Greenland, and especially its northern regions of Ultima Thule, remains a land of fantastical and semi-mythical proportions, with aurora borealis, the vast tundra, glittering columns of ice, monstrous glaciers that calve icebergs into the sea and the proverbially tight-lipped Inuit. Ever since 15th-century explorers returned from the distant north with wild and woolly tales of a remote region of brutish hairy pygmies, unicorns, mind-bending visions and citadels of ice, Ultima Thule has been the fantasy of all fantasies. Poets from Virgil and Pytheas to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow have celebrated it in verse the Weimar Republic used it as a template for one of their mythic Nordic-Germanic societies and big-haired '70s rock bands, with a penchant for heavy feedback and fuzzy guitar solos, have used it as a clarion call to youthful rebellion.
Greenland, and especially its northern regions of Ultima Thule, remains a land of fantastical and semi-mythical proportions, with aurora borealis, the vast tundra, glittering columns of ice, monstrous glaciers that calve icebergs into the sea and the proverbially tight-lipped Inuit. Ever since 15th-century explorers returned from the distant north with wild and woolly tales of a remote region of brutish hairy pygmies, unicorns, mind-bending visions and citadels of ice, Ultima Thule has been the fantasy of all fantasies. Poets from Virgil and Pytheas to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow have celebrated it in verse the Weimar Republic used it as a template for one of their mythic Nordic-Germanic societies and big-haired '70s rock bands, with a penchant for heavy feedback and fuzzy guitar solos, have used it as a clarion call to youthful rebellion.