Imagined Reality: Ultima Thule

Imagined Reality: Ultima Thule

The Arctic as a mental concept, world of thoughts and place of peculiarities

During the last weeks in which I have engaged myself with Canadian Arctic literature, I have gained an understanding of what it means to be, encounter and write about North as a non-Inuit. I don’t believe in a general concept of what North is and rather think of it as a mental place we create in our mind or a metaphysical bundle of impressions and reflections, associations and feelings. Through a need to tell the story we recreate reality. In history, the term ‘Ultima Thule’ has gone through a process in which it first described a Greek myth and was later used for an actual people and place in the North. It to me represents the very same process in which imagined reality becomes reality and furthermore exaggerates the metaphysical and mythical character of the Arctic.

In this paper I first want to explore the historical meaning of Ultima Thule and draw a connection to the process of imagined reality becoming reality and my idea of the North as a mental concept and world of thoughts. I have found Rudy Wiebe’s “Playing Dead” interesting to support some of my thoughts and I also want to mention John Moss’ chapter on “Ultima Thule and the Metaphysics of Arctic Landscape” from his book “Enduring Dreams” in my paper.

Ultima Thule, in literature, describes the furthest possible place in the world or, in history, the northernmost part of the inhabitable ancient world. The first one to mention the term was the Greek geographer and navigator Pytheas of Massalнa who sailed north and was also the first to describe polar ice, the midnight sun and the aurora borealis in the 4th century BC. In Greek Mythology there used to be a “race of Aryan