Works
The Historia de omnibus gothorum sueonumque regibus ("History of all Kings of Goths and Swedes") is a work on Swedish history, which was printed posthumously in Rome in 1554, by Johannes' brother Olaus Magnus. Olaus sent it to Sweden with a dedication to the dukes Eric, John, Magnus and Charles. It was subsequently republished several times. It appeared in a Swedish translation by Er. Schroderus for the first time in 1620. It is a very unreliable source for early Swedish history.
Johannes Magnus made creative use of Jordanes' Getica and of Saxo Grammaticus to depict a history of the Swedish people, of their kings, and of the "Goths abroad". He states that Magog, son of Japheth, was Sweden's first king. The first 16 volumes are taken up by the period before AD 1000 in a strange mixture of tales from earlier writers and his own fiction, allegedly derived from runic records at Uppsala in the Younger Futhark, which he claimed had served the Goths as an alphabet for some two millennia before Christ. Johannes Magnus invented a list of kings of Sweden with six Erics before Eric the Victorious, where he started counting from Jordanes' Berig as Eric I. He also invented six kings of the name Charles before Karl Sverkersson. This is how Gustav Vasa's sons could style themselves as Eric XIV and Charles IX. While the work describes these fictional Erics and Charleses in generally positive terms, it also includes a few invented tyrants with names similar to king Gustav.
The work is exceedingly patriotic and suggests that Denmark was populated by convicts exiled from Sweden, a charge drawing a sharp rebuttal from the Danish court.
Read more about this topic: Johannes Magnus
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