Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World

by David King

  He is the worst economist, and greatest waster in the world, maintains numerous staff, runs a big table and pays out large sums for his furniture, his gardens, and his enterprises.

  According to court rumors, the count had no fewer than forty or fifty different building projects all in progress at the same time on his estates. Whether he was constructing churches, adding wings to hospitals, or embellishing his favorite gardens with the latest fashions, whatever he touched tended to take on immense proportions. The count seemed to be building everywhere, almost all the time, and with very little sense of restraint. On the banks of the river at Lidköping, he was even building his own city.

  At that point in the early 1670s, De la Gardie clearly seemed at the top of the world, and it is easy to understand that he looked untouchable. But then again, it had seemed that way once before. In the middle of the 1640s, De la Gardie had returned to Sweden from his studies on the Continent speaking French like a “Frenchman” and a master of the latest Parisian fashions. Everyone admired his gift of sparkling conversation, and he lacked, as one Frenchman put it, “none of the qualities which should win him friends.”

  Just back from his grand tour, De la Gardie caught the eye of young Queen Christina, and she took quite a liking to the dashing gentleman. In fact, he became her obvious favorite. Generously disposed to those she liked, and apparently seeing him as a kindred soul, the queen showered him with gifts, titles, and honors on an unprecedented scale. She paid his personal debts, which had already reached the enormous sum of twenty thousand riksdaler. Courtiers looked on at the gallant spectacle that surrounded Sweden’s uncrowned prince of the court.

  But then the count received some startling news. It came in a letter from Her Majesty at the end of 1653 informing him, “I am from henceforth incapable to have any other apprehension for you than that of pity, which nevertheless can nothing avail you, since yourself hath made useless the thoughts of bounty which I had for you.” She added her blunt determination to break all contact with such a worthless and weak soul.

  Did the queen’s angry letter mask a deep affection, perhaps spurned love, or did it merely reflect more mundane power shifts at court? Christina was starting to favor a newly arrived French doctor, Pierre Bourdelot, who had cured her of an ailment and, she thought, saved her life. At this point, De la Gardie watched jealously as he lost ground to the upstart physician, and his own behavior precipitated the whole confusing affair. The last face-to-face encounter between the queen and her courtier, in late November 1653, had indeed been awkward.

  Evidently feeling his influence slipping away at court, De la Gardie contrived a reason to address the matter with the queen. He claimed to have heard word of her disapproval of him, and when the queen asked about his sources, he stalled, very reluctantly mentioning names. When the queen checked out De la Gardie’s alleged sources, the whole thing backfired. There was nothing “grand, beautiful, or noble in his actions,” she fumed. In light of the embarrassing scene that followed, many trace the count’s fall not to some unreturned love, but rather to De la Gardie’s own insecurities about his position. At any rate, whatever the ultimate causes, the results were all too clear.

  The letter was the first in a long line of losses. Titles, honors, and privileges started to disappear, generally announced at irregular, unpredictable intervals, with understandably a more crushing effect. Then the count saw his cool ostracization thaw into an icy official banishment that turned the former twentysomething superstar into a thirty-one-year-old apparent has-been. Nothing, the queen said, would change her mind. And she meant it, much to the displeasure of De la Gardie, his friends, and his mother, who came to plead with the queen. Even Christina’s future successor, Charles, could not convince her of De la Gardie’s merits.

  Nothing worked, that is, until Queen Christina left the Swedish throne. Once she moved to Rome, and brought the famous Vasa dynasty to a close, the Pfaltz family captured the throne under Christina’s cousin, Charles X Gustav. Among other things, the new king had strong family ties to De la Gardie, not to mention having been swayed by his undeniable charm. Now, with De la Gardie’s cousin and brother-in-law Charles X Gustav in the saddle, Sweden was preparing for the count’s triumphant return. After the king’s coronation in 1654, offices slowly started to come his way again, and he enjoyed them with his usual flair, though his real break came six years later.

  At the death by pneumonia of King Charles X in 1660, Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie experienced a quick, sudden elevation that once again landed him at the top. He was named Chancellor of the Realm, with the power to authorize everything that should be executed in the king’s name. The count was made responsible for all foreign policy and a considerable part of domestic policy; he would in fact lead the government until the future king—then only four years old—came of age.

  Such experiences with the stresses of power, not to mention the wild uncertainties of fortune, had undoubtedly exaggerated the count’s already impulsive behavior. He could bounce unpredictably from one idea to another, one project to another, one favorite to another. He appeared whimsical and wavering. Even at the height of his authority, De la Gardie was racked by terrible self-doubt.

  Additionally, as the threats of international war and economic stagnation loomed, De la Gardie would find himself increasingly and publicly challenged. He also found himself resorting to old tactics. When things did not go his way, he would often get up in the middle of a debate and go home. Advocates well versed in the principles of power politics strongly advised him against such rash actions, as did his own sister, Maria Sofia, who correctly saw the risks of fleeing to the countryside in the heat of a debate.

