THULE, or THYLE, (anc. geog.) an island about the situation of which authors disagree. Strabo frankly owns that it lies in obscurity, and that what Pytheas of Marseilles says about it is not to be depended on. Pliny seems to have known a little more; namely, that it is the outmost or last of all the known islands, in which there are no nights at the summer-solstice: Ptolemy makes the longest day there 24 hours, and assigns it 63 degrees of north latitude. Stephanus allows but 20 for the longest day. From all which it appears evident to some, that the ancients could not mean Iceland, as is commonly thought, but either Shetland or Ferro, as agreeing tolerably well with the days and hours above-mentioned; though others are of opinion that Iceland is the Thule of the ancients. Agricola, in sailing round Britain, says, he had then a view of Thule, lying in snow and involved in winter; whereas Iceland lies at too great a distance to be seen in sailing round Britain. Nor is it certain whether they took it for some ordinary island, or for the great peninsula of Scandinavia; that is, Sweden and Norway, which very many authors formerly took for an island. Pliny, however, seems to have distinguished Norway from Thule; who places beyond it, at the distance of a day's sail, the Frozen Sea, called Cronium by some, and Pigrum by Tacitus. All the knowledge either Greeks or Romans had of this island, Bochart supposes to have been derived from the Phoenicians. Antonius Diogenes, a very ancient author, who lived in the time of Alexander the Great, and who wrote concerning the island of Thule, professes he drew his tale or his story from the Tabula Cyparissina dug up at Tyre, when taken by Alexander, from the tomb of the Tyrian adventurers who sailed thither.
Southern THULE. See AMERICA, n° 21.