Finding Atlantis

by David King

  We know that Rudbeck used the Silver Bible in his research, and that he specifically cited this passage in his discussion about his discovery of Atlantis. But would his passion make him resort to forging sources—and would his growing obsession make him do so in the oldest survival of any Germanic language, and in Sweden’s most treasured manuscript?

  OF COURSE, it is possible that the letters had already been doctored by the time Rudbeck stumbled across the passage, and he was so blinded by his obsession that he failed to detect the tampering. Out of all the people who would have had access to the Gothic Bible on its long wandering before it reached his study—in Queen Christina’s library, the Dutch scholar’s home, De la Gardie’s castle, and through the various loans to professors before the count’s donation in 1669—it would be unfair to single Rudbeck out as the culprit in the crime, that is, without clear evidence linking him to the alteration. Surely Rudbeck the master technician would have made the changes in a more dexterous and artful manner than the way they appear. The possibility of another actor should at least be entertained.

  For scholars who have investigated this controversy, the name most often mentioned is again Rudbeck’s energetic brother-in-law, Carl Lundius. Sometimes it seems that Professor Lundius is still, three centuries later, deflecting blame for the unscrupulous forgeries away from Rudbeck or some other close friend.

  Lundius had an undeniably strong desire to push forward the frontiers of the search for Atlantis. He would certainly have had the knowledge of variant readings of Ubizvai, as well as the necessary access to the Silver Bible. More suspiciously, his own work on the laws of ancient Sweden unquestionably relies on sources that no known scholar had used before or has since.

  In his Zamolxis, for instance, a work discussing the legendary first Gothic lawgiver mentioned briefly by Herodotus, Lundius cited some curious documents that would supposedly place Zamolxis’s home in Sweden. His name in “our scrolls” was Samolses, and Lundius applauded Herodotus for his accuracy, “the perfect agreement and harmony [with] the incunabula of the ancient Goths.” But grander and more dramatic claims would follow from his controversial waxed tablets. For example: “We have in evidence a number of literary monuments having a completely overwhelming convincing force, attesting to the Greeks having taken from the Goth (Geta), in every particular, the essential element of the Athenian legislation.” Unfortunately, no one has ever seen any of these manuscripts.

  Maybe all these documents preserving the ancient Swedish-Greek cultural links were destroyed in one of the fires that ravaged Uppsala over the years, or were somehow lost over time. Even if we assume the best of intentions, however, and make the most cautious conclusions, Lundius’s scrolls remain very much in doubt.

  Nevertheless there is still good reason not to rush into accusing this zealous law professor. It is certainly possible that Lundius was not so much the deceiver as the deceived. The scrapings and repaintings in the Gothic Bible are in fact only the most prominent of a series of questionable and nefarious activities on the fringes of Rudbeck’s search for Atlantis. Some have pointed to an entire “forgery factory” in operation somewhere in the gabled university town.

  Could the culprit be a certain one of Professor Lundius’s friends and colleagues, now known to have been a forger, manipulating old manuscripts with a deliberate attempt to deceive? After all, this friend was arguably the most talented and prolific of all known forgers in Scandinavian history: a priest named Nils Rabenius.

  What little is certain about Rabenius’s life gives the impression of a checkered career. Suspended from his duties, criticized for flagrant disobedience, and reprimanded for routine drunkenness, this renegade priest even spent a night or two in jail. Unscrupulous and highly unstable, Rabenius seems to have reveled in mischief, with his antics earning him a degree of notoriety and, oddly enough, also a position as court preacher in Stockholm for the very devout king Charles XI.

  Rabenius was an avid collector of medieval manuscripts, and a notorious editor of the documents he accumulated. He was particularly prone to inserting exploits of his own family. Any mention of someone in the “Rabbe” family in a medieval document is today considered a good reason to question its authenticity. So one can only wonder about Rabenius the champion forger, his well-known connections with Lundius, and the parchments circulating around Uppsala supposedly chronicling Zeus’s adventures in Sweden.

