In 1690 a most remarkable dissertation was published at Uppsala University by a young man named Lucas Halpap. Hjalmars och Hramers saga, as the title under which it was presented reads, told the story of the ancient King Hjalmar who conquered Bjarmaland with his companion Hramer at his side. Hjalmar settled in Bjarmaland, while Hramer married Hjalmar's daughter and was granted his own territory. The end of the saga discusses how they are eventually brought low by their enemies.

This saga was a new contribution, providing completely new information about a very early period of Swedish and Scandinavian history (other Icelandic narratives, such as Af Upplendingakonungum and Hversu Noregr byggðist recounted history in a similar way, albeit with more focus on Norway). Hjalmars och Hramers saga was unique, however, as the fragmentary manuscript it was found in was written in a runic script (unlike the many Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian manuscripts which were written in the Roman alphabet, albeit with a couple of extra letters such as þ and ð).

Halpap had apparently been given the fragmentary runic manuscript by an unnamed farmer. After the edited text appeared in 1690, the Swedish State Antiquarian, Johan Hadorph, was keen to see the original manuscript. Unfortunately, Lucas Halpap was by that time in Stade, modern-day Germany. It took several years before the manuscript showed up in Stockholm, by which time (1694) Johan Hadorph was dead. The new State Antiquarian, however, a man named Johan Peringskiöld (1654–1720), decided to publish a facsimile of the runic manuscript under the Latin title “Historia Hialmari regis Biarmlandiæ atque Thulemarkiæ” (“The story of Hjalmar, king of Bjarmaland and Thulemark”), accompanied by both a Swedish and a Latin translation.

There were suspicions as to the saga's authenticity right from the start, but in 1774 Carl Gustav Nordin published a thesis at Uppsala entitled “Monumenta sviogothica vetustioris ævi falso meritoque suspecta” which dealt a death-blow to the saga as a reliable historical source. Many of the phrases used in the saga were shown to be taken verbatim from the saga editions and lexica which had appeared in the years prior to Hjalmars och Hramers saga's publication. Vilhelm Gödel corroborated the inauthenticity of the saga in an article from 1896 in which he declared it to be “ett literärt falsarium” (“a literary forgery”). Since then some theories have been aired as to the motivations behind the forgery, the most likely being that the saga was fabricated in order to give credence to the theories of Carl Lundius concerning early Swedish connections with figures from classical history.

As a brief introduction, it is worth mentioning that dedications (such as item 1 here) were a matter of course in works of the time, and dedicating your work to royalty made sense: since dedications helped writers to gain favour amongst the powerful and influential, dedicating to a royal personage showed respect where respect was due. Charles XII (1682–1718, r. 1697–1718) was just a boy when this dissertation was published, but Halpap may have hoped to gain favour with his family, such as King Charles XI (1655–97, r. 1660–97). The two notes by Olof Rudbeck and Johannes Bilberg (items 2 and 3) show that Halpap, although young, did, however, already have powerful supporters. Olof Rudbeck (1630–1702) is well known, among other things, as the author of Atlantica (published in four volumes between 1679 and 1702). The second volume had appeared in 1689, just a year before Halpap's dissertation, so Rudbeck would have been a significant patron to be giving his blessing to the book. Johannes Bilberg (1646–1717) was a professor of mathematics at the University of Uppsala (starting in 1677, up until 1692). Of the four pieces of introductory material, Halpap's own note to the reader (item 4) is the most interesting. This is principally because it is the only account that we have of how the runic manuscript was actually discovered. The description of the farmer who had the tattered remnants of a manuscript in his possession is sufficiently vague - no name is given, no place is stated - for one to perhaps already feel suspicious that there may be something underhand going on.

Below I present all of these texts in their original language, with an accompanying translation into English.