Beyond the North Wind

In the fifth century BCE the priests of Delos told Herodotus that every year a bundle arrived on their island from the far north, wrapped in wheat straw. It had passed from people to people across the whole of Europe. Nobody on Delos had met the senders. The Greeks called them the Hyperboreans, the people beyond the north wind. In another book Herodotus admits he cannot say where the north ends, only that amber reaches Greece from there. Two thousand years later, historians on the Baltic coast put those two passages together and concluded that the Greeks had been writing about them.

This note follows Hyperborea through the books Source Library holds: the Greek poets and historians who described it, the scholars of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries who each found it in their own country, and the historians of Prussia, Latvia and Lithuania who joined it to the one northern thing a Greek could hold in his hand. Many of these books are in the library's Baltic Paganism collection, translated into English for the first time.

What the Greeks said

The oldest sources treat Hyperborea as a place that cannot be reached. Pindar, writing for a victor at the Pythian games in 498 BCE, puts it at the limit of human striving:

Neither by ships nor by land canst thou find the wondrous road to the trysting-place of the Hyperboreans. Yet among them, in olden days, Perseus, the leader of the people, shared the banquet on entering their homes and finding them sacrificing famous hecatombs of asses in honour of the god.

The god is Apollo. The Hyperboreans are his people: he spends the winter with them, and they live long and free of sickness and war. Herodotus, a generation later, is the first to say plainly that he does not know whether they exist. Neither the Scythians nor anyone else in the north, he writes, has anything to say about them; the reports come from poets (Hesiod and the epic Epigoni) and from Delos. The Delians' story is the strangest thing in his account:

They claim that sacred offerings wrapped in wheat-straw are brought from the Hyperboreans into Scythia. When they have passed through Scythia, each neighboring nation receives them in turn until they are carried as far west as the Adriatic Sea. From there, they are brought southward, and the people of Dodona are the first of the Greeks to receive them.

At first, the Delians said, the Hyperboreans sent two girls, Hyperoche and Laodice, with an escort of five men. None of them came home. After that the Hyperboreans carried the bundle only to their own border and asked their neighbours to pass it on. The girls' tomb was still shown on Delos, under an olive tree to the left of the temple of Artemis, and Delian boys and girls cut a lock of their hair before marriage and laid it there. Herodotus adds a detail he had seen himself: Thracian and Paeonian women never sacrificed to Artemis without wheat straw.

Then he steps back. He will not tell the story of the Hyperborean Abaris, who carried an arrow all around the world without eating, and he points out the symmetry the idea depends on: if there are people beyond the north wind, there must be people beyond the south wind too. He laughs at the mapmakers who draw the earth as a perfect circle.

Later writers repeated the poets rather than the doubter. Pliny the Elder, in the first century CE, set the Hyperboreans behind the Rhipaean mountains, the range the Greeks imagined along the top of the world, where the sun rises once a year and sets once a year and the old, tired of living, feast and then leap into the sea. Solinus, copying Pliny two centuries later, decided that so many authors could not be wrong: “let no one fear the false. We shall, therefore, speak of the Hyperboreans.” Diodorus of Sicily, drawing on the lost Hecataeus of Abdera, made Hyperborea an island “no smaller than Sicily” opposite the land of the Celts, with a round temple where Apollo came every nineteen years. The German antiquary Johann Georg Keyssler was still quoting the passage in 1728 in a dissertation on sun worship.

Abaris and the golden arrow

The one Hyperborean with a name is Abaris, priest of Apollo. Herodotus gives him a single sentence and refuses to repeat the story. The later lives of Pythagoras, written in the third and fourth centuries CE by Porphyry and Iamblichus, give him a career. In Iamblichus he comes south “gathering gold for the temple and predicting a plague. He stayed in the temples, and he was never seen drinking or eating anything.” He performs purifications at Sparta, after which, the story goes, Sparta never had the plague again; Pausanias, as an Italian literary historian noted in 1678, credits him with founding the Spartan temple of Kore the Saviour.

Then he meets Pythagoras. Iamblichus describes him as an old man from the north, “inexperienced in Greek education and uninitiated”, and says Pythagoras waived the five years of silence his other pupils served and taught him the doctrine of nature and of the gods in brief. Abaris takes Pythagoras for the god he serves, and is shown the proof:

For the fact that he displayed his golden thigh to Abaris the Hyperborean, who had surmised that he was the Apollo who is among the Hyperboreans, of whom Abaris was a priest, confirming that his assumption was true and not a deception, is very famous.

