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<\/a>Greek explorer Pytheas traveled to what is now the British Isles and farther north in a trireme, exploring and mapping much of the coastline. He wrote of Thule, an island that people have searched for ever since. This illustration is by John F. Campbell from the 1909 book\u00a0The Romance of Early British Life<\/i>. Photo by Chronicle\/Alamy Stock Photo<\/p><\/div>\n
Unfortunately, like so many other ancient masterworks, the copy of On the Ocean<\/em> meant to be preserved for posterity was lost when the great library at Alexandria burned down in 48 BCE. No other copy\u2014presumably there were other copies in Marseille and elsewhere\u2014has survived. All that is known of On the Ocean<\/em> comes from a small and somewhat random set of quotes and paraphrases passed along by later geographers and historians like Strabo (early first century BCE) and Pliny the Elder (later in the same century).<\/p>\n These snippets of text seem to confirm that Pytheas actually had discovered a strange island in the remote Far North, in fact the remotest Far North of the known world\u2014thus the adjective ultima<\/em>, meaning \u201cmost extreme,\u201d attached to it by the Roman poet Virgil. But where exactly was the island? No other explorer had returned to it in the centuries between the discovery and the destruction of the library. As a result, Strabo, Pliny, and other writers could only guess at Thule\u2019s true location. Their speculation initiated a whole branch of Thule scholarship and exploration, all aimed at finding the place Pytheas had so intriguingly described. And as century after century went by without a definitive answer, Thule attained a kind of mythic stature. From the first century CE onward, Thule became more of an idea than an actual place, an abstract concept decoupled from the terrestrial map, simultaneously of the world and otherworldly. Poised at the edge of the known and inhabited Earth, it functioned as an emblem of mystical isolation, liminal remoteness, a real discovered place and yet unknown: \u201cOut of SPACE\u2014Out of TIME,\u201d to quote Edgar Allan Poe in one of the countless literary allusions to the enigmatic island.<\/p>\n Few places on Earth have been the subject of as much controversy, wrote the German historian Martin Ninck in 1945, referring to the search for Thule. The controversy arises from the thinness of the evidence\u2014mostly just those scant surviving fragments from On the Ocean<\/em>. The clues point in certain clear directions while leaving open a broad range of possibilities. Over the years, Iceland, Greenland, the Shetland Islands, the Faroe Islands, Saaremaa (an Estonian island), and islands along the north coast of Norway have all been viewed as contenders.<\/p>\n These postage stamps from the Faroe Islands reproduce part of the map Carta Marina<\/em> created in 1539. It shows the Faroe Islands (Fare) with nearby Thule (Tile). The Faroe Islands is just one of many places in the world\u2019s northern reaches that vie for the location of Thule. Image via stamps.fo\/public domain<\/p><\/div>\n Since the early 20th century, though, two schools of thought have dominated the debate: that Thule is Iceland, and that it is Norway. The arguments for each side are compelling, yet the evidence is so ambiguous that for every plausible claim, the other side has forcefully advanced a counterclaim. Consequently Norway versus Iceland, as a scholarly debate, often looks very much like a stalemate, impossible to break.<\/p>\n The debate received a jolt, though, in 2010 with the publication of a study out of the Technical University of Berlin. The authors, two geodesists (geodesy is a branch of applied mathematics focused on maps and measurements), an expert in the study of Greek and Latin texts, and a historian of science, took an innovative approach. They began with the famous map of the oikoumen\u0113<\/em>\u2014the ancient Greek name for the inhabited world\u2014drafted by the second-century CE geographer Ptolemy. Although the map was sophisticated for its time, its coordinates were problematic, partly because of deficits in Ptolemy\u2019s understanding of projection, partly because of errors in measurements of distances. The German team addressed the problems through reconstructionist geodesy, a method of detecting the errors accurately and correcting them systematically. The novel approach led to a solution striking in its precision. And to a happy, if surprising, outcome for everyone who favored Norway. Thule, according to the team, almost certainly must be the island of Sm\u00f8la, a locale farther to the south than any of the Norwegian islands that had been on the longlist of contenders.