Alan (the Lone Librarian rides again) Teder’s Reviews > Silverwhite: The Journey to the Fallen Sun > Status Update

The iron contained in the Kaali meteorite, about 450 tonnes, was of immense value, totalling more than the entire world's annual iron production. We might assume that attitudes towards Saaremaa changed with the dawn of the Iron Age: notions of terror and catastrophe were complemented with fairy tale-like themes of wealth, ultimately blending and overwhelming the earlier reputation.

Baltic Finns’ relationship to snakes is conspicuously contradictory and does not seem to fit the global myths in which a snake represents evil, downfall, and death. Instead, Baltic-Finnic folklore reveals a friendly and tenderly caring attitude towards the reptiles. Snake worship persisted in Estonia until the 20th century,

There are in this sea many other islands, of which a large one is called Estland […]. Its people, too, are utterly ignorant of the God of the Christians. They adore dragons and birds and also sacrifice to them live men. (Adam of Bremen, 1073–6)

The Kaali impact event is Europe’s largest and only; the Saidmarreh landslide is unique and the greatest to have happened globally. The Kaali catastrophe took place in a well-populated area during the Bronze Age; the Saidmarreh catastrophe took place in an area that was likewise well-populated, 11,400 years ago during the Stone Age.

People of the time equated the meteorite’s collision to the sun collapsing onto the earth, then Pytheas’s reason for visiting Saaremaa could have been, and likely was, the Kaali phenomenon.

In the first edition of this work, I presented my belief that the impetus for Pytheas’s travels was the Kaali impact event on the island of Saaremaa. True, it did take place two hundred years or more before Pytheas’s expedition. ... I present proof that Pytheas visited Saaremaa, as well as the premise that the reason behind his visit was a mythological and folkloric ripple caused by the Kaali impact event.

Based only on known information, the Baltic toponym wasn’t adopted for the sea until Adam of Bremen wrote his chronicle (1073–6 CE): Mare or Sinus Balticum. Since then, Pytheas’s Basilia, Balisia > Balcia, Baltia > Baltic Sea has come into international use.

The goal was amber, Thule was its unintended result.

To the most famous seafarer of the classical world, to whom we owe the mystery of Thule. Pytheas of Massalia was more than a theoretician and remarkably more than a practician. His ultima Thule had been the oldest enigma of Western cultural history. Yes, I do believe the pluperfect is justified in that statement.

Let us now add amber, which was called helm in that era (now merevaik, ‘sea sap’). Demand for the strange organic mineral was remarkably more volatile. The amounts that have been found in Cretan and Mycenaean archaeological sites gave rise to a fantastical hypothesis in the early 20th century that the Baltic Sea figured into the Trojan economic orbit.