THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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the great fairytale tone, the element of mystery lacking in the purely southern utopia, that allows a real point of utopian contact between the Orient and the territory of
Ossian. The real connections: ancient trading, oriental and northern ornaments, Christianity in the Edda, these are not so important in the present case, although they
obviously also have an effect on the actual utopia of Thule. More important is the fact that the objective atmospheric elements from which every daydream develops
were able to migrate from the oriental locality with such elective affinity into the northern one. This accounts for the unmistakable correspondence between the world of
veils and the world of mists, between the biblical and the highly wintry Christmas landscape, between the Apocalypse and the frontierlike­cryptic manner in which the
Edda presents its twilight of the gods. Mount Olympus cannot be imagined at all beyond the Mediterranean world, but smoking Mount Sinai accords well with the
north, as does the cloud and the pillar of fire. Hence Macpherson also takes his language in equal measure from the Psalms, Milton's biblical tone and the extant Gaelic
songs. And thus from the frontier situation that is called mystery this veiled element in the Orient is added to the overcast atmosphere in the north: ultima Thule accords
in a very particular way with the final frontier, with the end of the world. The overcast atmosphere of Thule thereby simultaneously discloses itself in its frontier sense
itself: it is, as Herder says, ‘an outlet of the world into sublimity’. The corporeally so incomprehensible inclination towards the north thus becomes clear: the attractions
of the south and of the north affect different sides of human nature, its Midsummer Day in the case of the former, its Christmas in that of the latter. To the south a
profusion of life utopianizes itself geographically, which certainly knows death but emphasizes neither it nor the countermove against it; to the north a magic of death
utopianizes itself geographically, which contains within it a complete destruction of the world, but also seeks to overcome it, with a paradoxical homeland. Thule is the
geographically dialectical utopia of a world which is ending and perishing, but with the constantly interwoven contrasting images of the stormy night and the castle. Thule
in the northern ocean is the mysticism of bad weather, with the open fire in its midst. With Herder and Ossian there stirred ‘the harp, the gloomy one,/Shrouded in the
grey of dawn,/Where the sun rises resounding,/From waves whose heads are blue’. Thus this kind of geographical utopia also remained in the high north, it was not
made groundless by what was discovered to exist.