Olaus Magnus

• 1. Introduction

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  Olaus Magnus was born Olof Månsson in Linköping in October 1490, a Swedish priest who would spend most of his adult life far from Sweden, writing about it with an intensity that only exile can produce. By the time he died on the 1st of August 1557, he had produced a map so large and so precise that later scientists would cite it centuries after his death, and a book about northern peoples that remained the primary European reference on Scandinavia for generations.

  He was never permitted to hold the office he was given. He carried the title of Archbishop of Uppsala, yet he could not set foot in Uppsala. He was a patriot of a country that had confiscated his property and banned him from its borders. How does a man in that position leave behind a legacy? What exactly did he map, what did he write, and why did oceanographers in the modern era go back to study his work on ocean currents? Those are the questions worth following.

• 2. Rome and Exile

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  It was a mission to Rome in 1524 that first set Olaus on the path away from Sweden. Gustav I of Sweden sent him there to secure the appointment of Olaus's elder brother Johannes Magnus as Archbishop of Uppsala. The errand succeeded, but the world Olaus returned to was changing fast.

  The Reformation arrived in Sweden, and Olaus's loyalty to the Catholic Church made him a man without a country. He stayed abroad in Poland rather than convert or conform. In 1530 his Swedish belongings were confiscated and he and his brother were formally exiled. He settled in Rome in 1537, working as his brother's secretary, handling correspondence and foreign affairs.

  His role as a diplomat had already reached further than religious matters. Before the exile hardened into permanence, Olaus had sent home a document containing trade agreements with the Netherlands, demonstrating that his years abroad were not simply clerical postings but active service to Swedish interests. That practical engagement with the wider world would shape what he chose to record in his later writing.

• 3. The Carta Marina

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  In 1539, working in Venice with financial support from a nobleman named Hieronymo Quirino, Olaus completed a map he called the Carta marina et Descriptio septemtrionalium terrarum ac mirabilium rerum in eis contentarum. The full Latin title translates roughly as a marine map and description of the northern lands and their marvels, carefully drawn up at Venice.

  The map covers Northern Europe with particular focus on Scandinavia. It consists of nine parts and is remarkably large: 125 centimetres tall and 170 centimetres wide. For centuries it was lost, until Oscar Brenner rediscovered it in 1886 in the Munich state library. When scholars examined it, they found it to be the most accurate depiction of Scandinavia of its time.

  The map is populated with sea monsters and strange creatures alongside its geographical details, which might invite dismissal. But when present-day oceanographers looked past those decorative elements, they found something unexpected: a truthful and precise depiction of the currents running between Iceland and the Faroe Islands. A series of scientific publications followed from that rediscovery, treating Olaus's sixteenth-century observations as genuinely useful data.

• 4. Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus

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  Printed in Rome in 1555, the Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus, or A Description of the Northern Peoples, became the work by which Olaus Magnus is best remembered. Its full translated title runs to remarkable length, encompassing the manners and customs of Nordic peoples, their superstitions, bodily exercises, government, food keeping, war, buildings, metals, and the kinds of animals found in those regions.

  For the rest of Europe, this book became the authority on Swedish matters. It described dark winters, violent sea currents, and beasts of the ocean in ways that astonished European readers who had no other reliable source. The book was translated into Italian in 1565, then German in 1567, then English in 1658, and Dutch in 1665. Abridgments appeared at Antwerp in 1558 and 1562, at Paris in 1561, at Amsterdam in 1586, at Frankfort in 1618, and at Leiden in 1652. Notably, the work was not translated into Swedish itself until 1909.

  The delay in Swedish translation is striking for a work that Olaus intended as a patriotic record of his homeland. He had written it in Latin for a European audience, and European readers eagerly consumed it while his own countrymen, shaped by the Reformation that had pushed him out, did not bring it into their language for three and a half centuries.

• 5. Title Without a Church

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  When Johannes Magnus died in 1544, Pope Paul III named Olaus as his successor in the archbishopric of Uppsala. Olaus held that title for the rest of his life. He also attended the Council of Trent beginning in 1545, continuing to participate in those sessions until 1549.

  He later became a canon at St. Lambert's Cathedral in Liège, and King Sigismund I of Poland offered him a canonry at Poznań. His later years were spent at the monastery of St. Brigitta in Rome, where a pension assigned by the Pope kept him alive. He also took on the additional labour of seeing to the publication of historical works his brother had written before his death.

  His name itself carried a kind of quiet correction worth noting. Olaus Magnus was not his birth name. He was born Olof Månsson, the last name meaning son of Måns. Magnus is a Latinized version of his patronymic, and not, as it might appear to a Latin reader, the personal epithet meaning great. He chose the scholarly Latin form, as educated men of his era did, but those who assumed the name celebrated a personal grandeur were reading something into it that was not there.