  By the early 1670s, the vicissitudes of fortune and the volatilities of the passions reigning at the center of power had confirmed his worst fears. He felt vulnerable once again. Worries consumed him, and made him especially prone to fits of anxiety. As many of his allies learned, far too often it seemed that De la Gardie nervously yielded under challenge. He seemed too unreliable and much too mauled by second-guessing phantoms. Shunning confrontation and indulging a tendency to fret, this gentleman was hardly a modern paladin.

  Such was the man that Uppsala’s scholars hoped to attract to Rudbeck’s search. And indeed De la Gardie seemed overjoyed with the news from the academy. He could not have been more enthusiastic about Rudbeck’s quest. The question, though, was how long the attraction would last.

  ESTEEM FROM THIS powerful man and the learned historians must have been exhilarating, but it could hardly compare with the excitement sparked by the maps and the manuscripts. Armed, too, with his new archaeological dating method, Rudbeck made progress on his search with lightning speed. The secrets of the distant past could now be teased from the nearest burial mound, and faint signs of this forgotten world rendered more clearly than ever before. With an instinct as sharp and exact as any compass he had made, Rudbeck wondered if he stood on the verge of unlocking the secrets to some of the greatest mysteries of all time. And he was delirious with joy.

  But what difficulties lay ahead—centuries of error and ignorance had covered the trail with “tall, terrifyingly impenetrable overgrowth.” To clear this path, he would need a combination of historical knowledge, language skills, and an uncanny ability for uncovering clues and deciphering them correctly. Distant, often obscure, and almost always ambiguous, the evidence would need the rigor of the scientific method. Yet it would also need a bold, almost reckless ability to see the world in a new way. Success in this quest, as he was just starting to see, would require a delicate balancing act indeed.

  There were already nagging questions about the people buried in the giant mounds of Old Uppsala. If their civilization was really so old, and he had repeatedly confirmed this, why hadn’t the ancients written more about them? Why hadn’t they, for that matter, written more about themselves, leaving a large body of literature like the Greeks and the Romans? Surely such a sophisticated civilization could not have escaped the
notice of every single ancient observer.

  These were serious matters that needed to be addressed. As he tried to figure out why the ancient Scandinavians had not written more about their civilization, other than the “beautifully carved runes” adorning the stones, Rudbeck would venture into one of his many provocative discussions about the nature of history.

  The lack of a written record, he conjectured, actually made perfect sense. Civilizations experiencing golden ages were not likely to write; presumably they were too busy enjoying peace, prosperity, and the good life. History as we know it comes only with more difficult times. Whether wars, invasions, or civil strife, conflict on a grand scale is needed to give rise to history, and to inspire stirring narratives. With no struggle, there was no history, he suggested. In the process, Rudbeck was anticipating some fertile musings about the “philosophy of history” that flourished among fashionable Romantic thinkers of the nineteenth century. One of these leading figures, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, put the idea more famously: “The periods of good fortune form [history’s] emptiest pages.”

  Feeling that he had solved the problem of the silent golden age, Rudbeck did not, unfortunately, develop this thought, or the idea of struggle, further. If he had, his commentary would probably have made an interesting read. For the role of struggle in history would have a long life, not least with Hegel and one of his readers, Karl Marx, who elaborated the notion and made it a cornerstone of his understanding of the entire historical process. All history, Marx would later say, was about struggle: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” The centrality of conflict would indeed last a long time in standard historiography—that is, until the rise of analytical schools that would show other ways to craft the past that did not rely on clash-driven narratives.

  As for the first and more immediate problem—the lack of references to Scandinavian civilization in ancient texts—there was a possible solution. Many Greek and Latin writers had recorded impressions about the Hyperboreans, and a number of Swedish thinkers had started to wonder if this enigmatic nation might have been located in the far north of Sweden. Olaus Verelius, for one, had already given much thought to the matter, and considered the possibility almost a certainty. So did his teacher, the poet and philosopher Georg Stiernhielm, as did his teacher Johan Bureus at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Even before that, some medieval continental thinkers, including Adam of Bremen and Albertus Krantzius, had placed the Hyperboreans on maps of Sweden.

  Despite all the lively speculation, however, no one had been able to prove or disprove that the Hyperboreans had actually lived in Sweden. Both Bureus and Stiernhielm had devoted years to the study, but both, unfortunately, died before they could realize their ambitions. The vast majority of their reflections about this ancient people had in fact never been published, and existed only in the form of manuscripts.

  Given this state of affairs, Verelius would prove to be highly useful to Rudbeck’s search. He knew the traditions about the Hyperboreans, having discussed them regularly in his commentaries to the sagas. He had access to the unpublished works of his teacher, Stiernhielm, which he almost certainly loaned to Rudbeck. By the early 1670s, too, Verelius was regularly reading Rudbeck’s own notes, gladly offering advice and guidance.

  Verelius was, in many ways, helping Rudbeck navigate through the sea of speculation that placed the original home of the Hyperboreans everywhere from Celtic Britain to the Netherlands to Siberia (and in modern times, Oxford University’s professor of Greek E. R. Dodds proposed China). The Hyperboreans were placed all over the “north,” anywhere that could conceivably be understood as “beyond the north wind”—that is, when authorities did not dismiss them outright as myth, as most would do today.

