Adventures in Unhistory: Conjectures on the Factual Foundations of Several Ancient Legends by Davidson Avram

Author:Davidson, Avram [Davidson, Avram]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2006-11-27T16:00:00+00:00

THE SECRET OF HYPERBOREA

There rolls the deep where grew the tree,

O earth, what changes hast thou seen!

There where the long street roars, hath been

The stillness of the central sea.

The hills are shadows, and they flow

From form to form, and nothing stands;

They melt like mist, the solid lands,

Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam”

Many mysteries have come down from ancient times without much abatement of the mystery, let alone any solution having been found. We still do not really know how the statue called the Vocal Memnon sang at the break of dawn each day for hundreds of years, and then fell silent: we only know that it did sing … and that it did fall silent. The mystery of the Oracle of Delphi remains unsolved; neither do we know in what manner the ancient Egyptians built the immense pyramids at Gizeh. The pyramids, however, are more than merely famous; they are literally known to everyone, and they are still there. The statue of the Vocal Memnon, silent for millennia, is at any rate still there; and on its base, and still there on its base, are the graffiti of those who had heard it sing. The song is silent, but the statue is present. Among the less well-known mysteries, however, is the secret of Hyperborea. Modern scholars have spent little time in trying to solve it. Humboldt called it “a meteorological myth,” and Dempsey has said that there was no mystery at all, referring us to Ahrens, whose involved and complicated explanations are to the effect that the ancient Greeks made several mistakes in their own language—mistakes which Ahrens, who evidently knew ancient Greek better than the ancient Greeks did, has solved.

Maybe.

Only maybe not.

It is my own opinion that the Secret of Hyperborea was not a mere meteorological myth and that mistakes in grammar and/or the meanings of words are beside the point and that the secret rested upon a reasonably sound and solid basis, one so solid that we might actually hold it in our hands; and so far as I know, I am the first to suggest the solution1 which I will, in the course of this adventure, reveal to you. However, it may be that the very word Hyperborea and its meaning is a secret to some, although, even so, if you break the word down into its two main parts you will realize that you almost knew what the word means.

Break it down. Hyper. Borea. Everyone knows hyper, as in hypertension and hyperthyroid and hyperactive and hypersensitive and—

And so on.

To your dictionaries, O readers!—or, to be a trifle more realistic, to mine; in fact, to my Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, a mine of information, which tells us that hyper- is a prefix, from the Greek, meaning, 1: above; beyond; super-. There are other meanings, but let us leave it at that. As for Borea, to be sure, Borea as such is not in Webster’s Collegiate, but what is helpful enough, is to wit boreal and Boreas.

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