Pythagoras also takes away Abaris's golden arrow, “without which he was unable to find his way.” Near the end of the book the two men stand together before Phalaris, the tyrant of Acragas, and Abaris asks “concerning statues, the most holy forms of worship, the providence of the gods” while Phalaris rages and blasphemes. The Hyperborean in these stories is a pious foreigner who confirms that Pythagoras is divine. His homeland matters only as the place Apollo goes when he leaves Greece.

The arrow is what people remembered. In Porphyry and Iamblichus it is Apollo's gift, and Abaris rides it: as the German collector of magic lore Eberhard David Hauber quoted the Greek in 1739, “he crossed rivers and seas and impassable places, walking through the air, as it were.” Hyginus made it the arrow Apollo shot the Cyclopes with and then hid under a mountain in the north. The pagan critic Celsus held Abaris up against Jesus as a man nobody called a god although he flew on an arrow, and Origen answered with a question: “what did he himself gain by being carried on an arrow?”

Christian writers kept the arrow as a figure. Gregory of Nazianzus, in his funeral oration for Basil, set the arrow of Abaris beside Pegasus as things whose flight mattered less than lifting the mind to God, and Erasmus entered it in his Adages: Abaridos oistos, “the arrow of Abaris, is said of those who are swift”. Nicolas Caussin's emblem book of 1623 glosses it as “a mind contemplating God, or fame.” Later readers tried to explain it. Pierre Bayle, in a note Hauber summarised in 1738, compared it to the dowsers' divining rod and judged that the rod, which found “treasures, metals, the boundaries of fields, thieves, and murderers,” was “no less wonderful than the arrow of Abaris.” Godfrey Higgins guessed in 1827 that “perhaps this arrow was the magnetic needle,” and the Welsh antiquary Edward Davies suggested it had been an arrow of straw, like the straw the Hyperborean offerings came wrapped in.

Where he came from was argued as hard as where Hyperborea was. Higgins summed up the British debate:

Every true and loyal Scot is certain that he came from the Hebrides: Mr. Vallencey proves, as clear as the sun at noon, that he was an Irishman. This seems odd to the Welshmen, who are quite certain that he came from Wales; and Mr. Borlase does not fail to secure him for Cornwall.

In 1706 Carl Gottfried Zapf devoted a whole academic disputation to Abaris. He collected every ancient witness and then declined to locate the man's homeland, because “to designate in what region that people held a fixed seat is dangerous”: what the authors wrote about the northern ocean was “very unknown and uncertain.” The historian of philosophy Jacob Brucker put the problem more sharply in 1742: the Pythagoreans' enthusiasm for Abaris “strangely obscured his history.” The alchemist Johann Ludwig Hannemann went the other way. He read the Hyperborean birth of Apollo and Diana as a code for the red and white stones of the Great Work, and concluded that the art had first flourished among that people and spread from them to the rest of the world (1694).

Modern scholars read Abaris with a second figure from Herodotus, Aristeas of Proconnesus, who said in his epic verses that, while possessed by Apollo, he reached the Issedones, and that beyond them lived the one-eyed Arimaspians, the gold-guarding griffins and, last, the Hyperboreans by the sea. E. R. Dodds, in The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), grouped the two with Hermotimus and Epimenides as Greek “shamans”: holy men who fasted, travelled out of the body and came, or were said to come, from the Scythian north. Walter Burkert developed the argument for the Pythagorean tradition. On that reading the arrow is a memory of a real practice seen at second hand, and Abaris is less a visitor from Hyperborea than the Greeks' picture of a northern holy man.

Other travellers from the north

Abaris was not alone. Greek cult stories kept bringing people, gods and things south from Hyperborea, almost always to Delos or Delphi. Pausanias, in the second century CE, collected many of them.

• The Delian maidens. Herodotus names two pairs: Hyperoche and Laodice with their five escorts, and before them Arge and Opis, who came “at the same time as the gods themselves.” Later poets added Opis and Hecaerge, and Olen's hymn brought a third, Achaeia, “to Delos from these Hyperboreans.”
• Eileithyia, goddess of childbirth, who in the Athenian story “is said to have come from the Hyperboreans to Delos to help Latona in her pangs.” Diodorus said Leto herself was born among the Hyperboreans, which is why Apollo was honoured there above all gods.
• The founders of Delphi. The Delphian poetess Boeo wrote that the oracle was set up by Hyperboreans, Pagasus and Agyieus, and that Olen, who came with them, “was the first to give oracles and sing in hexameters.” Herodotus calls Olen a Lycian; Boeo made him a northerner. The Delphians also said their second temple, made by bees “out of wax and feathers,” was “sent to the Hyperboreans by Apollo.”
• Two ghost warriors. When the Gauls attacked Delphi in 279 BCE, thunderbolts and falling rocks drove them off, and “two of these phantom warriors, Hyperochus and Amadocus, came from the Hyperboreans.”
• The olive of Olympia. Pindar tells how Heracles persuaded “the servants of Apollo, the people of the Hyperboreans” to give him the wild olive from the springs of the Danube, and planted it at Olympia, where it crowned the victors.
• Aristeas of Proconnesus, the poet who said he had travelled north possessed by Apollo, reappeared at Metapontum in Italy long after his supposed death. The Metapontines set up a bronze laurel “when he said he had arrived from the Hyperboreans.”

