by David King
At this time, too, authorities recognized the young professor’s talents, and he rose like a rocket through the ranks of the university hierarchy. He was promoted to assistant professor, then full professor, and by 1661 he had been selected to be rector, the highest position at the university. Although expectations were certainly high, no one had any idea of the outburst of energy soon to be unleashed.
ABOUT TWELVE MILES outside of Paris, Louis XIV was busy turning his father’s modest hunting lodge into a palace worthy of the “Sun King.” Some thirty thousand workers labored around the clock to complete the complex of gardens, fountains, and ponds, and of course the enormous palace itself. A fusion of classical dignity and Baroque splendor, Versailles was the epicenter of a country greatly influencing culture on the Continent. What was later said about the Revolution was already applicable to this fashionable trendsetter: “When France caught a cold, Europe sneezed.”
Scandinavia was certainly not immune to the rays of the Sun King and his court. Young dandies were everywhere opting for a more gilded look, complete with powdered wigs, lace scarves, and silk as colorful as peacocks. The cuffs ruffled more, and the French tricorne was placed on the head, or politely raised. Paint and perfume, gloves and handkerchiefs, snuff boxes and walking sticks were added for good measure.
Uppsala’s skyline was characterized by the royal castle, the cathedral, and also, after the early 1660s, Rudbeck’s anatomy theater.
Whims of fashion changed all around him, but Olof Rudbeck kept to his old ways. He preferred a simple black coat, white collar, and knee-length breeches. This attire would have been the height of fashion around 1650, but, as with his long hair, which now flowed naturally onto his shoulders without benefit of a powdered wig, Rudbeck looked increasingly outdated and drew more and more attention for his old-fashioned manner.
He probably appeared a bit eccentric, though in a charming sort of way. His eyes gleamed with hints of mischievousness and flashed with his exuberant love of life. His face was somewhat elongated; his cheeks were rosy. Thin, butterfly-wing whiskers perched above his mouth. His voice was a deep baritone of phenomenal strength, and his laughter often filled the room with mirth.
Happily, Rudbeck had taken up his position as rector of Uppsala University. Over the next few years, vitality and exuberance would permeate almost everything he touched. After his pioneering work with the lymphatic system, Rudbeck went on to build an impressive anatomy theater. He actively participated in its construction, from drawing the designs to hammering in the nails, and the building was praised for its architectural wonders. Not least of these was the way in which he managed the light so that it focused on the dissection table at the center, yet avoided casting shadows that would obscure the view from anywhere in the octagonal auditorium. For special occasions, Rudbeck brought out his collection of skeletons, mummies, and even specimens of human skin.
The anatomy theater was actually only one of the prominent landmarks that the city owed to Rudbeck’s efforts. Another was a special institution designed to attract young Swedish aristocrats who might otherwise be tempted to study abroad. This was an elite academy that exercised the body as well as the mind. Built by Rudbeck in 1664–65, this Collegium Illustre had in only a couple of years enrolled fifty-five students who fenced, danced, and rode with skill and flair. Fluent in French, they worked zealously to perfect the gentlemanly arts. This program survived until the late nineteenth century, when the building was torn down and its prime real estate used to house the university administration.
Rudbeck built the anatomy theater in the middle of Uppsala, just opposite the cathedral and atop the main university building.
Some contemporaries believed Rudbeck had been born under a lucky star. From the anatomy theater to the botanical garden to the elite exercise academy, visitors could not fail to see his legacy all around town. There was also an apothecary laboratory, a community house to provide free food and shelter to the poor, and a workshop that harnessed the town river to power several machines simultaneously. When his term as rector expired, a new position of curator was created, and Rudbeck was named one of its first officers (along with two others). The multitalented professor had indeed exerted a profound influence over his beloved town and university.
