. . CONTENT I SAVOUR MY NORTHERN EARTH TILL MEMORY’S SHUTTLE DARTS ACROSS IT A FAR PICTURE “THULE,” LAURENCE BINYON (1869-1943) In the old controversy of Thule, there was another strain. There was a renegade group that thought Pytheas had never gone towards the ice seas and the Arctic mountains, but had instead sailed to the east, along the Baltic coast. He had never supped with the Sámi; he had never watched the Arctic sun descend across the glaciers. He had never sailed into the western fjords, marvelling at the rocks. He had never been to the Arctic at all. Instead, he had sailed towards Russia, finding lands that were later Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. It wasn’t a popular theory. Burton and Nansen had never lined up to endorse it. It dragged Thule away from the frozen Arctic and landed it at the Gulf of Finland. I didn’t really believe this idea at all, but I knew there was a president who had recently lined up to defend it. He had a vested interest in Thule’s having been somewhere in the Baltic—he was Lennart Meri, the first post-independence president of Estonia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
