Magnus. Olaus sent it to Sweden with a dedication to the dukes Eric, John, Magnus and Charles, Gustav's sons. 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 Charles Sverkersson. This is how Gustav I Vasa's sons could style themselves as Eric (XIV) and Charles (IX). While the work describes these fictional Erics and Charles in generally positive terms, it also includes a few invented tyrants with names similar to 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. A milestone in Swedish and European Gothicism, Johannes’ work proved fundamental in the birth of various declensions of Nordicism, arguing that humankind stemmed from the North and imbuing this cardinal point with powerful political and prophetical meanings. See also Ballad of Eric List of Archbishops of Uppsala Footnotes Sources External links 1488 births 1544 deaths Roman Catholic archbishops of Uppsala 16th-century Roman Catholic archbishops in Sweden 16th-century Swedish historians Swedish genealogists