Ultima Tule ("the most distant Tule"; sometimes translated - "extreme Tule"), with this epithet the name of the ancient northern land was established in world history, geography and poetry. The stable Latin phrase, which has become a catch phrase, was introduced by Virgil in the Georgics (I. 30).
Where is the ocean, century after century, knocking on granites, He divulges his secrets in a brooding hum, The island rises, long forgotten by sailors, -
Ultima Thule.
An island where there is nothing and where everything has just been, Is that why you seem to me to be a desirable land?
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I was imperiously attracted to you by an unknown force, Ultima Thule.
May I be one on your plateaus!
I'll visit a row of graves where the heroes fell asleep
I'll bow down to your ancient gloomy ruins
Ultima Thule.
- Valery Bryusov
Fragment of the Carta Marina map (16th century). Thule is designated Tile
Medieval Arab authors - geographers, historians, cosmographers - reported vying about the distant northern island land of Tulia, or Tuli.
Thus, the philosopher Al Kindi (d. 961/962) wrote about the huge island of Tulia and the big city on it with the same name, located "at the northern end of the inhabited land, under the North Pole." Although the said country is surrounded by the "great sea", there is nowhere to go beyond it - there is no other land in the Northern (Ice) Ocean anymore.
Cosmographer Dimeshki, developing this information, emphasizes that the land of Tulia is inhabited by Slavs.
The foregoing echoes the news about the Island of the Rus of other Arab travelers and merchants who visited Russia mainly during the days of paganism. Almost all of them unanimously argued that the Russians (and Slavs) live on some distant island.
This fact, by the way, was reflected in the Russian medieval "Cosmographs" and attached to them kargs, where the territory of Russia up to the XVIII century. depicted as half an archipelago, the islands of which are elongated in a semicircle.
The Island archetype is widespread in the mythologies of various peoples of the world.
For example, in the Karelian-Finnish runes, combined and literally processed by Elias Lönroth into a coherent text of "Kalevala", Ostrov (in Finnish - Sara) is a distant, forgotten and largely unknown northern ancestral home, from where many heroes have their true origin. For example, one of Lemminkäinen's nicknames is Sarilainen (which translates as Islander).
In the same way, the Northern Land of Darkness - Pohjola, where many events of the Kalevala unfold, has a second, more archaic name - Sariola.
Fragment of the world map from Ptolemy's "Geography" (XIV - XV century). At the top, the island protruding beyond the limits of - Thule, Ultima Thule - the ecumene limit, the farthest stretch of land known at the time.
In Greek, the toponym-symbol of the mysterious and inaccessible North is written through "theta" and is reproduced in different languages in different ways - both as Tule (Tula) and as Fule (Fula).
In Russian, both vocalizations are accepted at the same time. For example, the name of the famous ballad by Goethe, written by him at the age of twenty-five and subsequently included in the first part of Faust, is now translated exclusively as King of Foul.
In the German original, "t" is clearly indicated: "Es wag ein Konig in Thule …" (literal translation: "[Lived] - there was [one] king in Tula"). In Faust, this ballad is sung by the carefree Margarita, who is not yet aware of her unhappy fate.
Meanwhile, in almost all translations of "Faust" (and there are up to ten of them in Russian), including the classical translations of V. Bryusov, V. Kholodkovsky and B. Pasternak, Thule is transmitted either as Fule or as "Fula", although in the original Goethe does not use the adjective. Only Athanasius Fet, who also translated both parts of "Faust", put in exact accordance with the original Tule (through "fit"), but his translation has not been republished since the end of the 19th century.
Through "f" - Fula - is designated the mysterious northern land and in the last translation of "Geography" by Strabo; in other cases, it is more often written Tule (Tula).
However, the father of European geography himself could not report anything more about the distant full-fledged country, except that he could borrow from the messages of the ancient navigator Pytheas, now lost. He first, having rounded Britain, approached the edge of the ice sludge, which did not allow him to reach the promised northern edge.
Since the II century. n. e. In the ancient world, the novel by Antony Diogenes about the travels of Dynius, which, after long wanderings, reached the Arctic (Scythian) ocean and the island of Tule located in it, was widely spread (the novel has survived to our time only in a Byzantine retelling).