But all that was about to change. By the end of the 1660s, the economy had started to falter. The Swedish copper coin took a nosedive in value, and income from university properties went into startling decline. This meant that salaries at the university were often delayed, and in some cases even unpaid. Professors started to look back in anger at the ambitious builder of the previous decades. They whispered in the shadows, grumbled in the corridors, and increasingly brought their discontent out into the open.
All these issues, still unresolved, were soon to explode. They would also be transferred onto a new battleground, where they would rage with even greater ferocity. In the midst of the chaos, Olaus Verelius, a colleague and an expert on the Vikings, came with a request: he wanted Rudbeck to draw a couple of maps of ancient Sweden to accompany his forthcoming edition of a Norse saga. As Rudbeck set out to help his friend, he found something that dramatically changed his life.
3
REMARKABLE CORRESPONDENCES
Just amusing myself by indulging in fantastic dreams. Toys! Yes, I suppose that’s what it is—toys!
—FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKI, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
IT WAS THE Hervararsaga that Olaus Verelius brought to his friend. Set in the dim and misty past, this was a fantastic tale of a sword named Tyrfing. Hammered in the hidden forges of two talented dwarves, this was the “keenest of all blades,” never failing to render its wielder victorious while shining all the time with the radiance of the sun. Tyrfing was something of a Norse Excalibur, a magical sword fit for a Viking King Arthur. There was, however, one important qualification: this sword carried a nasty curse. Once drawn, it had to take a human life, and then return to its scabbard still warm and red. Generation after generation suffered from the bitter truth that this irresistible sword with the golden hilt brought untold violence and misery.
In the late 1660s, many unreservedly ranked this Hervararsaga as one of the oldest and most impressive texts illuminating Sweden’s distant past. What a thrill it must have been to pore over this treasured manuscript and prepare its first-ever publication. And to adorn it with the most up-to-date and valuable scholarly accessories, Verelius asked Olof Rudbeck to make a map of the many places mentioned in the saga.
This may seem like a strange favor to ask of a medical doctor. But Rudbeck had earned a reputation for producing high-quality maps. He excelled at sketching the mountains, hills, and rivers of the countryside, and then reducing them to a series of lines and dots on a flat surface. Measuring with a great concern for precision and calculating with a single-minded patience, cartography was virtually an extension of Rudbeck’s skill in technical areas. His curiosity and his own love for discovery, moreover, helped him understand the value of a good, accurate map. Many officials requested Olof Rudbeck’s services, including no less than Carl Gustaf Wrangel, one of Sweden’s most feared generals during the Thirty Years’ War.
But this time, when Rudbeck accepted the offer, no one could have known what this curious little manuscript would mean for Uppsala’s distinguished professor.
“It was like a dream,” he later recalled. Behind the story of the cursed sword, the deadly runic magic, and the wild, howling berserks whipped into a furious rage, Olof Rudbeck saw many strange parallels between the Norse world and what he remembered from classical Greek traditions. All through the manuscript, in fact, were many “remarkable correspondences.” Kings, queens, customs, and places—far too many features in this late Viking saga struck with a peculiar resonance.
What exactly it was that first captured Rudbeck’s attention and launched him on what would be a lifelong quest may never be known. His earliest notes on the search do not survive, and the first draft of his work was later destroyed. The list
of possibilities is extensive. For instance, as Rudbeck combed the saga looking for material for his map, he would have encountered some extraordinary information. The very first line in the manuscript noted a beautiful kingdom that once flourished in the north of Sweden, called Glasisvellir. This may not at first sound even remotely classical, but when translated from the Old Norse glaes, “amber,” and vellir, “rolling landscape,” it would be something altogether different.
The Glasisvellir were the “Glittering Plains”—a name that would have evoked the brilliant and shining Elysian Fields of classical mythology. According to the oldest of the ancient Greek accounts, the Elysian Fields were the great plains at the end of the world where the mild, cooling breezes blew, and its inhabitants lived what the ancient poet Homer called “a dream of ease.” Now, too, in this old manuscript of the Hervararsaga, there were provocative images of a place in the far north that seemed to have more in common with those joyous fields than just their name.