  As far as the forgeries in the Gothic Bible are concerned, another intriguing option put forth by the Swedish scholar Gunnar Eriksson changes the terms of the debate somewhat. As the discovery of the tampering is not known to have been made until the 1730s, years after the death of Rudbeck and the other principal characters in this story, it is possible that the changes in the Silver Bible were made after the Atlantica was printed. This may sound paradoxical, but as Eriksson correctly points out, when Rudbeck linked Ubizvai to Uppsala, he was not relying on the Silver Bible. He was using instead a manuscript in De la Gardie’s collection, now lost. In other words, it could have been Lundius, Rabenius, or a later reader who had access to the work at the university library—and then decided to “correct” the Silver Bible to make it agree with Rudbeck’s Atlantica.

  At any rate, regardless of who actually made the changes, the forged manuscripts and the fabricated passages in the Gothic Bible illustrate the great difficulty Rudbeck and his supporters were starting to face in the search for Atlantis. They also show just how far some would go to find the necessary yet elusive evidence, even if it meant unscrupulously tampering with the material. Expectations for Rudbeck’s quest were high, and already rising. Each new finding only increased the plausibility of the sweeping vision, while at the same time intensifying the demand for greater, more exciting breakthroughs.

  BY THE END of 1678, Sweden had emerged as the original home of the classical gods, and the land often visited by ancient heroes in search of wisdom and enlightenment. One of the last discoveries that Rudbeck managed to fit into his bulging volume of Atlantica was no less impressive.

  His theory involved the runes, best known today perhaps as a language of elves, dwarves, and hobbits in the fantasy realm of Middle Earth. But as J. R. R. Tolkien, Bosworth Chair of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, knew, the runes were once a functioning alphabetic script found in Scandinavia and northern Europe. The sharp, angular symbols could be scratched into wooden staffs, cut into helmets, inscribed on whalebone, or, more often, carved on large standing stones, usually adorned with intertwining snakes or dragons. Just over three thousand inscriptions are known today in Sweden, by far the most in any country. A full thousand are found in the area around Uppsala alone, most of which had already been discovered by the late seventeenth century.

  Interpreting these runes is a thrilling and at times very difficult challenge. Scholars have not been able to agree about many things, including for instance where the letters originated. Strong arguments have been put forward in favor of Sweden, Denmark, the Black Sea region, and somewhere high atop the Alps. Not even the basic chronology can be convincingly determined. The most commonly proposed time of invention points to the first century A.D., though alternative estimates range from a remote period of the past to as late as the fourth century A.D. It is appropriate, then, that the word rune means literally “mystery” or “secret.”

  No less mystery enveloped these rare carvings in Rudbeck’s day, and his own growing infatuation would bring him into contact with the pioneering scholars in the history of the runes. As with the revival of the Old Norse sagas and eddas, the “runic renaissance” had begun to flourish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Scholars at the forefront of this movement were again Scandinavians, among others the Swedish scholar Johan Bureus and the Danish royal physician Olaus Wormius.

  These highly original thinkers traveled the countryside looking for runic inscriptions, meticulously copying them down, and trying to decipher their possible meanings. Significantly, they were also helped by the fact that knowledge
of the runes had, in some places, never completely died out. The last surviving “rune masters,” the name for the craftsmen skilled in the art of carving the letters, would live on in certain parts of the Scandinavian peninsula to as late as the early twentieth century. Elsewhere this knowledge had been gradually forgotten or, in some cases, as in Iceland, ruthlessly suppressed for its presumed magical, superstitious qualities.

  In Rudbeck’s own study of the runes, the single greatest inspiration was one of these early thinkers, his fellow Swede Johan Bureus, already a valuable source for his theories about the Hyperboreans. With his long white beard and strong mystical leanings, Bureus looked like one of the legendary rune masters whose art he had studied so energetically. Like many mystics of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Bureus believed that a harmonious order governed the universe, literally breathed into existence at the beginning of time and encoded in all creation. This divine wisdom had survived the Flood, the confusion at Babel, and the many great upheavals of the past, though at times it had only done so by going underground, flourishing among a select group of thinkers. True prophets and sages had been privy to the secret “hermetic” tradition that, by Rudbeck’s time, was communicated only to the initiated. Bureus spent his entire life trying to penetrate this wisdom, and that was certainly one of the main reasons for his fascination with the runes.