“Dinius set off to travel on the other side of Tula. He saw what scientists who observe the luminaries also prove. For example, that there are people who can live in the most distant Arctic limits, where the night sometimes lasts a whole month; it can be shorter and longer than a month or six months, but not more than a year. Not only is the night stretched out, but the day is commensurate with the night. The most incredible thing was that, moving north towards the moon, seeing in it some kind of cleaner land, they reached it, and when they reached, they saw such miracles there, which in many respects surpassed all previous fantastic stories."
But there were other sources, unfortunately, which also have not survived to this day. Their existence, however, is evidenced by fragments of more successful authors: their works did not sink into oblivion, on the contrary, they served as the starting point for ancient and medieval maps, where the island of Thule was depicted either unimaginably large or incredibly small, as, for example, on the map compiled based on the information of the ancient Greek geographer Eratosthenes of Cyrene (c. 276-194 BC). In the Middle Ages, ancient information continued to be supported by the same polar realities.
Extreme Fula got its name from the sun:
For the summer sun is there on the solstice
Reverses the rays
So that they do not shine longer;
It takes days away, plunges into a continuous night
The air is dark above her, dresses the icy sea
Ice, so that it is idle, it was inaccessible for ships.
- Golfrid of Monmouth "The Life of Merlin" (Translation by S. A. Osherov)
In the famous book of the largest Byzantine historian of the VI century. Procopius of Caesarea "War with the Goths" also contains a detailed description of the "island" of Thule (Fule):
“This island of Fula is very big. It is believed to be ten times the size of Britain (Ireland). He lies far to the north from her. On this island, the land is mostly deserted, but in the inhabited part there are thirteen tribes, very populous, and each tribe has its own king. A wonderful phenomenon happens here every year. Around the summer sun, the sun does not set for about forty days, but it shines continuously over the earth during this time. But six months (no less) after that, near the winter sun, for forty days the sun does not appear over this island at all, and it is immersed in a continuous night. [The most accurate description of the polar day and night, for example, at the latitude of the northern tip of the Kola Peninsula or Novaya Zemlya. - V. D.] This time people living here spend in complete despondency,since they have no possibility then to communicate with each other. Personally, I went to this island to see with my own eyes what I was told, although I tried very hard, I did not succeed."
Further, Procopius describes in detail the way of life of one of the tribes living in Tula - the Scritifins (other authors, for example, Jordan, call them Screfennes). The last part of the ancient ethnonym clearly reads the modern name of the people - Finns. Like other northern tribes, the ancient Tuleans do not wear ordinary clothes and shoes, do not drink wine, and do not get any food for themselves by cultivating the land. They do not plow the land, men and women are busy only with hunting.
“The forests there are huge, abounding in wild and other animals, as well as the mountains that rise there. Skritifins always feed on the meat of captured animals, and dress in skins, since they have neither flax nor a device to twist threads, but, having tied the skin with animal veins, they thus cover the whole body. And their babies are nurtured by them differently from other people. Scritifin babies are not fed on human milk, and they do not suckle on the mother's breast, but are fed only on the brains of captured animals. As soon as a woman gives birth, she wraps the newborn in the skin of an animal, immediately hangs it to some tree, puts the brain in his mouth, and immediately goes with her husband on the usual hunt. They do everything together and go hunting together. This is the way of life of these barbarians.
But the other inhabitants of Fula, one might say, are not very different from other people: they worship many gods and demons (geniuses) living in the sky and in the air, on earth and in the sea, and some other small deities who are believed to be are in the waters of springs and rivers. They continuously make all kinds of sacrifices, sacrifice to the dead and heroes. Of the victims, they consider the most beautiful sacrifice of the person who was their first prisoner of war."
