Thule

A Complete History of the Arctic

von Erik Gray

348 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Thule is a reconstruction of the northern world as it was known, named, and remembered before the Arctic became a blank space on modern maps. Drawing on Greek, Roman, Norse, Islamic, Celtic, East Asian, and Indigenous sources, this volume traces humanity's long engagement with the far North-not as an empty wilderness, but as a region of orientation, continuity, and meaning.

From the first accounts of the midnight sun to Renaissance maps of the polar axis, Thule restores the testimony of sailors, monks, geographers, traders, and myth-keepers who reached toward the edge of the inhabited world and recorded what they found. These voices-long scattered across languages, disciplines, and centuries-are placed back into sequence, revealing a persistent body of knowledge about Arctic lands, peoples, and phenomena that predates modern exploration by millennia.

Each chapter presents primary sources accompanied by critical commentary, allowing the original witnesses to speak for themselves while situating their accounts within historical, geographical, and cosmological context.

This edition includes complete, newly rendered English translations of foundational exploration texts, among them:

The Periplus of Hanno - the earliest surviving firsthand account of Atlantic exploration.

The full testimony of Ottar of Hålogaland, preserved in the Old EnglishOrosius- the first ethnographic record from within the Arctic Circle.

Eiríks saga rauða (The Saga of Eirik the Red) -the Norse narrative of Greenland and the western edge of the known world.

Combining textual recovery, cross-cultural synthesis, and historical cartography, Thule presents a comprehensive history of the Arctic as both place and memory: a region where geography, myth, and orientation converge.