Thule

For the city in Greenland, see Qaanaaq.
Thule
Thule carta marina Olaus Magnus.jpg
Thule as Tile on the Carta Marina of 1539 by Olaus Magnus, where it is shown located to the north west of the Orkney Islands, with a "monster, seen in 1537", a whale ("balena"), and an orca nearby.
On the Ocean
Creator Pytheas
Genre Classical literature
Type Fictional island

Thule (pronounced /ˈθuːliː/ or ˈθjuːli;[1][2][3] from Greek Θούλη, Thoulē), also spelled Thula, Thila, or Thyïlea, is, in classical European literature and maps, a region in the far north. Though often considered to be an island in antiquity, modern interpretations of what was meant with Thule often identify it as Norway.[4][5] Other interpretations include the Orkney Islands, Shetland Islands, and Scandinavia. In the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, Thule was often identified as Iceland or Greenland. Another suggested location is Saaremaa in the Baltic Sea.[6]

The term ultima Thule in medieval geographies denotes any distant place located beyond the "borders of the known world". Sometimes it is used as a proper noun (Ultima Thule) as the Latin name for Greenland when Thule is used for Iceland.

Contents

Ancient geography

The Greek explorer Pytheas is the first to have written of Thule, doing so in his now lost work, On the Ocean, after his travels between 330 BC and 320 BC. He supposedly was sent out by the Greek city of Massalia to see where their trade-goods were coming from.[7] Descriptions of some of his discoveries have survived in the works of later, often skeptical, authors. Polybius in his Histories (c. 140 BC), 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 stades, 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."[8]

Strabo in his Geography (c. 30), Book I, Chapter 4, 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 Ierne (Ireland) do not mention Thule, though they speak of other islands, small ones, about Britain." Strabo adds the following in Book II, Chapter 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, in Book IV, Chapter 5, "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."

Nearly a half century later, in 77, Pliny the Elder published his Natural History in which he also cites Pytheas' claim (in Book II, Chapter 75) that Thule is a six-day sail north of Britain. Then, when discussing the islands around Britain in Book IV, Chapter 16, 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, writing in Book VI, Chapter 34,: "Last of all is the Scythian parallel, from the Rhiphean hills into Thule: wherein (as we said) it is day and night continually by turns (for six months)."

Other late classical writers and post-classical writers such as Orosius (384-420 A.D) and the Irish monk Dicuil (late 8th and early 9th century), describe Thule as being North and West of both Ireland and Britain. Dicuil described Thule as being beyond islands that seem to be the Faroes, strongly suggesting Iceland. In the writings of the historian Procopius, from the first half of the 6th century, Thule is a large island in the north inhabited by twenty-five tribes. It is believed that Procopius is really talking about a part of Scandinavia, since several tribes are easily identified, including the Geats (Gautoi) in present-day Sweden and the Saami (Scrithiphini). He also writes that when the Heruls returned, they passed the Varni and the Danes and then crossed the sea to Thule, where they settled beside the Geats.

Ancient literature

A novel in Greek by Antonius Diogenes entitled The Wonders Beyond Thule appeared c. AD 150 or earlier. Gerald N. Sandy, in the introduction to his translation of Photius' ninth-century summary of the work,[9] surmises that Thule was "probably Iceland."

Early in the fifth century AD Claudian, in his poem, On the Fourth Consulship of the Emperor Honorius, Book VIII, rhapsodizes on the conquests of the emperor Theodosius I, declaring that the "Orcades [Orkney Islands] ran red with Saxon slaughter; Thule was warm with the blood of Picts; ice-bound Hibernia [Ireland] wept for the heaps of slain Scots." This implies that Thule was Scotland. But in Against Rufinias, the Second Poem, Claudian writes of "Thule lying icebound beneath the pole-star."

Over time the known world came to be viewed as bounded in the east by India and in the west by Thule, as expressed in the Consolation of Philosophy (c. AD 524) 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.[10]

The Roman historian Tacitus, in his book chronicling the life of his father-in-law, Agricola, describes how the Romans knew that Britain (which Agricola was commander of) was an island. He writes of a Roman ship that circumnavigated Britain, and discovered the Orkney Islands and says the ship's crew even sighted Thule. However their orders were not to explore there, as winter was at hand.

Middle Ages to Nineteenth Century

During the Middle Ages the name was used first of all to denote as Iceland, such as by Dicuil, by the British monk Venerable Bede in De ratione temporum, by the Landnámabók, by the anonymous Historia Norwegie and by the German bishop Bremen's Deeds of Bishops of the Hamburg Church, where they cite ancient writers' usage of Thule but also new knowledge since the end of antiquity. All these authors also understood that other islands were situated in the north of Britain.

A madrigal by Thomas Weelkes entitled Thule from 1600, describes it thus:

Thule, the period of cosmography,
Doth vaunt of Hecla, whose sulphureous fire
Doth melt the frozen clime and thaw the sky;
Trinacrian Etna's flames ascend not higher...[11]

Thule is referred to in Goethe's poem "Der König in Thule" (1774), famously set to music by Franz Schubert (D 367, 1816), and in the collection Ultima Thule (1880) by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Dream-Land" (1844) begins with the following stanza:

By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named Night,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule —
From a wild weird clime, that lieth, sublime,

Out of Space — out of Time.

Modern use

A municipality in northern Greenland (Avannaa) was formerly named Thule after the mythical place. The Thule People, a paleo-Eskimo culture and a predecessor of modern Inuit Greenlanders, were named after the Thule region. In 1953, Thule became Thule Air Base, operated by United States Air Force. The population was forced to resettle to Qaanaaq, 67 miles to the north[12] ( only 840 NM from the North Pole).

