Gripla - 20.12.2009, Qupperneq 116

GRIPLA116
He continued his course northward over the ocean, and came to the utter­
most region, “Thule”, which was the land of the midnight sun, “where the
tropic coincides with the Arctic Circle”” (Nansen 1911, 53). Pytheas was an
astronomer and the most important observation he brought back was the
length of the day during summer in this place, which was ‘six days’ sail
north of the orcades. the actual location of Pytheas’s thule remains
uncertain because most of Pytheas’s own observations have been lost, and
are known only through slightly later, and highly critical renditions (by
Pliny and Strabo, among others), who were sceptical about the possibility
of life that far north.
In the early twentieth century, the Danish geographer H.P. Steensby
used geographical evidence to assert that Pytheas’s Thule would have been
located in western Norway, and probably in the region of present day
Bergen (Steensby 1917, 17). Steensby was further inclined to suggest that
Pytheas himself had actually only come as far north as the western coast of
Jutland (of present day Denmark), where he would have gathered informa­
tion about this place even further north that he then named thule. this
would fit the mythical portent of the name.
Whatever the actual geographical turning point for Pytheas, the notion
of Thule soon took on a life of its own and was to refer to a moving and
imaginary horizon between an inhabitable and civilised South, and a barely
inhabitable land of barbarians in the far north. Perhaps the most influen­
tial source for this particular image of the North was found in Virgil’s
vision of Augustus’s resurrection of the Roman Empire to which even
Ultima Thule would surrender (Harbsmeier 2002, 37). In Seneca’s Medea
(1st century), the Chorus comments on the future possibilities of the
Argonauts, and says that when the world grows older the ocean will open
and new continents will be disclosed, and Thule will no longer be the far­
thest of lands (nec sit terris ultima Thule (Seneca. Medea, 1927, 267–279).
thus it is fair to say that in antiquity, thule belonged to the imaginary
horizon of human life, on the edge of which an unknown people lived in
strange ways. Space does not permit me to go further into this, and I shall
leave antiquity by giving the final word to Fridtjof Nansen, whose image
of the misty relationship between the antique south and the far north is
evocative of thule itself: