Two early modern best-sellers presented the Arctic to a vast readership. Olaus Magnus’s History of the Northern Peoples (1555) offered a semi-fantastical image of the far north. This was translated from Latin into a number of modern European languages, and remained in print and in demand for over a century. Johannes Schefferus’s Lapponia (1673) was likewise immediately translated, and found an international readership. However, in part because of the long afterlife of Magnus’s book and the relative lack of new works on the arctic, these two works were to some extent in dialogue in the later seventeenth century.
Neither author visited the arctic. They approached their topic in part through a convention of topographical writing that was also used for other places relatively unfamiliar to early modern Europeans, notably the Americas. Both emphasized the natural environment and the people who lived within it. However, this convention was flexible, and Magnus and Schefferus generated very different narratives. Magnus skewed towards the fantastical, presented with rhetorical flourishes and vivid woodcut illustrations. Schefferus insisted that he worked from discussions with travelers and those who lived in the arctic, and from Sámi objects in collections in and around Stockholm, emphasizing documentable evidence. Both works found a large reception, but somewhat different ones. Magnus’s descriptions were adopted by Edmund Spencer and William Shakespeare, among others, for dramatic effect. Schefferus’s book was more often cited by scholars and travelers.
