Ultima Thule / Thule

The name Thule has a long history of referring to some distant place. It may be most familiar to English-speakers today as the name of place in Greenland. In 1910, Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen established a trading post with that name at the site the Inuit called Uummannaq (heart-shaped). Subsequently the Inuit settlement came to be called Pituffik (where dogs are tied). In 1951, the US Air Force relocated the Inuit residents and constructed an airbase there, dubbing it Thule after Rasmussen's nomenclature. In 2020 the base was rechristened Pituffik Space Base.

Of more recent vintage, in 2014 astronomer Marc Buie discovered what is now called 486958 Arrokoth (cloud in the Powhatan language), a Kuiper Belt object. The object was provisionally nicknamed Ultima Thule, and in 2019 the New Horizons spacecraft flew by the object, making it the most distant object visited by a spacecraft. Almost every news report of the New Horizons encounter said that the name meant “beyond the edges of the known world.” But that is not exactly the case. Ultima Thule is not a vague, undefined location. It is a specific place in the North Atlantic, although exactly which place it refers to is uncertain to us today, and various classical and medieval writers may have used the name to refer to different places. It has been used in the metaphorical sense that the news articles describe, but that’s not the name’s meaning. The metaphorical sense is akin to referring to Timbuktu, a very real place in North Africa, as metaphor for somewhere distant and inaccessible. 

Ultima simply means “farthest” in Latin, and Thule is a place name of unknown origin. So the name simply means that Thule is very far away.

The earliest known reference to Ultima Thule is in Polybius’s account of the voyage of Pytheas, written in the second century BCE. Pytheas supposedly traveled to Thule, an island six days sail north of Britain. Today we’re not sure exactly which place in the North Atlantic Polybius was referring to. It may have been the Shetland Islands, Iceland, or somewhere in what is now Denmark or Norway, but it was definitely a specific, defined location. Pliny, Tacitus, and Virgil also made reference to Ultima Thule. Classical and medieval references to Ultima Thule are to this specific place, although today we aren’t quite sure where that is.

The earliest references to Thule in English dates to the late ninth century. It appears in the Old English translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. In this passage the character of Wisdom is speaking of a hypothetical emperor who rules the entire world:

Þeah he nu ricsige ofer eallne middangeard from eastweardum oð westeweardne, from Indeum, þæt is se suðeastende þisses middaneardes, oð ðæt iland þe we hatað Tyle, þæt is on þam norðwestende þisses middaneardes, þær ne bið nawþer ne on sumera niht ne on wintra dæg, þeah he nu þæs ealles wealde, næfð he no þe maran anweald gif he his ingeþances anweald næfð and gif he hine ne warenað with þa unþeawas þe we ær ymb spræcon.

(Though he now ruled over all middle earth, from east to west, from India, which is the southeast corner of this middle earth, to that island we call Thule, which is in the northwest corner of this middle earth, where there is neither night in summer nor day in winter, though he now ruled all that, he does not rule over his inner thoughts if he does not protect himself against the vices that we spoke about before)

From the description of Thule here, it is clear that it is a reference to a place above, or at least near, the Arctic Circle.

The name also appears in the Old English adaptation of Orosius’s History Against the Pagans, written at about the same time:

And on westhealfe on oþre healfe þæs sæs earmes is Ibernia þæt igland, and on the norðhealfe Orcadus þæt igland. Igbernia, þæt we “Scotland” hatað, hit is on ælce healfe ymbfangen mid garsecge. And forðon þe sio sunne þær gæð near on setl þonne on oðrum lande, þær syndon lyðran wedera þonne on Brettannia. Þonne be westannorðan Ibernia is þæt ytemeste land þæt man hæt Thila, and hit is feawum mannum cuð for þære oferfyrre.

(And to the west, on the other side of the arm of this sea is the island of Hibernia, and to the north the island of Orkney. Hibernia, which we call “Scotland,” is on each side surrounded by the ocean. And because the sun comes neaer to it when it sets than to other lands, there the weather is milder than in Britain. Northwest of Hibernia is the farthest land, which people call Thule, and it is known to few people because of the distance.)

Hibernia is the Latin name for Ireland (despite the name Scotland, a reference to the Scoti people which originally referred to the Celtic people of Ireland), and in this passage Thule refers to someplace more distant than the Orkneys, perhaps Iceland.

Sources:

Boethius. The Old English Boethius, vol. 1 of 2. Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine, eds. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009, 29.77–88, 303.

Orosius. The Old English History of the World. Malcom R. Godden, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 44. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016, 1.32, 50–52.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1912, s.v. Thule, n.

Image credit: Olaus Magnus, 1539. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.