The pattern is consistent. What comes from Hyperborea is old and holy: the first prophet, the first temple, the first offerings, the olive of the games, help in a sacred war. Hyperborea worked as the source Apollo's worship was believed to have come from, at a distance that kept it pure.

Apollo's tears

Hyperborea and the Baltic meet in a story about amber. The Greeks said that when Phaethon crashed the chariot of the Sun into the river Eridanus, his sisters, the Heliades, mourned on its bank until they turned into poplars, and their tears hardened into amber. Apollonius of Rhodes, in the Argonautica (third century BCE), sails his heroes up the Eridanus past the smoking wreck and records a second version:

The Celts have made it a tradition that these are the tears of Apollo, son of Leto, which are borne in the eddies, which he shed in countless numbers before, when he reached the holy race of the Hyperboreans, leaving the gleaming heaven because of his father's rebuke.

Amber was real, and so was the trade that brought it south. Infrared analyses of Bronze Age finds, made by Curt Beck and his colleagues at Vassar from the 1960s onward, identified Baltic amber (succinite) in Mycenaean Greece. Herodotus knew that amber came from the far north and did not believe the river story that explained it. He did not believe there was a river called Eridanus flowing into a northern sea; the name was Greek, he said, and some poet had made it up ; yet “it is from these furthest reaches that both tin and amber come to us.” Five centuries later Tacitus named the people who gathered it. On the right-hand shore of the Baltic, he writes in the Germania, live the Aestii, who “worship the Mother of the Gods” and wear the figures of wild boars as its emblem, and who alone collect amber, which they call glesum, on the beach and in the shallows.

Nothing in Herodotus says what was inside the Hyperborean bundles. A commentator on Callimachus's Hymn to Delos, printed in a 1761 edition of the poet, notes that Pausanias described the first-fruits as “hidden in wheaten straw, and recognized by no one.” What the Greek sources do record is a chain of hands running out of the north toward Delos, and amber arriving along the same kind of chain. Early modern readers took the overlap for an identity.

Thule and the other edges of the north

Hyperborea was not the only northern edge, and the others are easy to confuse with it. The difference is that Hyperborea came from poets and cult, while Thule came from a traveller. Around 325 BCE Pytheas of Massalia (Marseille) sailed north past Britain and reported an island where at midsummer the sun did not set. Pliny preserves the distance: Thule is “six days' sail from the north of Britain.” Beyond it, Pytheas said, there was no longer land or sea or air but “a kind of substance concreted from all these elements, resembling a sea-lung.” Pliny adds that “at one day's sail from Thule is the frozen ocean, which by some is called the Cronian Sea.”

Strabo did not believe a word of it. Gerardus Vossius, listing the charges in 1624, noted that Strabo had called Pytheas andra pseudestaton, “a most lying man.” The same page shows why Pytheas matters for the amber story. Pliny cites him for an estuary of the Guttones, a Germanic people, and an island called Abalus a day's sail off, where amber washes up in spring as “a refuse of the congealed sea,” which the islanders burn as fuel and sell to the Teutons. Pliny also reports that Pytheas called a huge northern island Basilia, the name Diodorus used for the amber island that Hartknoch would claim as Samland. Pytheas is the first Greek who seems to have reached the amber coast, or met people who had. In 1641 Pierre Gassendi, at the urging of his friend Peiresc, set out to defend his fellow Provençal: “Pytheas is the oldest scholar the entire West possesses.”