<\/p>\n In 2010, a team of researchers used this world map, drafted by the geographer Ptolemy in the second century CE, to help calculate that Sm\u00f8la, Norway, was a probable location for Pytheas\u2019s Thule. Photo via Wikimedia<\/p><\/div>\n The confidence of the researchers in their finding can be seen plainly in a letter from the team leader, Dieter Lelgemann, to a journalist in Sm\u00f8la in 2008, following a press release that announced the team\u2019s in-progress discovery: \u201cAs about this old information there cannot be any doubt anymore,\u201d he wrote. \u201cYou live on the mystic island of Thule, and this can of course be interesting for all tourists.\u201d<\/p>\n On the mystic island, the reaction was generally enthusiastic. Many of Sm\u00f8la\u2019s 2,000 permanent residents saw an opportunity. For the past few decades, the focus of the island\u2019s tourism marketing had been sportfishing and wildlife tours, primarily for European and domestic markets. To be identified as Thule potentially opened up a much wider realm of tourist interest, international in scope. Before long, ideas for Thule-inspired merchandise entered into the picture: T-shirts, caps, jigsaw puzzles of antique maps, models of Greek merchant vessels. A marketing logo was designed that featured a ship sailing toward a midnight sun skimming the horizon in midsummer, just as Pytheas had described the sun in On the Ocean<\/em>.<\/p>\n The sanguine view of an influx of Thule tourists has its roots in historical precedent, as tourists have been curious about Pytheas\u2019s voyage for centuries. The Dutch historian and artist Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, for example, born in 1563, traveled to Norway\u2019s North Cape to sketch landscapes of a coast that at the time stood among the contenders. In the 19th century, Thomas Cook & Son, forerunner of the late Thomas Cook Group, arranged tours to the North Cape and nearby islands and advertised them as journeys to an Arctic wasteland discovered by the ancient Greeks. And solo or small teams of adventurers set out on quests for Thule, including the renowned polar explorers Vilhjalmur Stefansson (the discoverer of several islands in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago) and Fridtjof Nansen (the first to cross the Greenland ice cap and later a Nobel Peace Prize laureate).<\/p>\n Then there are the Thule voyagers of the present, the tourists who pay homage to the statue of Pytheas in Marseille, or visit the Thule Bar in Lerwick on the Shetland Islands, or run in the annual ultima Thule marathon on Saaremaa, or leave their jobs to chase Thule clues and write about them, as Joanna Kavenna did in the much-lauded 2006 book, The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule<\/em>.<\/p>\n Pytheas is celebrated in this statue in Marseille, France, the port from which he set sail on his northern voyage that included the discovery of Thule. Photo by Roland Bouvier\/Alamy Stock Photo<\/p><\/div>\n It\u2019s not, though, as if even the most optimistic Sm\u00f8la residents expected throngs of tourists. The interest in Thule has always been driven by a somewhat esoteric curiosity. None of the polar explorers or amateur adventurers who set out in search of the actual Thule were motivated by material or commercial interests. The search for Thule has been purely a search to solve a mystery, unlike, say, the search for the Northwest Passage as a European trade route to Asia. An abstruse mystery; still, even a slight boost to tourism makes a difference to a small island like Sm\u00f8la that relies heavily on tourism revenue.<\/p>\n Making Sm\u00f8la a Thule tourist destination has long been on the mind of Ernst Olav Blakstad. If anyone on Sm\u00f8la knows Thule\u2019s complex history, it\u2019s this affable, exceptionally knowledgeable master mariner whose work has taken him across many of the same northern oceans traversed by Pytheas. He\u2019s stocky, with the broad shoulders and muscular forearms of someone who could wrestle a thrashing shark into submission. From the second floor of a pub in Dyrnes, a village in the northwest corner of the island, he points out a house built by his grandfather and originally used for storing cod and repairing fishing nets. His uncles and father built a bigger structure for making nets and trawls; that building is now the pub we\u2019re sipping coffee in. \u201cMy family has fished for cod from this island for four generations,\u201d he says. He\u2019s proud of the deep tradition, but thinks that for tourism to gain traction, it needs to be bold. \u201cWe need to think bigger,\u201d he says. \u201cWe need to look beyond our fishing history, toward our rightful place in the major discoveries of the ancient world. We are<\/em> a major discovery.