L. Sprague de Camp wrote that "the city of Massalia... sent Pytheas to scout northern Euroope to see where their trade-goods were coming from." Descriptions of some of his discoveries have survived in the works of later, often skeptical, authors. Polybius in his Histories, Book XXXIV, cites Pytheas as one "who has led many people into error by saying that he traversed the whole of Britain on foot, giving the island a circumference of forty thousand stadia, and telling us also about Thule, those regions in which there was no longer any proper land nor sea nor air, but a sort of mixture of all three of the consistency of a jellyfish in which one can neither walk nor sail, holding everything together, so to speak."
The first century BC Greek astronomer Geminus of Rhodes claimed that the name Thule went back to an archaic word for the polar night phenomenon – "the place where the sun goes to rest". Dionysius Periegetes in his De situ habitabilis orbis also touched upon this subject as did Martianus Capella. Avienus in his Ora Maritima added that during the summer on Thule night lasted only two hours, a clear reference to the midnight sun.
Strabo, in his Geographica, mentions Thule in describing Eratosthenes' calculation of "the breadth of the inhabited world" and notes that Pytheas says it "is a six days' sail north of Britain, and is near the frozen sea". But he then doubts this claim, writing that Pytheas has "been found, upon scrutiny, to be an arch falsifier, but the men who have seen Britain and Ireland do not mention Thule, though they speak of other islands, small ones, about Britain". Strabo adds the following in Book 5: "Now Pytheas of Massilia tells us that Thule, the most northerly of the Britannic Islands, is farthest north, and that there the circle of the summer tropic is the same as the Arctic Circle. But from the other writers I learn nothing on the subject – neither that there exists a certain island by the name of Thule, nor whether the northern regions are inhabitable up to the point where the summer tropic becomes the Arctic Circle." Strabo ultimately concludes, "Concerning Thule, our historical information is still more uncertain, on account of its outside position; for Thule, of all the countries that are named, is set farthest north." The inhabitants or people of Thule are described in most detail by Strabo : "the people live on millet and other herbs, and on fruits and roots; and where there are grain and honey, the people get their beverage, also, from them. As for the grain, he says, since they have no pure sunshine, they pound it out in large storehouses, after first gathering in the ears thither; for the threshing floors become useless because of this lack of sunshine and because of the rains".
The mid-first century Roman geographer Pomponius Mela placed Thule north of Scythia.
In AD 77, Pliny the Elder published his Natural History in which he also cites Pytheas' claim that Thule is a six-day sail north of Britain. Then, when discussing the islands around Britain, he writes: "The farthest of all, which are known and spoke of, is Thule; in which there be no nights at all, as we have declared, about mid-summer, namely when the Sun passes through the sign Cancer; and contrariwise no days in mid-winter: and each of these times they suppose, do last six months, all day, or all night." Finally, in refining the island's location, he places it along the most northerly parallel of those he describes: "Last of all is the Scythian parallel, from the Rhiphean hills into Thule: wherein it is day and night continually by turns."
The Roman historian Tacitus, in his book chronicling the life of his father-in-law, Agricola, describes how the Romans knew that Britain was an island rather than a continent, by circumnavigating it. Tacitus writes of a Roman ship visiting the Orkneys and claims the ship's crew even sighted Thule. However their orders were not to explore there, as winter was at hand. Some scholars believe that Tacitus was referring to Shetland.
The third-century Latin grammarian Gaius Julius Solinus wrote in his Polyhistor that "Thyle, which was distant from Orkney by a voyage of five days and nights, was fruitful and abundant in the lasting yield of its crops". The 4th century Virgilian commentator Servius also believed that Thule sat close to Orkney: "Thule; an island in the Ocean between the northern and western zone, beyond Britain, near Orkney and Ireland; in this Thule, when the sun is in Cancer, it is said that there are perpetual days without nights..."
Other late classical writers and post-classical writers, such as Orosius and the Irish monk Dicuil, describe Thule as being north and west of both Ireland and Britain, strongly suggesting that it was Iceland. In particular, Dicuil described Thule as being beyond islands that seem to be the Faroe Islands.
Solinus in his Polyhistor, repeated these descriptions, noting that the people of Thule had a fertile land where they grew a good production of crop and fruits.
In the writings of the historian Procopius, from the first half of the sixth century, Thule is a large island in the north inhabited by 25 tribes. It is believed that Procopius is really talking about a part of Scandinavia, since several tribes are easily identified, including the Geats in present-day Sweden and the Sami people. He also writes that when the Herules returned, they passed the Warini and the Danes and then crossed the sea to Thule, where they settled beside the Geats.

