Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 118
GRIPLA118
eleventh century, the inhabitants of Thule were somewhat anomalous: The
Icelanders treated their bishop as king, and took his words for law. It has
been suggested that Adam mistook the Lawspeaker for a bishop, but the
implication is clear: the Icelanders had no proper king, as had otherwise
become the mark of civilised government (Hastrup 1985). this state of
affairs was correlated with another apparent paradox in Iceland. According
to Adam, the inhabitants were exceedingly primitive (as befalls the inhabit
ants of legendary Thule!) and lived in a state of nature; yet they were
Christians. from the perspective of Bremen, the Icelanders mediated
between the truly wild peoples such as the Finns – who had been identi
fied by Procopius as the last barbarians of the northern countries – and the
civilised world of Christians and kingdoms. Implicitly, this observation
echoes Brink’s point that Christianisation is not ‘an event’, or an abrupt
ideological shift; it is rather a gradual change in mentality (Brink 2004).
the history of thule – first as a metaphor for a distant land in the mys
terious north and later as a distinct island in the north Atlantic – is a
revealing case of the interpenetration of maps and metaphors. In this case
the metaphor preceded the map; or, in a different phrasing, the illusion of
an unknown land drove the explorers to the limit and urged them to map
the blank spaces; later, the maps themselves became new metaphors as
happened to vancouver’s chartings of the Pacific coast of America (fisher
and johnston 1993). the result of mapping is as much a continuation of
metaphor as it is a new map. Even when Thule was finally situated in
northern Greenland, when in 1910 Knud Rasmussen established his Thule
station (Hastrup 2009), the result was still a ‘cartographic illusion’ (Ingold
2000, 234). The map never simply represents the world, because in the
process of representation, two important processes are bracketed: first, the
process by which the explorers had arrived there in the first place – includ
ing the process by which they came to imagine Thule as their goal; and,
second, the process by which they inadvertently came to represent it in
particular terms. The actual way-finding across the sea, the experience of
driftice and unreliable climes corroborated the classical image of thule
that again filtered into the final map through the process of (mentally)
mapping the experience in comprehensible terms.
the illusion of thule reminds us that both maps and histories are mat
ters of perspective and of available imagery. In the process of the vision