Images of Thule: Maps and Metaphors in Polar Exploration • Kirsten Hastrup

Images of Thule: Maps and Metaphors in Polar Exploration • Kirsten Hastrup For some two thousand years, Thule marked the ultimate North, an unknown region where a different kind of people lived. In the early Middle Ages, it became located in Iceland, which was as far north as imagination would allow people to live. For Knud Rasmussen, the Danish polar ex- plorer (1879-1933), Thule was where the legendary Polar Eskimos lived, and the destination of his fi rst expeditions to affi rm their existence, em- bracing them as Nye Mennesker (“New People”), as the title of his fi rst book went. Knud Rasmussen established and named Thule station, thus defi ni- tively locating Thule in geography. Locating Thule is not the main interest of this paper, but rather the entanglement of real and mythical mappings of the North, not only in the works of Knud Rasmussen, but also in Polar exploration in general. In the process of incorporating new people into the image of an empty and uninhabitable North, a new arena for scientifi c and political action was set that relied on both the maps and the metaphors of Ultima Thule. If anthropology in general grew out of early expeditions (see e.g. Fabian 2000), these always had a special fl avour in the Arctic, forever marking the ethnographic renderings by the original challenge of stretching the limit of 104 Kirsten Hastrup the world. In 1911, Fridtjof Nansen, himself a major player in polar exploration (1861–1930), asserted: [F]rom fi rst to last the history of polar exploration is a single mighty manifestation of the power of the unknown over the mind of man, perhaps greater and more evident than in any other phase of human life. Nowhere else have we won our way more slowly, nowhere else has every new step cost so much trouble, so many privations and sufferings, and certainly nowhere have the resulting discoveries promised fewer material advantages – and nevertheless, new forces have always been found to carry the attack further, to stretch once more the limits of the world. (Nansen 1911, vol. I, p. 4) The perceived diffi culty in penetrating the frozen North accounts for much of the heroics that sticks to Arctic exploration. The less-than-hos- pitable seas and shores stopped many explorers in mid-step, as happened to the ill-fated expedition (1845) of “Franklin and his gallant crew”, now a literary image of the Canadian North (Atwood 2004). Nansen fared better, not least on account of his “sportsman’s method” in polar exploration, which not only referred to his skiing but also to the careful selec- tion of a small but well trained group of participants (Huntford 1997, p. 131). Knud Rasmussen continued in Nansen’s tracks also in this respect (Hastrup 2006). Knud Rasmussen is one of the protagonists in this paper, including his relations to the Polar Eskimos (as he called the Inuit group at Smith Sound) and to mythical Thule. Yet, his story is replete with other people, whose actions and narratives fi lter into Rasmussen’s own, and his perception of Thule is redolent with both past and contemporary images of this place, north of and beyond the frontiers of the known world. Through my brief investigation of his particular story, I want to draw attention to the role played by previous imaginations in ethnographic discovery, and to contribute to an understanding of the entanglement of maps and metaphors in the perception of the world—and of its limits..

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