  For Bureus saw the enigmatic runic symbols as possibly capturing this original wisdom (one of their many levels and functions in ancient society). They were the oldest language in the world, that is, after Hebrew, though later in his life he would reverse the order, giving precedence to the Scandinavian letters. Bureus’s enthusiasm was certainly infectious. King Charles IX had selected him to teach history to the young prince and future king Gustavus Adolphus, who, when he came to power, welcomed the scholar into his inner circle.

  In one of his typically bold plans, Bureus had once proposed that Sweden replace its current alphabet with a revived form of the older, nobler, and more mystical runes. He thought the Latin-derived Swedish script was too closely bound up with the Roman Catholic Church, whose triumphant march had gone hand in hand with the progress of the Latin language. Returning to the runes, Bureus argued, would spark a new renaissance in Sweden and unlock enormous creative energies. One law was actually passed in 1611 forbidding the publication of the regular Swedish grammar books in favor of the runes, and Bureus worked on inventing a more flexible, cursive form. But otherwise this dreamy plan does not seem to have gotten very far.

  Neither, for that matter, did most of Bureus’s literary works. He had a very difficult time completing his projects, and so, at the time of his death in 1652, virtually the entire bulk of his life’s work remained buried in unfinished manuscripts. Rudbeck, however, was more than glad to continue investigating the runes where Bureus and his successors had stopped.

  APPLYING HIS MEASURING staff to the soil around the stones, Rudbeck read the layers of humus, the accumulations of the rich fertile soil that, given their position, could have gathered only after the erection of the pillars. The age of the stones varied tremendously. Some were set up rather late, during the period A.D. 600–1100, a very conventional date for the many late Viking inscriptions found around Uppsala. But other inscriptions, Rudbeck was convinced, must have been significantly older. Some, he thought, dated all the way back to 2300–2200 B.C. And if this calculation was accurate, then the findings would be extraordinary.

  This would mean that the Swedes had started carving the runic letters only a few hundred years after they had arrived in the land around Uppsala. Given conventional chronologies, this was an exceptionally early date, about one thousand years before the Trojan War or the first Olympic games. In other words, if Rudbeck’s measurements were correct—and a reported twelve thousand tests had convinced him they were an “infallible” method of dating—then Bureus had been right: Sweden had one of the oldest alphabets in the world.

  Further explorations in the countryside followed, and other surprising implications ensued. After closely reading the inscriptions found on the runic monoliths, Rudbeck had come to believe that these mysterious letters were actually the origin of the ancient Greek alphabet. A little historical detective work started the chain of reasoning that led to this stunning conclusion about the Swedish runes, the Hyperborean hieroglyphics.

  One crucial piece of evidence came from the first-century Roman natural historian Pliny, who discussed the history of the Greek language in his multivolume Natural History. This ardent searcher of secrets had noted some intriguing facts about the development of the ancient language. Most interestingly, the Greek alphabet did not always have twenty-four letters. Pliny had concluded that in its earliest period of formation, before the Trojan War, the Greek language had had only sixteen letters. As Rudbeck looked further into the claim, which was based on many older sources, he agreed. From Plutarch to Aristotle, the ancients “spoke with one mouth” that there were at first only sixteen letters. The earliest Greek alphabet had consisted of the following:

  Α Β Γ Δ Ε Ι Κ Λ Μ Ν Ο Π Ρ Σ Τ Υ

  The other eight letters—Θ Ξ Φ Χ Ζ Η Ψ Ω—were added later.

  This piece of information from the cautious collector came as a revelation to Olof Rudbeck. He began to wonder even more about traditional accounts of the origins of the ancient Greek alphabet. According to these, the Greeks developed their letters from the Phoenicians, the ancient Semitic people living on the far eastern shores of the Mediterranean and still today credited with creating the oldest alphabet. But Pliny’s passing comment raised an intriguing question. If the Phoenician script had twenty-two letters, as modern authorities from Joseph Scaliger to Samuel Bochart knew, then Rudbeck asked: How did the Greeks end up with only sixteen of the twenty-two letters they had supposedly borrowed? Why would they prefer to take only part of a script, and what happened to the other Phoenician letters?

