Thule is the name given in ancient Greek and Roman literature for the most northerly part of the world. Around 300 BC the Greek navigator Pytheas claimed to have visited Thule, six days travel beyond Northern Britain. This may have been Iceland and in support of this idea a paper was submitted to the 2008 Atlantis Conference in Athens by two Italian researchers, G. Giancarlo and M. Stucchi. In Germanic and Scandinavian traditions the name is applied to a long lost continent in the North Atlantic.

Just a century ago, an extreme nationalistic German organisation called the Thule Society was founded in 1910 that looked northwards for the source of the Aryan race. This group was later merged with Ahnenerbe Forschungs und Lehrgemeinschaft, a branch of the Nazi SS. Many of its members sought to link Thule with Atlantis and the Aryans with the Atlanteans.