Rome kept Thule as the end of the world. Virgil called it ultima Thule, “farthest Thule,” and Tacitus says Agricola's fleet, rounding Scotland in 83 CE, saw it: “The shores of Thule were even descried.” Later writers moved it to wherever the edge of knowledge then lay. Procopius, in the sixth century, made Thule Scandinavia, where the Heruli sent to fetch a king of royal blood and where the people, after a “great and perpetual night of thirty-five days,” sent watchers up the mountains to look for the sun. Adam of Bremen, around 1075, settled it on Iceland: “This Thyle is now called Island, from the ice which binds the ocean.” Olaus Magnus, the exiled Swedish archbishop, agreed in 1555, calling Iceland “the glacial land, or the ultimate Thule.” A Greek-Latin edition of Cleomedes printed in 1605 lists the rival answers: Mercator's Iceland, Ortelius's Telemark in Norway, Camden's Shetland.

The other names belong to the same map. The Rhipaean mountains were the imagined range along the top of the world, behind which lay Hyperborea. Pterophoros, “feather-bearing,” was the land of falling snow that Herodotus explained as a figure of speech. The one-eyed Arimaspians and the griffins guarded northern gold. For the Goths the north was a beginning, not an edge: Jordanes, in the sixth century, called the island of Scandza “a workshop of nations or indeed a womb of peoples,” and placed it opposite the mouth of the Vistula, close to the amber coast.

Learned writers kept Thule and Hyperborea apart for a long time. Toland in 1740 was careful to say that by Thule he meant “only that of Pytheas, or Iceland,” and by the island of the Hyperboreans the one Diodorus described. The modern occult and racial writers merged them. The Thule Society, founded in Munich in 1918, gave Pytheas's island the qualities of Hyperborea and made it a lost homeland of the Aryans. The ancient sources do not support the merger: Thule was a place a man said he had sailed to, and Hyperborea was a place no road reached.

A round temple: Stonehenge?

The most specific Hyperborean landscape in Greek is the one Diodorus took from Hecataeus of Abdera, who wrote around 300 BCE. An island in the ocean opposite the land of the Celts, at least as large as Sicily, fertile, with a sacred precinct and a famous round temple, where the god comes every nineteen years and the moon looks very close to the earth. Readers in Britain drew the obvious conclusion. William Stukeley, in his Stonehenge of 1740, wrote that Diodorus “gives an odd account from thence mix'd with fable, and seemingly some reports of Stonehenge itself.” William Borlase quoted the moon passage in 1769 as if the islanders “had the use of telescopes”. John Smith, whose Choir Gaur (1771) called Stonehenge “the Grand Orrery of the Ancient Druids,” counted nineteen stones in the inner oval. Richard Payne Knight concluded in 1786 that “the Island I think can be no other than Britain.”

Several details fit. Britain lies opposite Gaul and is far larger than Sicily. The moon's rising and setting points swing to their extremes and back over 18.6 years, and the four Station Stones at Stonehenge form a rectangle that many archaeoastronomers read as aligned on those lunar extremes as well as on the midsummer sunrise. Hecataeus wrote a generation after Pytheas had sailed round Britain, so news of its stone circles could have reached him.

Other details do not fit. Stonehenge was built between about 3000 and 1500 BCE and was an old monument by the time of Hecataeus; whatever he heard described a ruin, or a living cult somewhere else. The nineteen years are a Greek number: Meton had announced the nineteen-year cycle that reconciles the sun and the moon at Athens in 432 BCE, and Hecataeus may simply have given his ideal temple the best calendar he knew. His Hyperborea has two harvests a year and citizens who play the harp to Apollo all day, which belongs to the genre of the ideal commonwealth, not to a report. The great stone circle at Callanish, on Lewis in Toland's Hebrides, is the other usual candidate. The cautious reading is that a report of British stone circles may lie behind the passage. Nothing in it proves which circle, or that it was any circle at all.

Pythagorean druids?

There is a bolder version of the British case: that the Hyperborean offerings reaching Delos in Herodotus's lifetime were sent by Pythagorean druids. Roman and Greek writers did describe the druids in Pythagorean terms. Caesar, in the 50s BCE, says that the druids' discipline “is thought to have been invented in Britain and transferred from there into Gaul,” that they keep their teaching out of writing although they use Greek letters for accounts, and that they teach above all “that souls do not perish, but after death pass to others.” Their Apollo, he adds, “drives away diseases”, which is what Abaris did at Sparta. Diodorus says outright that among the Gauls “the word of Pythagoras prevails”: souls are immortal and live again in another body after a fixed number of years. Ammianus Marcellinus, in the fourth century CE, describes the druids as bound in fellowships “as the authority of Pythagoras decreed.” Alexander Polyhistor claimed that Pythagoras himself had studied with the Galatians and the Brahmans.

