The name is older than any of them. Thisted derives from Tyr, the Norse god of law and single combat, plus the ending -sted, place: Tyr's stead. The town stands on the northern shore of Thisted Bredning, the broad reach of Limfjord water separating Thy from the island of Mors, laid out across three low ridges divided by two streams running down to the fjord. It grew as a medieval trading point, took market-town rights early in the 1500s, and kept the Gothic church that went up around 1490. Charters mattered less than infrastructure. When the Thy railway to Struer opened in 1882, a district that had reached the rest of Denmark by boat or by long road suddenly had a timetable.

In 1441 the peasants of northern Jutland rose, and King Christopher of Bavaria came north to the rebel camp at Husby Hole, near St. Jørgen's Hill. He sent word ahead: anyone who left the camp and went home would not be punished for rebellion. The men of Thisted, and those of Mors, took the offer. By any reasonable measure it was the sensible choice — the peasant risings of that century tended to end badly for the people holding the pitchforks. It did not read that way afterwards. They were called cowards and traitors, and the label long outlived everyone who supposedly earned it. Five and a half centuries later the story is still the one the town tells about that year.

Christen Kold, born here in 1816, turned the Danish folk high school into a working system — schools for adults, taught by the spoken word, an idea that shaped Danish education for a century after him. Jens Peter Jacobsen, born in 1847, translated Darwin into Danish and wrote Marie Grubbe and Niels Lyhne; he was novelist and scientist in the same person, and he died at thirty-eight. Hans Ditlev Bendixsen emigrated around 1865 and built ships on the American West Coast. Peter Tom-Petersen painted cityscapes and interiors. Knud Graah went to Norway and into textiles. Later arrivals on the list are noisier: the pop duo Junior Senior, and the producer Thomas Kato Vittrup, who records as Kato.

Grethe Rask was born in Thisted in 1930 and became a physician and surgeon. She spent years practising in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), and in 1977, at forty-seven, she died of an illness that none of her colleagues could identify. She is now recognised as one of the first non-Africans to die of AIDS — years before the syndrome had a name, a case definition, or a test that could have told her what was happening. It is easy to read that sentence as a medical milestone and skip the person inside it: a doctor who kept working through a decline nobody could explain to her, and who died without ever learning what she had.

Thisted Bryghus was founded in 1902 out of a bankruptcy. Its predecessor, Thisted Aktiebryggeri, had opened in 1899 and was finished off by the great lockout of that year; the new brewery was built from the wreckage of the estate. It stayed local in an unusual way, as a people's shareholding company with more than two thousand shareholders, most of them from Thy and Mors, and shares that almost never come up for sale. The output has punched well above the town's weight. Thy Pilsner took gold at Monde Selection in 1989. The same year the brewery revived Limfjords Porter, having acquired the rights after the Urban brewery closed in 1986. In 1995 it launched Øko Thy, Denmark's first organic beer. The annual general meeting draws such a crowd that locals call it the fourth public holiday in Thy.