Every Friday, a script verifies all the links on this website. I usually check the results that evening, or sometimes during the day at work, and see which dead links I can fix.

Strangely enough, this week 3 links on “What the heck is a Hyperborea?” have dropped off the face of the net. I checked the rest of the links manually, and 2 more turned up broken sites with internal errors!

The first was easy. It’s an excerpt from the book, Arctic Dreams: Imagination And Desire In A Northern Landscape by Barry Lopez. I just pulled up the Archive.org copy, picked a sentence to search for… and found the same excerpt at another URL. (A classic college website issue: moving faculty pages from a specific server to a more general site.)

The other two that actually reported errors are both role-playing games. The MUD Darkwind has moved to its own domain. Epiphany: The Legends of Hyperborea is a little trickier. It’s missing from its publisher’s website, but there are references to it online. I figured I could link to the sourcebook at Amazon, or maybe to a review, but the most informative page I could find was on archive.org.

Now to the sites that lied and reported “200 OK” instead of an error code. One was a page describing Clark Ashton Smith’s book, Hyperborea. The site had a search box on the home page, making it easy to find the new location. (It would have been nice if they’d actually removed the old script instead of letting it break. A 404 or even a 500 would have helped me catch this earlier.)

That leaves a Conan reference site, which is shut down, the domain name listed for sale. I went looking and found a site with maps of the world in which Conan takes place, showing Hyperborea near Cimmeria.

It’s just odd that three links would vanish from the same page at more or less the same time.