The dates allow the hypothesis. Pythagoras died around 495 BCE. His communities in southern Italy were still active when Herodotus settled at Thurii, a few days from Croton, in the 440s. Herodotus speaks of the Hyperborean offerings as arriving in his own time, and Greeks and Celts were already in contact through the Greek colony at Massalia, founded around 600 BCE. Herodotus knew that the Danube rose “among the Celts”, and the Hyperborean bundles came down to the head of the Adriatic, which can be reached from the upper Danube and the Alps. Two old witnesses point the same way. Hellanicus, a contemporary of Herodotus, put the Hyperboreans “beyond the Alps of Italy,” and in the next century Heraclides of Pontus called the Gauls who sacked Rome in 390 BCE “an Army, coming from the country of the Hyperboreans”; Plutarch adds that Aristotle called the same people Celts. Apollonius, finally, attributes the story of Apollo's amber tears among the Hyperboreans to the Celts themselves.

The evidence stops short of the claim in three places. First, no source says that Celts or druids sent the offerings; Herodotus names Scythians as the first carriers, and Pausanias's later route runs through the Black Sea. Second, the druids are first named in Greek around 200 BCE, by Sotion and a work on magic attributed to Aristotle, which Diogenes Laertius cites at the start of his Lives of the Philosophers, two and a half centuries after Herodotus. Third, the Pythagorean description of the druids goes back to one Greek ethnographer, Posidonius, around 100 BCE, whom Caesar, Diodorus and Alexander all seem to follow. The French Celticist Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville called it, in 1895, a hypothesis “flattering to the self-esteem of the Greeks”: a Greek explaining a foreign belief in the terms of his own philosophy. Jacob Brucker had made the same objection in 1742, that “some slight harmony and similarity of this or that doctrine” does not prove descent. On the present evidence, Celtic participation in the chain is possible and the later Greek writers clearly thought the Celts were Hyperboreans. That the senders were druids, or Pythagoreans, is a hypothesis the sources do not yet support.

The twelve-sided objects

One class of object keeps being drawn into this argument: the bronze dodecahedra of Roman Gaul. They are hollow, cast in copper alloy, four to eleven centimetres across, with twelve pentagonal faces, a round hole of a different diameter in each face and a small knob at each of the twenty corners. The first was shown to the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1739; about 130 are now known. Amateur archaeologists at Norton Disney in Lincolnshire added the thirty-third from Britain in 2023. They date from the second to the fourth centuries CE and were mostly made in Gaul. They have been found in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary and Britain, but not in Italy, the Roman heartland. Where the find context is known it is usually military or funerary, and several came from coin hoards. No ancient text or picture mentions them, and none carries letters or numbers. The one exception is a different object: a solid silver dodecahedron found at Geneva in 1982 has the name of a zodiac sign on each face.

The Pythagorean connection is real on the Greek side. The dodecahedron was the figure the Pythagoreans kept secret. Iamblichus says that Hippasus, one of the school, “was the first to divulge and write down the sphere made of the twelve pentagons” and drowned at sea for the impiety. Plato gave it to the cosmos. In the Timaeus, after assigning four regular solids to the four elements, “God used this one for the whole”; in the Phaedo the true earth seen from above looks “like balls made of twelve pieces of leather.” Plutarch, in his Platonic Questions, read the twelve faces as the zodiac: the figure, he wrote, seems to imitate the zodiac and the year. The Geneva object spells out the same idea.

The Celtic side is less certain. More than fifty uses have been proposed, among them candle holders, surveying instruments, coin gauges, glove-knitting tools and metalsmiths' test pieces. The surveying and gauge ideas founder on the absence of any markings and on sizes that do not match; spool knitting is not recorded before 1535. The curators at Tongeren, which holds a complete one found in 1939, lean toward unofficial religious use, divination or magic. A 2025 paper in The Antiquaries Journal by Michael Guggenberger and Stephen Leach reads them through Plato: its title, “The Gallo-Roman Dodecahedron and the Receptacle of All Becoming,” borrows the Timaeus's name for the matrix in which the cosmos takes shape. A ritual use would fit the Gallic distribution. It would not reach back to Herodotus. The dodecahedra are six to eight centuries later than his Hyperborean offerings, and they postdate the Roman suppression of the druids in the first century CE. An older stone dodecahedron was reported in 1885 from Monte Loffa near Verona, an Alpine site of the fifth to second centuries BCE that also produced Etruscan and Gallic objects, but its own date has never been fixed. The most the objects show is that in the Celtic provinces of the Roman empire someone was making and treasuring the Pythagorean figure of the cosmos. Whether that was druid learning surviving under Rome, or Greek geometry arriving with Roman rule, they do not say.