Modern research

The British surveyor Charles Vallancey was one of many antiquarians to argue that Ireland was Thule, as he does in his book An essay on the antiquity of the Irish language.
Another hypothesis, first proposed by Lennart Meri in 1976, holds that the island of Saaremaa in Estonia, could be Thule. That is, there is a phonological similarity between Thule and the root tule- "of fire" in Estonian. A crater lake named Kaali on the island appears to be have been formed by a meteor strike in prehistory. This meteor strike is often linked to Estonian folklore which has it that Saaremaa was a place where the sun at one point "went to rest".
In 2010, scientists from the Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformation Science at the Technical University of Berlin claimed to have identified persistent errors in calculation that had occurred in attempts by modern geographers to superimpose geographic coordinate systems upon Ptolemaic maps. After correcting for these errors, the scientists claimed, Ptolemy's Thule could be mapped to the Norwegian island of Smøla.

Modern geography and science

In 1775, during his second voyage, Captain Cook named an island in the high southern latitudes of the South Atlantic Ocean, Southern Thule. The name is now used for a group of three southernmost islands in the South Sandwich Islands, one of which is called Thule Island. The island group became a British overseas territory of the United Kingdom, albeit also claimed by Argentina.
In 1910, the explorer Knud Rasmussen established a missionary and trading post, which he named Thule on Greenland. The Thule people, the predecessor of modern Inuit Greenlanders, were named after the Thule region. In 1953, Avanaa became Thule Air Base, operated by United States Air Force. The population was forced to resettle to New Thule, to the north.
The Scottish Gaelic for Iceland is Innis Tile, which literally means the "Isle of Thule".
Thule lends its name to the 69th element in the periodic table, thulium.
Ultima Thule is the name of a location in the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky, United States. It was formerly the terminus of the known-explorable southeastern end of the passage called "Main Cave", before discoveries made in 1908 by Ed Bishop and Max Kaemper showed an area accessible beyond it, now the location of the Violet City Entrance. The Violet City Lantern tour offered at the cave passes through Ultima Thule near the conclusion of the route.
The Southern Thule islands were occupied by Argentina in 1976. The occupation was not militarily contested by the British until the 1982 Falklands War, during which time British sovereignty was restored by a contingent of Royal Marines. Currently the three islands are uninhabited.
In March 2018, following a naming competition, the Kuiper belt object 486958 Arrokoth, a fly-by target of the NASA probe New Horizons, was nicknamed "Ultima Thule". The fly-by took place on 1 January 2019, and was the most distant encounter between a spacecraft and a planetary body. An official name for the body has since been assigned by the International Astronomical Union.

Literary references

Classical literature

In the metaphorical sense of a far-off land or an unattainable goal, Virgil coined the term Ultima Thule meaning "farthermost Thule".
Seneca the Younger writes of a day when new lands will be discovered past Thule. This was later quoted widely in the context of Christopher Columbus' voyages.
The Roman poet Silius Italicus, who wrote that the people of Thule were painted blue: "the blue-painted native of Thule, when he fights, drives around the close-packed ranks in his scythe-bearing chariot", implying a link to the Picts. Martial talks about "blue" and "painted Britons", just like Julius Caesar. Claudian also believed that the inhabitants of Thule were Picts.
A work of prose fiction in Greek by Antonius Diogenes entitled The Wonders Beyond Thule appeared c. AD 150 or earlier.
Cleomedes referenced Pytheas' journey to Thule, but added no new information.
Early in the fifth century AD Claudian, in his poem, On the Fourth Consulship of the Emperor Honorius, , rhapsodizes on the conquests of the emperor Theodosius I, declaring that the Orcades "ran red with Saxon slaughter; Thule was warm with the blood of Picts; ice-bound Hibernia wept for the heaps of slain Scots". This implies that Thule was Scotland. But in Against Rufinias, the , Claudian writes of "Thule lying icebound beneath the pole-star". Jordanes in his Getica also wrote that Thule sat under the pole-star.
The "known world' of the Europeans came to be viewed as bounded in the east by India and in the west by Thule, as expressed in the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. "For though the earth, as far as India's shore, tremble before the laws you give, though Thule bow to your service on earth's farthest bounds, yet if thou canst not drive away black cares, if thou canst not put to flight complaints, then is no true power thine."

