Thule

'The Christian Science Monitor publishes a review of The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule By Joanna Kavenna. The reviewer, Randy Dotingam, includes something that has puzzled us a little bit:

The ancient Arctic land called Thule may not actually exist, but that hasn't stopped generations from trying to find it. (...)
And then there are the many authors and poets - including Edgar Allen Poe and Charlotte Brontë - who dwell on Thule, fascinated by its remoteness and strangeness, a northern landscape of ice and mystery.

Charlotte Brontë? We have checked Jane Eyre and there we found just at the beginning of Chapter 1:

Where the northern ocean, in vast whirls,
Boils round the naked melancholy isles
Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebredies:

But, if you read closely it is realized that, as a matter of fact, this is a direct quote of the book that the young Jane is reading: Thomas Beswick's History of British Birds that can be found on line and where we know that Beswick is also quoting James Thomson's (1700-1748) poem The Seasons.

So who dwelt on Thule? Charlotte? Beswick? Thomson?

Categories: In_the_News, Charlotte_Brontë