The form also travelled east. Much smaller dodecahedra of gold, with the same holes and knobs, have been found at Óc Eo in the Mekong delta of Vietnam, a port of the kingdom of Funan where Roman gold medallions of Antoninus Pius also turned up, and in Burma, Thailand, India and China. Louis Malleret, who excavated Óc Eo, published them in 1961 and read them as a sign of Mediterranean influence carried by trade. If he was right, the twelve-sided figure moved along Roman trade routes in both directions, to the Celtic provinces in bronze and to the Indian Ocean in gold, which makes a purely druidic explanation harder to hold.

What the ground shows

Texts cannot settle whether real people sent real things down Herodotus's chain. Finds can, and on one point they now say something definite. Amber became a common offering in Greek sanctuaries in the later eighth and seventh centuries BCE, the generations before Herodotus. The fullest study is Alessandro Naso's report on the amber from the sanctuary of Artemis at Ephesos. Infrared analysis of thirty samples there, made at the Vassar laboratory Curt Beck founded, showed that “the amber objects found in Ephesos are of Baltic origin”. Some arrived raw and were carved on the spot. Comparing the pieces with finds from Verucchio on the Adriatic coast of Italy and from Basilicata, Naso concludes that “Baltic amber reached Ephesos via a trade route along the Adriatic Sea.” He also lists amber from the sanctuaries of Artemis Orthia at Sparta, Hera at Perachora, Apollo at Eretria, more than two hundred pieces from Lindos, and half-worked amber, ivory and bone from the sanctuary of Apollo at Delos.

The Adriatic leg is where Herodotus's offerings turn south, and where the amber went. In the early Iron Age the main amber-working centres on that sea were Etruscan Verucchio on the Italian side and Novo Mesto in Slovenia on the other, a site of the Hallstatt culture of the eastern Alps. A 2018 University of Birmingham thesis on the dedications at Dodona goes as far as to propose “one main ideological and religious pathway” running “from the Baltic to the Adriatic, through Dodona, Pindos and Thessaly to its final destination, the island of Delos”, charted by the myth of the Hyperborean gifts.

Three cautions. The same thesis, surveying what was dedicated at Dodona, does not list amber among it. Some archaeologists doubt that a single “amber route” ever existed, rather than many short exchanges; Aleksandar Palavestra titled a 2007 paper “Was there an amber route?” And nothing says the Hyperborean bundles held amber. What the ground does show is a real flow of a northern material into the sanctuaries of Apollo and Artemis, by way of the Adriatic, in the centuries when the Delians were telling their story. For the druid hypothesis, it points away from Britain: the hands on the Adriatic leg were Etruscan, Picene and eastern Alpine.

Everyone's Hyperborea

From the sixteenth century onward nearly every northern nation found a scholar to argue that it was the land beyond the north wind. The case was usually made from the same handful of classical passages, and it usually arrived at home.

In Sweden, Olof Rudbeck's Atlantica (1679–1702) made Sweden both Plato's Atlantis and Hyperborea. The 1761 Callimachus commentary summarises his etymology: the name came not from the Greek boreas but from the Swedes, whose most ancient king was called Boreus, so that Oferborne, “Hyperboreans,” meant the nobly born. In Britain, John Toland placed them in the Hebrides and made Abaris a Druid: “if the Hebrides were the Hyperboreans of Diodorus, as I fancy it can scarce hereafter be doubted” (1740). John Wood made Abaris and Bladud, the legendary founder of Bath, “one and the same man” (1747), William Borlase read Diodorus's round temple into Cornwall, and Godfrey Higgins wrote in 1827 that by the Hyperboreans the Greeks “generally meant the British isles.”

The German geographer Philipp Clüver, in his Germania antiqua (1616), took the amber route instead and followed it to the Vistula. The amber river, he argued, was the Radaune, which reaches the sea at Danzig. The Greeks had heard its name as Eridanus, and the name later slid onto the Po and the Rhône because amber was shipped through them: “This confusion of the three rivers, Rhone, Po, and Vistula, is truly strange.”

The Prussian claim

The fullest version of the Baltic argument is in Christoph Hartknoch's Alt- und Neues Preussen (Old and New Prussia, 1684), a history of the land and its pagan religion by a teacher at the gymnasium in Thorn (Toruń). Hartknoch surveys the places scholars had looked for the Eridanus (Italy, the Rhône, Africa, Britain, even India) and then quotes Herodotus's doubt about the amber river as evidence for his own country:

Nevertheless, not all writers have gone so far astray; rather, there have also been people who believed they could find the Eridanus in the North, and perhaps they also found the amber-bearing river Eridanus, like the Electrides, in our Prussia.

