Thule (myth)

Thule
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 location
Created by	Pytheas
Genre	Classical literature
Type	Fictional island

Thule (/ˈθjuːliː/; Greek: Θούλη, Thoúlē; Latin: Thule, Tile) was a far-northern location in classical European literature and cartography. Though often considered to be an island in antiquity, modern interpretations of what was meant by Thule often identify it as Norway, an identification supported by modern calculations. Other interpretations include Orkney, Shetland, and Scandinavia. In the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, Thule was often identified as Iceland or Greenland.

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. The British surveyor Charles Vallancey was one of many antiquarians who argued that Ireland was Thule, as he does in his book An essay on the antiquity of the Irish language . The theory is found repeatedly in Irish literature, with Brendan narratives published widely in Renaissance Europe, with poems about Hy Brasil and an early epic on Cocaigne written in ancient Irish Englisc, as found in the Kildare Poems.

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 330-320 BC. He supposedly was sent out by the Greek city of Massalia to see where their trade-goods were coming from. Descriptions of some of his discoveries have survived in the works of later, often sceptical, authors. Polybius in his Histories (c. 140 BC), Book XXXIV, cites Pytheas as one: