Thule
Thule (/ˈθjuːliː/[1] Greek: Θούλη, translit. Thoúlē; Latin: Thūlē) 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 (Ösel) in Estonia,[2][3] and the Norwegian island of Smøla.[4]
In classical and medieval literature, ultima Thule (Latin "farthermost Thule") acquired a metaphorical meaning of any distant place located beyond the "borders of the known world".[5]
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.[6] By the late 19th century, however, Thule was frequently identified with Norway.[7][8] Indeed, many of the settlers of Iceland were fleeing Harald Fairhair's recent union of Norway, prominent among them the Thelir of Telemark (Thylemark). Thelir from neighbouring Grenland may have similarly named Greenland.
In 1910, the explorer Knud Rasmussen established a missionary and trading post in north-western Greenland, which he named "Thule" (later Qaanaaq).
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.
The Greek explorer Pytheas of the Greek city of Massalia (now Marseille, France) 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 (ta peri tou Okeanou). L. Sprague de Camp wrote that "the city of Massalia... sent Pytheas to scout northern Europe to see where their trade-goods were coming from."[9] 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 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."[10]