He goes on to read Diodorus's island of Basilia, where amber washes ashore, as Samland, the amber peninsula north of Königsberg. Diodorus had called Basilia an island. Hartknoch answers that Diodorus could not have known whether it was island or mainland, and that Adam of Bremen also counted Sambia among the Baltic islands, since the sea, the two lagoons and the rivers enclose it on every side. He states his purpose plainly: to prove that “even before the birth of Christ, and also long before the times of Herodotus, people lived in these places who gathered amber and sold it to other lands.” He is more cautious than Rudbeck. In these pages he does not claim the Hyperboreans for Prussia, and he allows that Diodorus may have meant Zealand or Sweden. What he wants from the Greeks is antiquity: a place for his country in the oldest histories there are.

The same wish shaped the Prussian origin legend, and it too ran through Hyperborean geography. The Dominican chronicler Simon Grunau, writing in the 1520s, gave the Prussians a migration from Scandinavia, a priest-king called Widewuto, and a sanctuary at Romove where three gods stood in an evergreen oak. The folklorist Wilhelm Mannhardt (1831–1880), whose collected study of Baltic religion was published in 1936, took the story apart source by source. Grunau had found in Erasmus Stella that “the Borussian peoples, who according to Ptolemy had their seats at the Rhipaean mountains,” had entered Prussia, and he placed the Rhipaean mountains in Norway. These were the mountains beyond which Pliny and Mela had put the Hyperboreans. So the Prussians' own founding story began, by way of a misread geography, on the threshold of Hyperborea.

Hartknoch engraved Grunau's scenes, including the war banner of Widewuto with the three gods: Patollo, old and grey-bearded, god of the dead; Perkuno, the thunder god, with a face like fire; and young Potrimpo, crowned with ears of grain. Mannhardt's verdict was that “like the entire triad, the image of the gods on the war flag of Widewut with the enigmatic inscription and the coat of arms of the first king are inventions.” The forger gave himself away with the horses: heraldic animals holding up a shield came into use only in the fourteenth century. Perkūnas, at least, is real. The thunder god appears across Lithuanian, Latvian and Prussian sources and in Lithuanian and Latvian folk song.

Lithuania and the sun

In the nineteenth century the argument moved from Prussia to Lithuania and from amber to language. Teodor Narbutt began his Ancient History of the Lithuanian Nation (1835) with the sun. Discussing a Samogitian prayer to the fire god Gabie that peasants still recited in their drying barns, he writes:

The worship of fire and the sun, or Apollo, merged into one among all nations. Fire and the sun everywhere received worship where the pagan religion had external pomp and priests. The Greeks used to say that the worship of Apollo among the northern peoples was very famous, for which reason they called him Hyperboreans.

Narbutt connected the Hyperborean Apollo to a sun cult “observed by the Baltic Sea” in Pliny, and later in the volume to Sanskrit. Lithuanian, he argued, came “directly and immediately” from Sanskrit, as Sanskrit devas, god, survives in Lithuanian Dievas, Latvian Dievs and Prussian Deiws. Half of that is right. Lithuanian is one of the most conservative Indo-European languages, and the cognates are real; but it is a sister of Sanskrit, not a daughter. The claim gave a small nation inside the Russian Empire a lineage older than Greece and Rome, which is what Hartknoch had wanted from the amber two centuries earlier.

Was it Russia?

The oldest Greek route to Hyperborea runs north-east. Aristeas, in Herodotus, travels past the Scythians of the Ukrainian steppe to the Issedones, and beyond them come the one-eyed Arimaspians, the gold-guarding griffins and finally the Hyperboreans. Pausanias's route for the offerings comes the same way:

the Hyperboreans, they say, hand them over to the Arimaspians, the Arimaspians to the Issedonians, and from the Issedonians the Scythians convey them to Sinope.

That points up the steppe toward the Urals and the Altai, whose gold the Scythians traded. In that sense the earliest Hyperborea lay in what is now Russia and Kazakhstan.

Western Europeans later used the word for Russians. In a dialogue Alexander Herzen wrote at Nice in 1869, a French doctor greets the Russian narrator as “my dear Hyperborean,” and he answers: “do not call me a Hyperborean. Firstly, the word makes me cold every time,” and it recalls the age of Montesquieu, when Paris called Peter the Great le Grand Tzar hyperboréen. In the twentieth century the claim became Russian. In 1922 Alexander Barchenko led an expedition to the Kola Peninsula in search of an ancient northern civilisation, and since the 1990s Russian esoteric and nationalist writers, Aleksandr Dugin among them, have placed Hyperborea in the Russian Arctic. It is the same move Rudbeck made for Sweden and Hartknoch, more cautiously, for Prussia.