  It was highly unlikely, Rudbeck ventured, that the ancients would take a more complete and self-sufficient script and turn it into a truncated and incomplete one. No one would do that, he said, in his pragmatic approach to the question. Additionally, there was the strange case of the letters that the Greeks certainly had but were nowhere to be found in Phoenician. How, for instance, did the Greeks end up with alpha (Α), epsilon (Ε), iota (Ι), upsilon (Υ), or any other vowel, when no such letters existed among the Phoenicians? Besides, Rudbeck’s crash initiation into eastern antiquities, together with his typically unapologetic directness, made him think that the Greek letters were simply too different from their alleged counterparts to conclude that they were at one time the same letters. The runes adorning the standing stones in the Swedish landscape, on the other hand, were an altogether different matter.

  To Rudbeck, the sixteen original Greek letters seemed very similar to the sixteen symbols that he believed to be the oldest runic script. Placing the two alphabets side by side, Rudbeck saw, through his Atlantis-tinted glasses, a string of correspondences between the Greek and the runic. How similar they sounded! How similar the letters looked! How similarly they were drawn! The short, simple angular thrusts, in linear fashion, without any adornment, made Rudbeck absolutely sure that Swedish runic and ancient Greek were once the same script.

  Alpha (Α), beta (Β), gamma (Γ), delta (Δ), right down the list, no less than thirteen of the original sixteen Greek letters fit like a glove (see table on facing page). The last three letters, Ε, Κ, and Π, however, were not as easily found.

  Unable to solve this riddle, Rudbeck began to look at specific Greek words that used these letters and then compare them with words in Old Swedish that meant the same thing. In this way, for instance, Rudbeck came to believe that the Greek Κ (kappa) was derived from the Swedish H. The Swedish word for “heart,” hiarta, as the anatomist suggested, had become the Greek kardia.

  Rudbeck’s table highlights the similarities between the runic and the ancient Greek alphabets.

  The Greek pi
(Π) likewise revealed itself in the Swedish F. Rudbeck saw common words such as father, or fader, become the Greek pater , sensing what is now a well-established link shared among Indo-European languages. The famous figure of Greek mythology, Pan, or the horned, goat-legged, and mischievous god of antiquity, known for startling travelers (hence a “panic”), was originally the Swedish Fan, another horned, goat-legged figure who haunted the forests, and whose name is the word that today still is used in Swedish for “devil.” However ludicrous this may sound, Rudbeck had not lost his mind. What he had lost was perspective and, all too often, a sense of reality. And so Rudbeck went on happily deriving many Greek words from a Swedish origin, each one adding to the accumulating pile of evidence about the Swedish impact on the ancient past, and each one, at the same time, showing how ingenious his delusions could be.

  PROBABLY ONE OF the most creative pieces of evidence about the runic origins of ancient Greek developed naturally from Rudbeck’s previous work on the Olympian god Hermes.

  As the half-brother of Apollo, and the herald of Zeus, both already found in Sweden, Hermes must have seemed a natural candidate for a Swedish Atlantean. Equipped with his golden winged sandals and winged hat, he was also the chosen guide for escorting many souls through the “dank ways,” over the “snowy rock,” and past the “narrows of the sunset,” to the “wastes at the world’s end,” that is, to the kingdom of the Underworld, which Rudbeck had also already located in the Arctic north.

  Sure enough, Rudbeck believed that he had come across the original inspiration for the Olympian Hermes in the north: the Aesir god Heimdall. Like Hermes, who was praised for keeping watch over the house, the business, the family (perhaps explaining why Hermes was the most often sculptured of all the classical gods), “splendid Heimdall” was the watchman for the Norse Aesir. As Hermes relayed messages to mortals and immortals alike, Heimdall was the communicator for the Aesir gods. The similarities between the classical and Norse deities continued, though Rudbeck had to force them somewhat.