\u201d<\/p>\n And in fact, in the last few years, under the leadership of Einar Wikan, Sm\u00f8la\u2019s official business manager for the community, an assortment of new programs has been implemented to aggressively court tourism beyond the seasonal staple of sport fishers and wildlife viewers. Blakstad feels confident that in the expanded tourism scheme, Sm\u00f8la\u2019s identification as Thule will play a key role. \u201cThule tourists are dedicated people, searching for knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n Ernst Olav Blakstad, a mariner and sometime tour guide, examines several fishing net tags in his personal collection of maritime artifacts in Sm\u00f8la. Photo by F. Salazar<\/p><\/div>\n For the less hardcore of the Thule searchers, however, Sm\u00f8la-as-Thule has proved so far to be a hard sell. Hurtigruten, a major cruise line in the region, advertises the opportunity to \u201ctravel in the footsteps of the ancient Greek explorers,\u201d but the nearest its cruises come to Sm\u00f8la are stops at Kristiansund and Trondheim, still some distance (in the former case, two ferries and a bus) from the beach where the most famous of the Greek explorers may well have set foot. Lindblad Expeditions\u2019 fleet of adventure cruise ships, including the National Geographic Explorer<\/em>, has been making regular stops at Sm\u00f8la, but most of the passengers who disembark have come to see the wildlife\u2014Sm\u00f8la has one of the densest concentrations of white-tailed eagles in northern Europe\u2014or to tour the quaint fishing village of Veiholmen, at the far northern end of a long spit of land at the island\u2019s northeast corner.<\/p>\n The difficulties in courting Thule tourists were summed up in a conversation with Jonathan Zaccaria, an expedition leader for Lindblad Expeditions who\u2019d brought a group of adventure tourists to Sm\u00f8la in 2018 aboard the National Geographic Explorer<\/em>. After the Explorer<\/em> put in, Blakstad, who occasionally gives Thule-oriented tours and talks, showed the group around the late\u2013Iron Age fishing villages of Brattv\u00e6r and Odden, but the passengers were restless. They wanted quaintness. They spent half of their day on Sm\u00f8la in Veiholmen, the epitome of quaintness, with its fetching oceanfront kaffeebarer <\/em>(coffee bars) and white clapboard houses bearing names from the era when Veiholmen built a new, more sheltered harbor: a tourist favorite is Latr\u00e6va<\/em>\u2014lazy asses\u2014marking the property to which the less diligent of the harbor excavators would retreat for unsanctioned breaks.<\/p>\n In the end, Zaccaria hadn\u2019t been impressed: even with charming Veiholmen, Sm\u00f8la considered as a whole was just too desolate, in his view, Thule or no Thule, to justify a cruise stop. \u201cThe countryside of the countryside\u201d was how he characterized Sm\u00f8la as a Thule destination in comparison with, say, Reykjav\u00edk on Iceland. And in fact, according to Zaccaria when we spoke in January, Lindblad had recently reviewed its upcoming expeditions and crossed Sm\u00f8la off the list as, on balance, unworthy. Lindblad declined to confirm or deny, but in any case, for at least the summer 2020 cruising season, the point is moot, as most of Norway\u2019s cruises have been put on pause on account of the coronavirus pandemic. No small loss, as the cruises contribute massively to western Norway\u2019s economy.<\/p>\n Another obstacle to leveraging the German team\u2019s discovery as a means of boosting Sm\u00f8la\u2019s Thule tourism lies in the enormity of the history of the search for Thule. The history goes back so far, and so many voices have weighed in over the centuries, that even as innovative and confident a claim as that of the German team can at best take its place in the debate, its geodesic evidence stacked up against all the rest.<\/p>\n The view that Thule is Iceland, for example, remains influential. Foremost among the advocates of Thule-is-Iceland is Barry Cunliffe, author of The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek<\/em> and a professor emeritus at Oxford University who taught European archaeology for 36 years. Cunliffe defends the Iceland position one morning in the caf\u00e9 of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. In many ways, Cunliffe is Blakstad\u2019s scholarly counterpart, the defender of Iceland, as Blakstad is of Sm\u00f8la. Cunliffe in his thick wool sweater looks like he, too, would be at home at the helm of a fishing trawler. It\u2019s easy to imagine Blakstad and Cunliffe squaring off in friendly yet forceful debate over black coffee in some North Sea port tavern.<\/p>\n At the Ashmolean, with his notes spread on the table in front of him, Cunliffe sketches a plausible scenario for Pytheas\u2019s route to Iceland. \u201cImagine you\u2019re a seafaring people,\u201d he says, referring to the early inhabitants of what is now the northern British Isles, \u201cand every year you see birds migrating to the north. Where are they migrating to? Land must be out there, beyond the horizon. Eventually curiosity\u2014the human desire to acquire knowledge\u2014drives you northward to explore.\u201d It would have been those explorers, Cunliffe argues, who first discovered Thule, and who led Pytheas there.<\/p>\n
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