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 giants" that lived far north in the "Land of the Dead of Sacred Thule", as written down by Plato. Thule, or also referred to as "Hyperborea", was illuminated by a black sun and the inhabitants were giant because there was less gravity. They were also believed not to age and to have several magical and powers. Nazi mystics believed this people to be the historic origin of the Aryan race. Generally, throughout history, the term Thule has often been used to describe other meanings and places, normally islands or tribes in the north (Scandinavia, Greenland, Iceland). The Thule people, however, were the ancestors of modern Canadian Inuit who came to Alaska over the Bering Strait around 500 AD and to Nunavut, Canada around 1000 AD. Today, Thule describes a community and often the whole northwest region in Greenland, a Swedish music group, and an Asteroid that was named after the mythical island because it is located at the outermost point of the Asteroid main belt. I wanted to point all these meanings out because the development in the use of the word "(Ultima) Thule" seems very interesting to me and has a lot to do with the general nature of trying to describe the North or writing arctic narratives: At first there is a myth - a Greek legend or a narrative told and passed on by generations. Then, people who have only known the subject as an imagined story actually travel north and encounter a certain reality they have not known before and naturally try to describe it and give it a name. Self-evidently, they call it as they have known it before in their narratives and therefore descend the actual reality by recreating imagined reality. To me, although it is the most normal thing in the world, this process of forcing a mental concept onto an already existing reality seems very peculiar. John Moss also broaches the issue of imagined reality becoming reality and history in his book "Enduring Dreams". He states that in the Arctic, "You could imagine anything and write it down and it would seem real forever" (Moss, 105). Writing in and about the Arctic is always "imaginative creation", and I find this term quite interesting because it implies both imagined reality and creation of reality. Most people's knowledge about the Arctic is based on what they have read about it and therefore on what other people, early explorers, scholars or authors have written down. As mentioned above, I think, however, that our language and understanding of life, landscape and reality doesn't have the right character to describe Arctic circumstances and lacks the right features to create authenticity within northern narratives. Never having been there, we as readers will never gain an authentic view of what arctic reality is. We can never quite get the actual mental concept, and therefore what we know about the arctic is actually only what we think we know about the arctic and thus, inevitably, imagined.

In literature, Ultima Thule stayed this kind of imagined reality, this kind of metaphor for a mental place beyond human qualities and references to it appear in works by Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Henry Handel Richardson. Naturally, it is also a very common theme in Canadian Literature and normally represents a metaphysical place.

John Moss says that "Ultima Thule is a projection of private and collective aspirations, a paradox, just beyond the last place to be reached. Figuratively it exists, literally it is a fantasy." (Moss, 134) I think this is a very poetic definition and can also be applied to the Arctic in general. Having mentally constructed the North through imagination in our head, the Arctic becomes that very projection, that paradox, that metaphysical place of thoughts. The only difference is that the arctic doesn't only exist figuratively. There actually is such a place up North and that's why there will always be some kind of real context that serves as a kind of inspiration for our imagination, but also as some kind of reference material we can enquire information from. Unlike in science fiction - imagined tales about a place we are not able to reach - there always is this kind of reference place in the Arctic where we could go to and see what it is actually like. Most of us won't, however, and for so long our images of what is North will stay "Ultima Thule", a mental concept and place of ideas.

Now I want to look into Wiebe's presentation of what the Arctic is and represents.

Rudy Wiebe was born in 1934 and is a Canadian writer whose works mainly deal with the people and history of Western Canada. In "Playing Dead", Wiebe covers a wide range of subjects such as Franklin and the nature of the early European expeditions to the Canadian Arctic, the Oral Tradition and the difference in Inuit mentality, and by this he communicates a broad and general idea of that strange

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