The bloody custom of human sacrifice for a long time persisted throughout the world, especially among the peoples not affected by civilization. So, right up to the Spanish-Portuguese conquests and the subsequent Anglo-French colonization, it was practiced among the Indians of both Americas. In the distant past, in the era of global geophysical and climatic cataclysms, the ancestors of the Indians migrated from Tula to the south, occupying and mastering gradually, over many centuries and millennia, vast territories of North, Central and South America. The memory of the ancient ancestral home for a long time was preserved in some of the names brought from the North. So, the capital of the ancient Central American state of the Toleteks was named, like the ancestral home itself, - Tula. And the ethnonym Toteteki itself comes from the same root. The Toltec capital (on the territory of modern Mexico) existed until the XII century. n. e. The assumption about the lexical and semantic conjugation of the ethnonym of the Toltecs and the name of their main city with the legendary circumpolar territory of Thule was once expressed by one of the founders of modern traditionalism Rene Guenon (1886-1951) in his famous essay "Atlantis and Hyperborea".
Toltek Tula with its restored monuments (including the famous pyramid of Quetzalcoatl) is one of the most famous architectural and archaeological complexes of the New World. However, in this case, we are interested in the etymology of the Toltec city name:
Does it go back to the prohibitively ancient times, when the ancestors of the Indian tribes separated from the common ethnolinguistic mass and began their migratory procession across the American continent, leaving the common ancestral home of all the peoples of the world (presumably not earlier than 40 thousand years BC);
whether it belongs to a disappeared people who arrived from one of the lost hypothetical continents or archipelagos of Atlantis or Arctida;
whether it is autochthonous - given that the Toltec culture itself was short-lived (within three centuries) and relatively late.
But even if we dwell on the last possible explanation, it cannot be denied that the Toltecs themselves did not arise from scratch and not all of a sudden - they had ancestors and great-ancestors, in whose vocabulary there were certainly words with the root stem “tul [a]”. In addition, on the site of the destroyed capital of the Toltec state, the legendary city of the Nahua Indians - Tollan (or Tolyan), whose name is consonant with the lexeme "Tul", previously existed. And this chain of generations, stretching back into the depths of the centuries, can again be traced back to the beginning of the disintegration of the single ethnolinguistic community of all peoples and languages of the world.
And what is common, say, between the names of the Russian city of Tula and the sea animal "seal"? It is immediately evident - a common root! But why? Max Vasmer, the author of the most detailed, albeit very imperfect, four-volume "Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language", explains: the word "seal" came to us from the East Sami language, where it sounds like tulla. Among the Sami, the meaning of this word is clearly inspired by the memory of the ancient arctic continent or archipelago - Tula. From the same name Tule (more precisely, from the root underlying it), various Russian words with the root "tul" originate, including the Russian city of Tula.
Of course, Russian Tula is hardly directly related (by belonging) to ancient Tula. However, there is self-evident evidence: the ancestors of the Russian (as well as the Sami) people could well have known about the existence of the legendary country, whose name meant something hidden and cherished - they gave the name to the place where the modern city of Tula later arose (literally - "Hidden place"). This is precisely the meaning that, according to the dictionary of Vladimir Dahl, the notion “tula” has. This is a "hidden, inaccessible place" - "backstage", "bedside" ("tulit" - to cover, hide, hide, etc.).
There are other Russian words with this root: "torso" - a body excluding the head, arms and legs (more than a fundamental concept); "Trunk" - a quiver in the form of a tube where arrows are stored (hence the "sleeve"). Derivatives from the same root base in Russian are the words: "rear" - the back of the head and in general - the back of something, "tlo" - the base, bottom (in the modern language the stable phrase "to the ground" has survived); “Smolder” - to rot or just noticeably burn, etc. (It is interesting that in Finnish the word tuli means “fire”, that is, like the Russian “smolder”, it is associated with burning.) Thus, the name of the city of Tula has the richest semantic content. Toponyms with the root "tul" are generally extremely widespread: the cities of Toulon and Toulouse in France, Tulcea - in Romania, Tulchin - in Ukraine, Tulymsky Kamen (ridge) - in the Northern Urals,a river in the Murmansk region - Tuloma, a lake in Karelia - Tulos. And so on - up to the self-designation of one of the Dravidian peoples in India - tulu.
V. N. Demin, Doctor of Philosophy