Abstract

The title of Renaud Gagné’s book hides as much as it reveals. Hyperborea, R.G.’s name for the country of the Hyperboreans, is attested in a wide variety of ancient texts on those fascinating and enigmatic people of the farthest North, of which the A. proposes a “slow reading”: this reading is also a test case in which he tries out his “anthropological philology”. “Philology” might seem too narrow a term, since R.G. does not only look at the texts that talk about the Hyperboreans from Hesiod t...