noun
definition
One of a race of people in Greek mythology living in the extreme north, beyond the north wind.
definition
(usually humorous) Any person living in a northern country, or to the north.
adjective
definition
Pertaining to the extreme north of the earth, or (usually jocular) to a specific northern country or area.
Examples of hyperborean in a Sentence
The close connexion of the Hyperboreans with the cult of Apollo may be seen by comparing the Hyperborean myths, the characters of which by their names mostly recall Apollo or Artemis (Agyieus, Opis, Hecaergos, Loxo), with the ceremonial of the Apolline worship. No meat was eaten at the Pyanepsia; the Hyperboreans were vegetarians.
Here the connexion of Artemis with the Hyperborean legend (see Apollo) is shown in the names of the maidens (Opis, Hecaerge) who were supposed to have brought offerings from the north to Delos, where they were buried.
In northern Asia are found other aborigines, such as the Ainus of Japan and the so-called hyperborean races (Chukchis, &c.), but no materials are at present forthcoming for their history.
This theory may have been nothing more than an instance of the Greek tendency to assign a northern or "hyperborean" home to deities in whose character something analogous to the stormy elements of nature was found.
By some authorities Ainu colonists are supposed to have been the first settlers, and to have arrived there via Yezo; by others, the earliest corners are believed to have been a hyperborean tribe travelling southwards by way of Kamchatka.
At the festival of Apollo at Leucas a victim flung himself from a rock into the sea, like the Hyperborean who was tired of life.
Outside the precinct of Apollo, on the south, was an open place; between this and the precinct was a house for the priests, and within it, in a kind of court, a set of small structures that may perhaps be identified as the tombs of the Hyperborean maidens.
In his hymns he celebrated Opis and Arge, two Hyperborean maidens who founded the cult of Apollo in Delos, and in the hymn to Eilythyia the birth of Apollo and Artemis and the foundation of the Delian sanctuary.
Although the Hyperborean legends are mainly connected with Delphi and Delos, traces of them are found in Argos (the stories of Heracles, Perseus, Io), Attica, Macedonia, Thrace, Sicily and Italy (which Niebuhr indeed considers their original home).