For centuries, people have debated the location of ultima Thule—a mysterious northern land. Residents of Smøla, Norway, believe they live in that fabled place; other contenders say not so fast.

On a Monday late in April 2020, the tiny, rocky, sparsely populated Norwegian island of Smøla, which had been sealed off from the outside world for three months, reopened its one point of access, a ferry terminal that connects it to the coastal cities of Trondheim and Kristiansund. The move brought joy to the residents of Smøla, who often travel to the mainland for supplies and recreation. It also gladdened tourists and adventurers, particularly those with an interest in the fabled land of Thule, also known as ultima Thule, whose exact location in the world has been debated for over two millennia. According to one recent school of thought, Smøla is the island with the strongest claim to that location: reopening Smøla thus meant that it was once again possible to set foot on Thule.

The island of Smøla, Norway, is thought by many to be ultima Thule, first described by the Greek explorer Pytheas. Photo by Anton Petrus/Alamy Stock Photo

Thule’s enigmatic and complicated history begins in the fourth century BCE, when the ancient Greek explorer Pytheas left the port city of Massalia—now Marseille, France—in search of new trading opportunities in the Far North. Pytheas and his commercial backers had a special interest in finding amber, used as a form of currency, as well as tin, a key ingredient in manufacturing bronze. Sailing at first west, then north, Pytheas arrived at and mapped the coastline of Prettanikē—now the British Isles—and then boldly headed farther north into uncharted territory. And there the journey entered an unworldly realm. After a few days’ sail, Pytheas reached a place he described as neither earth nor sea, “but instead a sort of mixture of these similar to a marine lung, in which the earth and the sea and all things together are suspended, and this mixture is … impassable by foot or ship.” Pytheas landed nearby, on an island whose name he heard as Thule [TOO-lee]. Eventually he returned to Massalia and wrote his masterwork, On the Ocean, an account of his voyage and a treatise of enormous influence in the ancient world.

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 The Romance of Early British Life. Photo by Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo

Unfortunately, like so many other ancient masterworks, the copy of On the Ocean meant to be preserved for posterity was lost when the great library at Alexandria burned down in 48 BCE. No other copy—presumably there were other copies in Marseille and elsewhere—has survived. All that is known of On the Ocean 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).

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—thus the adjective ultima, meaning “most extreme,” 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’s 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: “Out of SPACE—Out of TIME,” to quote Edgar Allan Poe in one of the countless literary allusions to the enigmatic island.

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—mostly just those scant surviving fragments from On the Ocean. 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.

These postage stamps from the Faroe Islands reproduce part of the map Carta Marina 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’s northern reaches that vie for the location of Thule. Image via stamps.fo/public domain

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.

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 oikoumenē—the ancient Greek name for the inhabited world—drafted 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’s 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 Smøla, a locale farther to the south than any of the Norwegian islands that had been on the longlist of contenders.

In 2010, a team of researchers used this world map, drafted by the geographer Ptolemy in the second century CE, to help calculate that Smøla, Norway, was a probable location for Pytheas’s Thule. Photo via Wikimedia

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 Smøla in 2008, following a press release that announced the team’s in-progress discovery: “As about this old information there cannot be any doubt anymore,” he wrote. “You live on the mystic island of Thule, and this can of course be interesting for all tourists.”

On the mystic island, the reaction was generally enthusiastic. Many of Smøla’s 2,000 permanent residents saw an opportunity. For the past few decades, the focus of the island’s 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.

The sanguine view of an influx of Thule tourists has its roots in historical precedent, as tourists have been curious about Pytheas’s voyage for centuries. The Dutch historian and artist Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, for example, born in 1563, traveled to Norway’s 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).

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.

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

It’s not, though, as if even the most optimistic Smøla 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 Smøla that relies heavily on tourism revenue.

Making Smøla a Thule tourist destination has long been on the mind of Ernst Olav Blakstad. If anyone on Smøla knows Thule’s complex history, it’s this affable, exceptionally knowledgeable master mariner whose work has taken him across many of the same northern oceans traversed by Pytheas. He’s 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’re sipping coffee in. “My family has fished for cod from this island for four generations,” he says. He’s proud of the deep tradition, but thinks that for tourism to gain traction, it needs to be bold. “We need to think bigger,” he says. “We need to look beyond our fishing history, toward our rightful place in the major discoveries of the ancient world. We are a major discovery.”

And in fact, in the last few years, under the leadership of Einar Wikan, Smøla’s 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, Smøla’s identification as Thule will play a key role. “Thule tourists are dedicated people, searching for knowledge.”

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