Hyperborea is one of those ancient legends that really sparked the imagination of the Greeks—a mythical land they thought could rival Atlantis, home to gods and giants. They pictured it as a place "beyond the North Wind," where the sun never set, and everything was perfect. Pindar, a famous Greek poet, made this land sound almost too good to be true with his vivid descriptions.
The Greeks believed that Boreas, the god of the North Wind, lived in Thrace, with Hyperborea lying even farther north. Pausanias noted that the Hyperboreans lived beyond Boreas's home, and in the 4th century BC, Hecataeus of Abdera speculated that Hyperborea might actually be Britain. He described a grand, spherical temple there, which some think could be Stonehenge. Alcaeus, a poet from around 600 BC, even wrote songs about Apollo’s journey to this mysterious place.
Descriptions of Hyperborea make it sound like a dreamland—where the sun shines 24/7, especially during the Midnight Sun period. This has led some to suggest that Hyperborea might have been located within the Arctic Circle. Some ancient accounts even claim that the sun only rose and set once a year there. Esoteric thinkers have gone further, suggesting that Hyperborea was the birthplace of civilization, possibly even the original Garden of Eden. Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society, believed that the 'second root race' of humanity began in Hyperborea, long before Atlantis and Lemuria.
Herodotus, writing around 450 BC in his Histories, gave one of the earliest detailed accounts of Hyperborea. He mentioned that both Hesiod and Homer also wrote about it, although Homer’s work on the subject is lost. The 7th-century BC poet Aristeas described a journey to a place called the Issedones in the Kazakh Steppe in his now-lost poem Arimaspea. Hyperborea also popped up in the works of other ancient writers, like Pindar and Simonides of Ceos.
But where exactly was Hyperborea? That’s still a big mystery. Some ancient sources said it was beyond the snowy Riphean Mountains, though no one knows where those are—or if they ever existed. Writers like Apollonius of Rhodes and Aristotle mentioned these mountains, leading some modern scholars to think they might just be mythical. The philosopher Hierocles even suggested that the Riphean Mountains might actually be the Ural Mountains, possibly linking the Hyperboreans with the Scythians.
Strabo, the ancient geographer, described Hyperborea as a peninsula somewhere beyond what is now France, stretching more north-south than east-west. Along with Thule, Hyperborea was considered one of those mysterious, far-off lands where people supposedly lived incredibly long and happy lives. In 1963, John G. Bennett, a British mathematician, proposed in his paper “The Hyperborean Origin of the Indo-European Culture” that the Indo-European homeland might have been in Hyperborea.
Pindar famously wrote that there was no easy way to reach the Hyperboreans, “...neither by ship nor on foot would you find the marvelous road to the assembly of the Hyperboreans…” Legends also suggest that the Boreades, descendants of Boreas, established the first theocratic monarchy in Hyperborea. Roman writer Aelian mentioned Apollo’s priests in Hyperborea, who were said to be gigantic, about 10 feet tall (3 meters), and the sons of Boreas and Chione. These giant rulers are part of the enduring mystery of Hyperborea, a land that continues to captivate the imagination as a place where gods and giants might have once roamed the Earth.