As in the classical Elysian Fields, the fortunate residents of the Norse Glittering Plains enjoyed a happy existence, living to a great age and effectively banishing sickness from the realm. They were also, like their classical depictions, keen sportsmen who enjoyed tossing a goatskin back and forth, that is, when they were not reveling in the dances, songs, and feasts along the soft meadows and meandering riverbanks. Indeed, the Norse wrestled on the Glittering Plains, just as the classical warriors fought for fun in the Elysian Fields.
Located beyond Gandvik, literally “the Bay of Sorcery,” the Glittering Plains flourished in a mythical landscape that included yet other features that sounded familiar from classical mythology. There were the violent neighbors of Jotunheim, “the land of giants,” who recalled the Greek stories of the large, fierce creatures that waged war on Zeus and the Olympian gods. In Norse mythology, as Rudbeck would soon learn if he did not know already, the giants also fought relentlessly with Odin and the Aesir gods. Further, the king of the Glittering Plains was introduced in an evocative way. “A mighty man and wise,” King Gudmund held out against the forces of chaos and barbarism, ruling over a kingdom whose inhabitants reached such an advanced age that outsiders believed that “in his realm must lie the Land of the Undying, the region where sickness and old age depart from every man who enters it, and where no one can die.”
Wisdom, strength, longevity—all these factors made the northerners in the Glittering Plains seem like a blessed people, and their home a fabled “Land of the Undying.” Could this golden age kingdom really have existed, and could it have possibly been related to the Elysian Fields of classical mythology? For that matter, could this utopian civilization of the far north have had anything to do with the land of the Hyperboreans, another blessed people of classical mythology who were said, as their name suggests, to live somewhere “beyond the north wind”?
Whatever it was that first captured Rudbeck’s attention, it virtually sounded a call to action. Ideas swirled in his head, and “for some peace of mind,” he said, he had to “put pen to paper.”
ONE DAY RUDBECK showed his notes to his friend Verelius, the eccentric but undisputed authority on Scandinavian runes and Norse sagas. Recently appointed to a brand-new post as Sweden’s first and for a long time its only “Professor of the Antiquities of the Fatherland,” Verelius was charged with the responsibility of seeking out old manuscripts, gathering them together, and promoting anything “that can serve to enlighten the deeds of the ancient past.” In this respect, he had found his scholarly niche. He lectured widely on Swedish history—its runes, its Viking sagas, and many other aspects of the pagan past. Despite the fiery patriotism that heated up his accounts, Verelius’s lectures have been described as some of the most pioneering and erudite given at Uppsala University in his time. Unfortunately, though, as he lamented, this was usually only to the benefit of three or perhaps four students who made it to the early-morning lecture in the otherwise empty hall.
Rudbeck’s notes were hastily written, as he put it himself, “not polished, or even once read all the way through.” But Verelius was greatly pleased, and he praised Rudbeck’s “many excellent conclusions and exemplary deductions.” In a letter written much later, shortly after Christmas 1673, Verelius described his own reaction to Rudbeck’s work. He had been particularly impressed with the rich proposals for bringing order to the chaos of Swedish history. These outlines could in fact build a foundation for a true chronology of ancient Sweden, something he admitted “up until now we have never hoped to establish with any certainty.” Rudbeck, he added, “has taken it much further than I had ever expected.”
As he also cheerfully noted, Rudbeck had succeeded in “correcting” many errors that often prevailed in the image of the Swedes abroad. This was a reference to the medieval Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, whose colorful early-thirteenth-century account of the far north showcased the heroics of Sweden’s archenemy, the Danes (and by the way, Saxo’s history includes our oldest account of the misfortunes of Prince Amled, elaborated centuries later in Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, Prince of Denmark). Composed in a lofty Latin that even drew praise from no less a stylist than Erasmus of Rotterdam, Saxo’s work dismissed many parts of Swedish history with the haughty disdain of a man at the center of a powerful Danish kingdom looking down at the backward periphery.