Southern Thule is a collection of the three southernmost islands in the South Sandwich Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean, one of which is called Thule Island. The island group is overseas territory of the United Kingdom and uninhabited.

The Scottish Gaelic for Iceland is "Innis Tile", which means literally the "Isle of Thule".[13] Ultima Thule was the title of the 1929 novel by Henry Handel Richardson, set in colonial Australia.

Additionally, Thule lends its name to the 69th element in the periodic table, Thulium.

Ultima Thule is also the name of a location in the Mammoth Cave system. It was formerly the terminus of the known-explorable southeastern (upstream) 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.

Dutch writer Thea Beckman used the name Thule for Greenland, in her series about the world after a (hypothetical) Third World War. Climates shifted and the ice caps on Greenland melted, leaving behind an extremely fertile soil.

Nazi "Aryan" Thule

Nazi mystics believed in a historical Thule/Hyperborea as the ancient origin of the Aryan race. Much of this fascination was due to rumours surrounding the Oera Linda Book "found" by Cornelis Over de Linden during the 19th Century. The Oera Linda Book was translated into German in 1933 and was favored by Heinrich Himmler. The book has since been thoroughly discredited.

The Traditionalist School expositor Rene Guenon believed in the existence of ancient Thule on "initiatic grounds alone". According to its emblem, the Thule Society was founded on August 18, 1918[14]. It had close links to the Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (DAP), later the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, the Nazi party). One of its three founding members was Lanz von Liebenfels (1874–1954). In his biography of Liebenfels (Der Mann, der Hitler die Ideen gab, Munich 1985), the Viennese psychologist and author Wilhelm Dahm wrote: "The Thule Gesellschaft name originated from mythical Thule, a Nordic equivalent of the vanished culture of Atlantis. A race of giant supermen lived in Thule, linked into the Cosmos through magical powers. They had psychic and technological energies far exceeding the technical achievements of the 20th century. This knowledge was to be put to use to save the Fatherland and create a new race of Nordic Aryan Atlanteans. A new Messiah would come forward to lead the people to this goal." In his history of the SA (Mit ruhig festem Schritt, 1998), Wilfred von Oven, Joseph Goebbels' press adjutant from 1943 to 1945, confirmed that Pytheas' Thule was the historical Thule for the Thule Gesellschaft.

See also

  • Aristeas
  • Atlantis
  • Baltia
  • Brittia
  • Mythical place
  • Phantom island
  • Southern Thule
  • Thule people
  • Thule Society

References

  1. ↑ [1]
  2. ↑ [2]
  3. ↑ [3]
  4. ↑ [4]
  5. ↑ Bostock & Riley (1893) page 352 (on "Chapter 30 (16) – Britannia") assert: "Opinions as to the identity of ancient Thule have been numerous in the extreme." The notes on Book IV of Pliny in an 1829 translation into French by Ajasson de Grandsagne mention six, which are taken word-for-word in translation by Bostock & Riley (their words in quotes): ―
    • "That Thule is the island of Iceland." Burton (1875) pages 1, 25.
    • "That it is either the Ferroe Group, or one of those islands." Burton pages 22-23.
    • "The notion of Ortelius, Farnaby, and Schœnning, that it is identical with Thylemark in Norway." Burton page 25.
    • "The opinion of Malte Brun, that the continental portion of Denmark is meant thereby, a part of which is to the present day called Thy or Thyland." Fotheringham (1862) page 497.
    • "The opinion of Rudbeck and of Calstron, borrowed originally from Procopius, that this is a general name for the whole of Scandinavia." Grandsagne (1829) page 338: "L'idée de Rudbeck ... et de Calstron ... due originairement à Procope, qui ... a prononcé nettement que sous ce nom était comprise toute la Scandinavie." The reference is to Procopius Book III No. 4.
    • "That of Gosselin, who thinks that under this name Mainland, the principal of the Shetland Islands, is meant. The reference to "Gosselin" or elsewhere "M. Gosselin" and his monumental work dating from the time of the French Revolution is much copied even though miscited. No such geographer existed; the "M." must stand for Monsieur. The Library of Congress catalog cites the work as: Gossellin, Pascal François Joseph ([1798]-1813.). Recherches sur la géographie systématique et positive anciens; pour servir de base à l'histoire de la géographie ancienne. Paris: L'imprimerie de la république [etc.] an VI. http://lccn.loc.gov/02007793.  This four-volume work is rare and inaccessible today. The opinion is said to come from Volume I page 162 under the title Thulé.
    Bostock and Riley continue: "It is by no means impossible that under the name of Thule two or more of these localities may have been meant, by different authors writing at distant periods and under different states of geographical knowledge. It is also pretty generally acknowledged, as Parisot remarks, that the Thule mentioned by Ptolemy is identical with Thylemark in Norway."
  6. ↑ "The reflections on the Kaali meteorite in ancient legends"
  7. ↑ L. Sprague de Camp (1954). Lost Continents, p. 57.
  8. ↑ Polybius. Book XXXIV
  9. ↑ B. P. Reardon, ed. (1989). Collected Ancient Greek Novels. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-04306-5. 
  10. ↑ Irwin Edman, ed.; W. V. Cooper, translator (1943). The Consolation of Philosophy. New York: The Modern Library, Random House. 
  11. ↑ RPO -Thomas Weelkes : Thule, the Period of Cosmography
  12. ↑ Gilberg (1976) page 86. Hunting activities here are described in the January 2006 National Geographic.
  13. ↑ Rannsaich an Stòr-dàta Briathrachais Gàidhlig
  14. ↑ ^ a b Goodrick-Clarke 1985, p. 144

Bibliography

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