“‘Et jam sub septem spectant vaga rostra Trionos
Quà Tyle est rigidis insula cincta vadis.’
And afterwards he makes the Orcades to lie over-against this Thule, and seems to have in his eye the skerries and weels in Pictland (Pentland?) Frith in these lines:
“‘Est locus Arctoo quà se Germania tractu
cis Tyle ubi surgit aquis,
Quam juxta infamos scopuli et petrosa vorago
Asperat undisonis saxa pudenta vadis
Orcadas has memorant dictas a nomine Græco.”[26]
“But the clearest testimony of all we owe to Arngrimus Jonas (Specimen Islandicum, A.D. 1593),[27] when he brings in the verses of Fortunatus (lib. viii., cap. 1), who sings of St Hilarion (ob. A.D. 372):
“‘Eloquii currente rotâ penetravit ad Indos,
Ingeniumque potens ultima Thule colit.’
“And then reckoning up the several nations enlightened by him, he mentions Britain amongst the rest:
“‘Thrax, Italus, Scytha, Persa, Indus,
Geta, Daca, Britannus.’[28]
“To which he adds, ‘From whence it may fairly enough be inferred that either Britain or (as Pliny will have it) some island of Britain was the ultima Thule.’ And afterwards, ‘To confirm the opinion of Pliny and his followers, who will have some of the British Isles, or particularly, that farthest in the Scottish dominions to be Thule, I must acknowledge that the history of the kings of Norway says the same thing, in the life of King Magnus, who, in an expedition to the Orcades and Hebrides and into Scotland and Britain, touched also at the Island of Thule and subdued it.’
“By all this, I think, it appears sufficiently that the north-east part of Scotland, which Severus the emperor and Theodosius the Great infested with their armies, and in which, as Boethius[29] shows us, Roman medals were found, is undoubtedly the Thule mentioned by the Roman writers; and this also, if we believe the learned Arngrimus Jonas, was meant by Ptolemy, where he saith, that, to the twenty-first parallel drawn through Thule by Ptolemy, the latitude answers to 55° 36´, so that our country in those ancient times passed under the name of Thule and Hibernia, and the ‘Hiberni et Picti, incolæ Thules’ are the same people who were afterwards called Scots.[30]