Verse & Quotes

During the Middle Ages the name Thule was used first of all to denote Iceland, such as by Dicuil, by the Anglo-Saxon monk Venerable Bede in De ratione temporum, by the Landnámabók, by the anonymous Historia Norwegie and by the German bishop Adam of Bremen in his Deeds of Bishops of the Hamburg Church, where they cite ancient writers’ use of Thule but also new knowledge since the end of antiquity. All of these authors also understood that other islands were situated to the north of Britain.

Petrarch in the 14th century wrote in his Epistolae familiares (or Familiar Letters) that Thule lied in the unknown regions of the far north-west.

A madrigal by Thomas Weelkes entitled Thule from 1600, describes it thus:

Thule, the period of cosmography,
Doth vaunt of Hecla, whose sulphureous fire
Doth melt the frozen clime and thaw the sky;
Trinacrian Etna’s flames ascend not higher…

Hekla is an Icelandic volcano.  Thule is also referenced in Goethe’s poem Der König in Thule (1774), which was set to music by Franz Schubert as Der König in Thule, D.367 (Op.5 No.5) in 1816; and in the collection Ultima Thule (1880) by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [excerpt at top of this page].

Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Dream-Land” (1844) begins with the following stanza:

By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named Night,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule –
From a wild weird clime, that lieth, sublime,

Out of Space – out of Time.

 

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“The great sea has set me adrift
Weeds in a river
The great weather moves me
It blows through my soul so that I tremble with happiness.”
–Inuit poem