More off topic (geography trivia) (Destiny)

by Funkmon , Thursday, November 05, 2015, 21:14 (3336 days ago) @ marmot 1333
edited by Funkmon, Thursday, November 05, 2015, 21:19

In that Carl Sagan Destiny mash-up, I was very excited when I realized the background music was the first track off the excellent album, In a Safe Place, by the super-chill band* The Album Leaf.

In a Safe Place on Spotify

This album was recorded in Iceland at Sigur Ros's recording studio. It is reportedly built around an empty swimming pool, which lends some of the interesting reverb effects heard on Sigur Ros albums and this The Album Leaf album. The Sigur Ros guys also guest-played on a lot of tracks on this album.

The second song on the record is called Thule. This, as many know, is the name for a mythical land six days sail north of the British Isles. In the middle ages and in Latin, it's often used as a name for Iceland, leading some people to believe that the Britons, in the fourth century BC, knew of Iceland, or that at least one Greek visited. Of course, this isn't the case.

Thule wasn't identified as Iceland until the 700s, when it was described as the large island beyond what are probably the Faroe islands, but the name had been attributed to tons of places by then already, like north of the Eurasian steppes, Norway, et cetera. Some think the people living there were Pictish, but it's really unlikely, not only due to geographical issues, but also chronological ones. However, upon the discovery of Iceland, it was easily attributed there upon cursory knowledge of the legend.

The question then becomes, where did the idea come from?

A Greek guy called Pytheas went on a journey around Europe and wrote about Thule, saying it was six days north of Britain, and the most northerly of the British isles. No surviving texts of his exist, but another Greek guy, Strabo, uses him extensively as a source, and in general thinks Pytheas was a liar, but due to the uniqueness of the account, has to use him. We have Strabo's records, plus a few others. Many think Pytheas was a liar.

However, modern geography and science has proven he's not all bad. For example, he claimed to have visited Britain and explored the entirety of it (giving the ancients the names Kent, Britain, and Orkney in the process), with a perimeter of 40000 stadia. Everyone thought this was too large, but the coastline is actually about 60% longer than that. It works out fine. There's a few other solutions to this as well.

The didn't believe him about Thule, either, since nobody else wrote about it. Some think it's just because he was the first guy to show up there. This makes sense, since he was also the first guy to show up in the Baltic (which Strabo doesn't believe either), and he more or less correctly describes how amber is gathered and provides the first encounter with the Goths.

So, if Pytheas wasn't necessarily a liar, where's Thule?

Possibly Norway. Pytheas took a bunch of measurements, which have been altered over time by others to try to create maps. Ptolemy used some crappy ones, for example, and made Scotland lopsided. This was done to reconcile some perceived issues. Pytheas had to use very complicated angles to give distance on the sea, from a baseline of Marseilles. The north star wasn't there at the time, and its location could only be roughly guessed at. As a result, we're not exactly sure the latitude Pytheas measured, but from what we have today, it's probably around 65 degrees north.

That may be perceived to be a problem, since Thule was reportedly so far north that the sun never set. However, as far as we can tell, Pytheas never said that. While he was the first to describe the midnight sun (as well as sea ice), he only said that the sun barely set, and the nights were only a few hours long. The barbarians showed him exactly where the sun set and rose (presumably) on the summer solstice. Using these methods of latitude by longest time of day, it does seem Pytheas accurately got the north of Scotland, the Shetland islands, and possibly Trondheim, Norway, a coastal settlement at the right latitude that was inhabited. Fridtjof Nansen thinks he showed up a little farther south, somewhere in Møre og Romsdal.

Assuming Pytheas thought Trondheim was part of the British Isles, his measurements can be taken literally. He describes the island like a triangle, and therefore made triangular measurements. Some modern scholars think the shape was simplified but the measurements largely accurate, some think that Pytheas may have stated it in sailing times that was translated to distance, which is not good, but still others, who subscribe to the Thule is Norway theory, think it was literally a triangle, and literally correct. If one part of the triangle was in NORWAY, then the measurements work out very well. The numbers match. When the numbers match, it's likely to be the case, however keep in mind the OPERA FTL neutrinos experiment, where the error from prediction to observation was similar to not taking relativity into account for the GPS satellites, but the source of error was something else entirely.

Furthermore, Pytheas had no good way of figuring out his longitude, and continually made errors of things being west or east of where they really are. He also uses north as not the cardinal direction, but more like "more north than." This is possibly as a result of not being able to determine anything but latitude with a modicum of reliability. Pytheas sailed all around the Baltic, but had no reason to conclude that Thule was not a large island. To find it out, he would have had to do some insane exploring. Scandinavia was thought to be an island for a long time.

So, the name "Thule" as a poetic name for Iceland, as may have been meant in the song, as a result of recording in Iceland, is a misnomer.

End trivia

if you like guitar-led instrumental rock.

I do. I looked up Tristeza. I do not like this band. Too bad. They're very artsy it seems like. I understand why people like them though.