Gripla - 20.12.2009, Qupperneq 117

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thus at the close of antiquity the lands and seas of the north still
lie in the mists of the unknown. Many indications point to constant
communication with the North, and now and again vague pieces of
information have reached the learned world. Occasionally, indeed,
the clouds lift a little, and we get a glimpse of great countries, a
whole new world in the North, but then they sink again and the
vision fades like a dream of fairyland (nansen 1911, 124).
There is an oscillation between the openness and closure of horizons in
this image that was to find a new balance in the Middle Ages. With the
extensive travels of the Vikings and Norsemen, communications between
North and South became more regular, and with the Viking expansion on
the North Atlantic, new horizons opened. People from the British Isles
and Scandinavia moved out – to Iceland and beyond. Meanwhile, the vari­
ous geographies that had been produced in the first millennium maintained
the idea of the ‘outer sea’, and the island of Thule on the edge of the world;
interestingly, in quite a number of medieval texts, the Scythians are now
living in the North, and more precisely in Sweden (Hemmingsen 2000).
In 825 A.D., Thule appears in a work by the Irish monk Dicuil (Liber de
Mensura Orbis Terrae) and given the context, there is no doubt that it
refers to Iceland – as it would for Adam of Bremen and Saxo Grammaticus
a little later. Some authors have wanted to project this back onto Pytheas’s
thule (e.g. Stefánsson 1942), but this is highly unlikely, given that Pytheas
(allegedly) speaks of a people threshing and eating oats, among other
things. So far, there is no archaeological evidence of human presence in
Iceland at Pytheas’ time.
In Landnámabók (Sturlubók, Ch. 1), the identification of Thule with
Iceland is taken for granted. Sturla refers to Beda, who had mentioned the
island of Thile six days’ sailing north of Britain, where the sun shines all
night when the days are longest but is not seen at all when the nights are
longest. the echo from Pytheas is still audible across all of these centuries,
and Sturla readily embraces the name of Thile for his island, whose history
of settlement he then proceeds to describe. Again, there is a strong feeling
that the Icelanders knew their classical texts.
from the outside, the position of the Icelanders in the larger scheme of
things is not entirely clear. For Adam of Bremen (1968), writing in the late
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