James Field

Professor James Field was formerly the Professor of Anthropology at Miskatonic University. He set out in July 1911 on an archaeological expedition to Greenland. Here he was able to unearth the ancient Hyperborean city of Ulthar as well as various tablets containing the True Rite of Transcendence. He went mad in the attempt, however, and was eventually placed in the Arkham Correctional Facility for the Mentally Unsound.

Appearance
Professor Field is an incredibly short, meek looking man. Almost always dressed in a brown coat and adorned with an impenetrable frown, Professor Field's wild hair and untrimmed mustache earned him more than a few unflattering names from his students.

Early Life
Professor Field was born on a farm in Boxford, Massachusetts. The eldest of six children, Professor Field was raised a devout New England protestant, with his father reading to him every day from the Bible and his mother from works like Pilgrim's Progress. At 16, Field moved to Boston, where he lived with his Uncle and finished high school, graduating at the top of his class. At 18, he enrolled in Harvard University, where he studied European folklore. He went on to pursue both his Master's degree and PhD at Harvard before finding a teaching job in the town of Arkham as a Professor of Anthropology at Miskatonic University.

Early Expeditions
During Field's tenure as a professor at Miskatonic he went on a number of expeditions into the North Atlantic, becoming something an expert on the regions' various languages and cultures.

The first expedition Field went on sent him to Iceland, where he encountered oral evidence of an ancient civilization which he termed "the Hyperboreans" after an ancient race of people mentioned in early histories as living in the North. He theorized that these early histories were actually referring to a great civilization centered around Iceland and Greenland, but could not find substantial enough evidence to prove his assertions. Several follow-up expeditions drained the University coffers and patience, but continued to be unable to find evidence of Field's Hyperborean civilization. Yet determined by the success of his rival Hiram Bingham's expeditions in South America, Field begged for and received one last expedition. This 1911 expedition, later termed The Field Expedition, would finally give him the evidence he needed to prove his ideas, but at the cost of his sanity.

The Field Expedition
In the Summer of 1911, Field and his team set sail for Greenland hoping to find evidence of the lost Hyperborean civilization. Field hoped to find the remains of the Hyperboreans in the frozen Northern wastes of the island, furthest from human contact and so, he reasoned, furthest from damage by later peoples intruding on the land. After a number of fruitless days exploring the Northern coast, Field finally struck gold, discovering the largely intact remains of the city of Ulthar, greater than Macchu Picchu and far more advanced. These were the Hyperboreans.

However, the expedition met an ill fate after this. Reports are varied, and few survived to tell the tale, but it seems that The Field expedition fell apart from within. Growing paranoia and a sense that someone was watching the group caused them to fall apart and Field himself went mad within a few weeks. It is clear thst while there, however, he was able to get a hold of and partially translate the True Rite of Transcendence. He was unable to complete the translation before going mad, however.

In January of 1912, Professor Field was found gibbering and insane upon the coast of Norway with seemingly no knowledge of how he got there. He carried with him, however, his partial translation of the True Rite of Transcendence, which fell into the hands of the Norwegian government and eventually were purchased by Anne de Chantraine for a hefty sum.

In late January of 1912, Professor Field was transferred to the Arkham Correctional Facility for the Mentally Unsound, where he eventually died at the age of 49, a suicide.

Skills

 * Anthropology 99%
 * Archaeology 95%
 * Bargain 50%
 * Cthulhu Mythos 5%
 * Hide 30%
 * History 80%
 * Library Use 95%
 * Listen 80%
 * Natural History 50%
 * Occult 90%
 * Sneak 30%
 * Spot Hidden 70%

Languages

 * English 99%
 * Danish 90%
 * Greenlandic - 80%
 * Icelandic 80%
 * Latin 60%
 * Norwegian 85%
 * Swedish 90%