To Verelius’s mind, the implications of Rudbeck’s work were vast: if he was correct, he would have uncovered some major problems in Saxo’s influential history. The Swedes could finally expose some errors enshrined in the standard histories, sickening “lies” that had long offended Swedish sensibilities.
Pleased with the prospects of such a work, Verelius asked Rudbeck to speak with another authority, Professor Johannes (Johan) Loccenius. This was a stern, scholarly man, a former Royal Historiographer and a renowned expert in Swedish antiquities. Called over from Germany in the middle of the century, Loccenius had emerged as one of Uppsala’s prized scholars. He lectured regularly on ancient authorities such as Livy, Tacitus, and Cicero, and he seemed to be a man who, in modern parlance, “lived completely for science.” After Loccenius took up the history of his new homeland with a burning passion, his ambitious histories earned him praise for producing Sweden’s “first truly critical work.” A tireless scholar who trudged through the material slowly and cautiously, building his way to reasonable conclusions, Loccenius had earned his reputation as one of the greatest living experts on ancient Scandinavia.
When this scholar first saw Rudbeck’s notes, he was also visibly delighted. The seventy-year-old Loccenius burst into tears of joy and expressed his wonder: “How many times have I and other historians read [these texts] and never realized that they referred to Sweden.” As he put it, Rudbeck was working on an unparalleled project; in fact, it was unlike anything Sweden had ever seen before.
RICH IN IMPLICATIONS, Rudbeck’s “remarkable correspondences” were especially thrilling in the vibrant atmosphere of the late seventeenth century. Like its rival, Denmark, Sweden was then in the throes of a “Norse renaissance.” Patriotic scholars working in the universities of Copenhagen and Uppsala were experiencing an enthusiastic, somewhat romantic revival of interest in the old Vikings. Drinking horns, magical spells written in strange runic scripts, and dragon-headed prows adorning oak longships, the fact and fantasy of the Viking Age (roughly A.D. 800–1050), had long been sealed off into a virtually lost world.
A number of Scandinavian antiquarians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Arngrimur Jónsson, Christiern Pedersen, and Brynjólfur Sveinsson, began rediscovering this Norse heritage. Forgotten and unheralded though they are today, it is largely through their efforts that so much of our material about the Viking world has survived. They hunted down the old manuscripts in the original language wherever they might be found, gathered them together into collections, and sought to add these to the accumulated treasury of history. Given the merits of the cherished rediscovered sagas, these Scandinavian antiquarians “broo
ded over them like the dragon on his gold.”
Such enthusiasm for all things Norse flourished in the aftermath of the classical Renaissance, the dramatic rebirth of interest in ancient Rome and Greece that began centuries before in the Italian city-states. After spreading across the Alps, this revival had splintered into a cluster of movements that, for better or worse, came for a long time to shape the ways historians viewed the past. One thing the many Renaissance thinkers had in common, though, was a firm belief in the great importance of antiquity. Some went so far as to celebrate the classical past as the source of almost all our knowledge.
But as northern thinkers delved deeper into the Greek and Latin texts, they came across curious references to their own past. The plains, forests, and wastelands at the edge of the classical world swarmed with hordes of northern tribes—Celts, Cimbrians, Sarmatians, and countless others. They were not always well known, and were often subject to glorification, vilification, mystification, or just plain error. Yet all these peoples, however represented and interpreted, were, to the classical mind, simply barbarians.
The word barbarian did not, of course, have a pleasant ring, deriving originally from the observation that the nonclassical outsiders spoke a different language—one that sounded to ancient Greeks like incomprehensible gibberish, which they mimicked as “bar-bar-bar.” The name stuck, expanding to a general term of scorn. The barbarian world seemed primitive and insignificant next to the monumental achievements of the Greco-Roman civilization, with its baths, aqueducts, amphitheaters, and thriving cities, not to mention its rich cultural legacy.