Thule: the geographical riddle that was never solved

---

The main chapter presented Pytheas’s voyage and his scientific observations. This zoom lingers on a question Pytheas left open more than 2,300 years ago: the exact location of Thule, the mysterious land he placed six days’ sail north of Scotland, which has never ceased to fascinate geographers and historians.

---

🗺️ A first ancient landmark

The geographer Ptolemy, in the 2nd century CE, placed Thule at the latitude of the Shetland Islands, helping to firmly anchor this identification in ancient geography. The Middle Ages, however, muddied the waters: once the Vikings had revealed the existence of Iceland, the two lands — Shetland and Iceland — were frequently conflated under the same name of Thule by authors such as Adam of Bremen or Saxo Grammaticus, with the exception of certain English sources, such as the so-called Cottonian map, which took care to distinguish them.

---

❓ Competing hypotheses that remain unresolved

Modern historians and geographers have never definitively settled the question, and several candidates remain in contention. Iceland remains a widespread hypothesis, consistent with medieval tradition. Others propose the Faroe Islands or the Estonian island of Saaremaa. A fairly widely adopted theory identifies Thule with a point on the Norwegian coast, with some recent researchers even proposing the specific island of Smøla, off western Norway. A more radical hypothesis, put forward by the researcher Lucio Russo, proposes locating Thule as far as Greenland, on the premise that Ptolemy’s Geography contains a systematic longitude error that needs correcting.

This persistent uncertainty is not a failure of historical research, but the symptom of a lost founding text: without Pytheas’s original work, On the Ocean, historians can only work from fragmentary citations and summaries transmitted by later authors, who themselves sometimes disagreed with one another over the distances and headings reported.

---

🧠 Key points

• Thule, described by Pytheas as six days north of Scotland, has never been located with certainty.
• Ptolemy placed it at the latitude of Shetland; the Middle Ages often conflated it with Iceland.
• Modern hypotheses include Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Norway (the island of Smøla), Estonia (Saaremaa), and even Greenland according to Lucio Russo.
• This uncertainty stems from the loss of Pytheas’s original work, known only through fragments.