Inter imperium sine fine: Thule and Hyperborea in Roman Literature

Abstract

The Far North fascinates. From antiquity to today, explorers, scholars, and poets have characterized it as 'other' , 'exotic' , or 'different'. An exemplar is that of the celebrated Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō, who went on a long journey from Edo to the northern interior of Honshu in the late seventeenth century ce and captured his experiences of this journey in his Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North). In this work, he composed a haiku that illustrates the allure of the Far North: 風流の (fūryū no) 初やおくの (hajime ya oku no) 田植うた (taueuta).

The ‘deer‐men’ and the ‘bowhead‐men’: The colonial co‐optation of Arctic Indigenous knowledge within the ‘origins of the Inuit’ debates

“…235–236) explains that these debates formed ‘part of a greater story about the history of the travels of human societies and the development of civilisations’. Discussions on those dwelling in the Earth's northernmost regions had been in circulation since antiquity (see Sandin, 2018; Webb, 2018), yet it was during the eighteenth century that thinkers began to focus their attention explicitly on investigating the ‘cradle’ of Arctic peoples. The Prussian missionary David Cranz, for example, who was sent to Greenland by the Moravian Church in 1759, began to explore this question in his influential book Historie von Grönland ( The History of Greenland ).…”