Medieval and early modern works

In the early seventh century, Isidore of Seville wrote in his Etymologies that:
Ultima Thule is an island of the Ocean in the northwestern region, beyond Britannia, taking its name from the sun, because there the sun makes its summer solstice, and there is no daylight beyond this. Hence its sea is sluggish and frozen.
Isidore distinguished this from the islands of Britannia, Thanet, the Orkneys, and Ireland. Isidore was to have a large influence upon Bede, who was later to mention Thule.
By the late Middle Ages, scholars were linking Iceland and/or Greenland to the name Thule and/or places reported by the Irish mariner Saint Brendan and other distant or mythical locations, such as Hy Brasil and Cockaigne. These scholars included works by Dicuil, the Anglo-Saxon monk the Venerable Bede in De ratione temporum, the Landnámabók, by the anonymous Historia Norwegie, and by the German cleric Adam of Bremen in his Deeds of Bishops of the Hamburg Church, where they cite both ancient writers' use of Thule as well as new knowledge since the end of antiquity. All these authors also understood that other islands were situated to the north of Britain.
Eustathius of Thessalonica, in his twelfth-century commentary on the Iliad, wrote that the inhabitants of Thule were at war with a tribe whose members dwarf-like, only 20 fingers in height. The American classical scholar Charles Anthon believed this legend may have been rooted in history, if the dwarf or pygmy tribe were interpreted as being a smaller aboriginal tribe of Britain the people on Thule had encountered.
Petrarch, in the fourteenth century, wrote in his Epistolae familiares that Thule lay in the unknown regions of the far north-west.
A madrigal by Thomas Weelkes, entitled Thule, describes it with reference to the Icelandic volcano Hekla:
The English poet Ambrose Philips began, but did not complete, a poem concerning ' which he published in 1748.
Thule is referred to in Goethe's poem "Der König in Thule", famously set to music by Franz Schubert, Franz Liszt and Robert Schumann, and in the collection ' by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Modern literature

's poem "Dream-Land" begins with the following stanza:
John Henry Wilbrandt Stuckenberg wrote on the subject in 1885:
Kelly Miller, addressing the Hampton Alumni Association in 1899, explained that
"Civilization may be defined as the sum total of those influences and agencies that make for knowledge and virtue. This is the goal, the ultima Thule, of all human strivings. The essential factors of civilization are knowledge, industry, culture, and virture."
Ultima Thule is the title of the 1929 novel by Henry Handel Richardson, set in colonial Australia.
Hal Foster's protagonist Prince Valiant gets his title from being the son of Aguar, exiled king of Thule who has taken refuge in the Fens during the days of King Arthur. Foster places this kingdom of Thule on the Norwegian mainland, near Trondheim.
"Ultima Thule" is a short story written by author Vladimir Nabokov and published in New Yorker magazine on April 7, 1973.
Jorge Luis Borges uses the classic Latin phrase "ultima Thule" in his poem A Reader. He uses the phrase to connect the study of Latin in his younger years to his more recent efforts to read the Icelandic poet Snorri Sturluson.
Bernard Cornwell references Thule in his novel The Lords of the North, the third book in the series The Last Kingdom. The character Uhtred of Bebbanburg calls it, "that strange land of ice and flame".
Thule is mentioned in Asterix and the Chieftain's Daughter.

In Nazi ideology

In Germany, occultists believed in a historical Thule, or Hyperborea, as the ancient origin of the "Aryan race". The Thule Society, which had close links to the Deutsche Arbeiter Partei, known later as the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei was, according to its own account, founded on August18, 1918. In his biography of Lanz von Liebenfels, Der Mann, der Hitler die Ideen gab, the Viennese psychologist and author Wilfried Daim claimed that the Thule Gesellschaft name originated from mythical Thule. In his history of the SA, Wilfred von Oven, Joseph Goebbels' press adjutant from 1943 to 1945, confirmed that Pytheas' Thule was the historical Thule for the Thule Gesellschaft.
Much of this fascination was due to rumours surrounding the Oera Linda Book, falsely claimed to have been found by Cornelis over de Linden during the nineteenth century. The Oera Linda Book was translated into German in 1933 and was favored by Heinrich Himmler. The book has since been thoroughly discredited. Professor of Frisian Language and Literature Goffe Jensma wrote that the three authors of the translation intended it "to be a temporary hoax to fool some nationalist Frisians and orthodox Christians and as an experiential exemplary exercise in reading the Holy Bible in a non-fundamentalist, symbolical way".