Other ancient writers pointed elsewhere: Hellanicus to the Alps, Hecataeus to an island off the Celts, Herodotus's offering route to the head of the Adriatic. The north-east was one direction among several. Hyperborea was wherever the known peoples ran out, and the Greeks knew the steppe earlier than they knew the Atlantic.

The polar homeland

By then Hyperborea was turning from a people into a homeland of humanity. The French astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly argued in the 1770s that the sciences had been invented by a lost northern people. William Warren's Paradise Found (1885) put Eden at the North Pole, and Bal Gangadhar Tilak's The Arctic Home in the Vedas (1903) put the Aryans there. Helena Blavatsky made the Hyperborean the second of her root races in The Secret Doctrine (1888), and she used the amber to prove it. The Eridanus could not be the Po, she wrote, because “amber is found only in the northern seas, in the Baltic”; Phaethon's fall was an allegory of the poles changing climate.

In the twentieth century the polar homeland was taken up by German racial nationalists. Besides the Thule Society (see the section on Thule above), the Dutch-German writer Herman Wirth, a founder of the SS research office Ahnenerbe, built a prehistory of a northern master race on the same classical passages. That use has continued on the far right. The passages themselves say much less, as the earlier readers in this note show.

What was the Hyperborean Apollo?

Everything the Greeks said came from Hyperborea is old and holy: the first prophet, the first temples, first-fruit offerings, the olive of the games, purification, healing and survival after death. If there was a real “Apollo of the north” behind the stories, the candidates are these, in order of the evidence.

• The near north. The one Hyperborean rite Herodotus saw for himself was local: Thracian and Paeonian women who never sacrificed to Artemis without wheat straw. Thrace also had Zalmoxis, the Getic teacher of immortality whom Herodotus makes a former slave of Pythagoras. In Plato's Charmides, Socrates names the two northern kinds of healing together: “the charms of Zalmoxis” and “those of Abaris the Hyperborean.”
• Beyond the Scythians. The Hyperborean holy men fast, purify cities, avert plague, travel out of the body and ride an arrow. Dodds and Burkert read them as Greek reflections of steppe shamanism, met at second hand through Scythian contacts and attached to Apollo as healer and prophet.
• The Celts and their druids. A real but later layer. Greeks of the fourth and third centuries BCE identified the Celts as Hyperboreans and described the druids in Pythagorean terms, as the section above sets out. The myth itself is older than any Greek knowledge of the Celts.
• The Baltic. The amber link is real; a cult link is not attested. Baltic religion fits Apollo poorly: the sun is a goddess, Saulė, the chief god is the thunderer Perkūnas, and the amber gatherers of Tacitus worship a Mother of the Gods. The Baltic peoples were probably an unseen far end of the chain rather than the source of the cult.
• Not northern at all. Many historians think Apollo himself came into Greek religion from Anatolia: a Hittite treaty of about 1280 BCE with Wilusa, probably Troy, names a god Apaliunas, and Herodotus makes the first Delian hymn-poet, Olen, a Lycian. On that view the north is where the Greeks put the purity of a god who had reached them from the east.

What the sources support

Read together, the Greek texts describe two things. One is a mythical people of Apollo at the edge of the world, whom Herodotus already doubted. The other is a real chain of exchange that brought amber and tin south out of northern Europe, through many hands, to people who did not know where it started. Hyperborea is what the Greeks called the far end of a chain they could not see. Baltic amber did reach Greece. Whether the Delian bundles were part of that trade, nothing in the sources says.

The historians of Prussia, Latvia and Lithuania who read these passages were not inventing a connection out of nothing. They lived on the amber coast, and they knew the Greeks had valued what washed up on their beaches. Their mistake was to ask the classical sources for a national past that the sources could not give. The older religion of the Baltic peoples survives in thinner but more reliable records: the treaty of 1249 between the Teutonic Order and the Prussians, the list of Samogitian gods that Jan Łasicki compiled in the 1580s, Matthäus Praetorius's Deliciae Prussicae from the Lithuanian villages of East Prussia, the dainos or folk songs, and Mannhardt's compendium of every source he could find. They are in the Baltic Paganism collection, with English translations, next to the Greek authors they were measured against.