Frozen Dreams

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, quests, the arctic

Right away I learned something: "Thule" has two syllables. It's been in my reading vocabulary for decades as "thool". Now I find (see the entry in TheFreeDictionary) that the classical "utmost north" place is spoken "thoo-ley", while the Thule Air Base and nearby Inuit village in Greenland are spoken "two-ley". I once knew someone with the last name Tooley. I wonder if an ancestor of his spelled it Thule?

The frontispiece map in The Ice Museum: in Search of the Lost Land of Thule by Joanna Kavenna makes it clear we are in for a lengthy quest. In her introduction, Ms Kavenna describes leaving her job to go hunt the Arctic for the "real" Thule. In the Acknowledgements among the afterleaves, more of the story is revealed. No quest is cheap, and the author was favored with a number of complaisant editors who published the freelance writing with which she replenished her finances from time to time.

No dates are given, but I suspect the "wall clock" period of the quest is quite a bit longer than the two or three seasons implied in the narrative. However, if she did perform the travels all at one go, my hat's off to her, for endurance at the very least!

The places visited, with one exception, each have a champion among 19^th and early 20^th Century explorers, as the location for the classical Thule, first mentioned by Pytheas in the 4^th Century BCE as lying six days sail beyond northern Scotland. That exception is the metaphysical Thule of the Thule Society, purported progenitor of the Nazi party. While the book devotes a couple of chapters to that bit of Germanic insanity (unfortunately still going on), for me, more than enough said.

In order, the Arctic places the author visited are the Shetland Islands, Iceland, northernmost Norway, Estonia, Greenland, and the Svalbard (Spitzbergen) islands. Of them all, I find the Estonian location the most intriguing. Former Estonian President Lennart Meri, noting that "tuli" in Estonian means "fire", and that Kaali crater on the large Estonian island Saaremaa resulted from a large meteorite fall just a few generations before Pytheas sailed, believes this crater to be the origin of the legend. Excited Germans, who live West and Southwest of Saarema, telling Pytheas of the day the sun fell in the East, are a likely source of an enigmatic passage he wrote regarding Thule.

Whatever Thule may have been physically, the idea of Thule has had the greatest impact over explorers of the past two or three centuries, and over others, both benign and evil, who see it as a prize to be won, an ideal to emulate...or impose.