  The more Rudbeck read about the people, however, the more familiar the Hyperboreans sounded. Ancient travelers venturing into their lands described them as tall and healthy, and enjoying great fame for their wisdom, righteousness, and justice. They worshiped outdoors, in sacred groves. With flutes and lyres, laurel-wreathed Hyperboreans danced and sang praises to their chief deity, Apollo, the archer god with his silver bow who came down to visit them every nineteen years. Everything Rudbeck heard and read sounded like a portrait of his northerners, a people who were building burial mounds long before the beginnings of classical civilization.

  With the help of Verelius and his manuscripts, Rudbeck would try to be the one who could finally find the Hyperboreans, and show that they had once lived in Sweden. The paths he blazed would be far from conventional.

  READING WIDELY IN ancient Greek accounts, Rudbeck felt that he had stumbled upon a fundamental error that had long caused confusion, and had kept the Hyperboreans enveloped in a gilded mist. He explained, “It often happens that when one people hears the name of another people, and cannot determine its meaning, they willingly interpret it according to their own language.”

  Ancient Greeks had, in other words, heard the name of the Hyperboreans and, not knowing its original meaning, had interpreted it as if it were a word in their own language: hyper meaning “beyond” and borea referring to Boreas, the north wind. This etymology made sense, at least in Greek, and sounded poetic, but Rudbeck wondered how a foreign people, Hyperboreans, with their own distinct language, could have a name that might meaningfully be reduced to Greek etymologies. Such an interpretation was bound to make mistakes, and create what Rudbeck called “strange animals.”

  In his mind, the word Hyperborean was clearly Swedish, and he had found evidence in the village of Ekholm, outside Uppsala.

  There stood a stone with two intertwining dragons, and carved on the back of one of them was the word Yfwerborne (pronounced ew-ver-BOR-nuh). The Greek word for the Hyperboreans is pronounced hew-per-BOR-eh-oi. Their similarities can be seen below:

  The main difference between these two words, as Rudbeck saw it, was the second syllable, with an f sound in Swedish and a p (π) sound in Greek. This could, however, easily be explained by the dynamics of the consonant shift that show how easily f and p change over time and across borders. Rudbeck cited many examples of this phenomenon: from the word for father, Swedish fader and Greek pater , to the word for fire, Swedish fyr and Greek pyr . (As for the suffixes, ne and oi, these were just standard plural endings.) In other words, the Swedish runic inscription Yfwerborne was basically a direct match to the Greek .

  With his burning interest in antiquities, Rudbeck quickly realized that this was not a stray find. Surviving examples of the Swedish Hyperboreans were turning up in many places. There was, for instance, a preservation of this memory in an old song he knew, a tune that ended every refrain with the thunderous words, “The Yfwerborne Swedes who conquered every land.”

  The breakthrough discovery about this people, however, came when Rudbeck pored over the old Norse sagas and eddas. In an old manuscript of the Icelandic poet Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, actually one of the oldest copies in existence, Rudbeck found a reference to a figure that was described in typically Hyperborean terms: “beautiful in appearance, big and powerful.” The name of this northerner was, interestingly, Bore. He was the founder of a family that would be praised to the skies. According to Norse mythology, Bore was the first god who appeared on earth, and his son Bor would be the father of Odin, “the greatest and most glorious that we know.” In other words, this Bore—whoever he was—was remembered as the ancestor of Odin, his wife Frigg, and, as the Edda made clear, many of the leading Aesir gods who would rule “heavens and earth.” The manuscript would also credit the children of Bor for going on to do many splendid deeds, from creating the first human beings to constructing Midgard, the fortress of the earth.

  Inside this passage were many “riddles” that Rudbeck felt needed clarification, and indeed he would spend most of his life trying to separate the history from the mythology. For now, though, the claim that Bor’s children ruled over the “heavens and earth” could be seen as a poetic cele
bration of ancient kings, much like the praises that Egyptian priests heaped on the pharaohs for commanding the sun to rise and the Nile to flood. The more Rudbeck read the stories of the children of Bor, the more he thought that these tales preserved distant memories of an advanced people who were building civilization in the north. Their deeds were so illustrious that they had been remembered over time as the achievements of gods.

  So far the legacy of the Hyperboreans was revealed by the fallen warriors in the burial mounds, the figures commemorated on the standing stones, the Yfwerborne celebrated in the tavern song, and the mythic “children of Bor” honored in the old Norse manuscripts. A glance at a map of Sweden showed many other surviving memories as well. The names Bore and Bor had lived on in many places around the kingdom: Boresland in the north (Terra Borealis), Borsfiord (Mare Borealis), Borö (Bore’s Island), Bore’s siön (Bore’s Sea), Boreswik (Bore’s Bay), Borristelle (Bore’s Place), and so on.

  All of this added up to Rudbeck’s new understanding of the word Hyperborean. The ancient Greeks had spelled the word correctly, though they had made a mistake in interpreting its origin and its meaning. The term did not stem from Greek words meaning “beyond the north wind,” but instead, coming from the Swedish Yfwerborne, the word derived from one of two possibilities. Either it referred to the founding king Bore and his illustrious descendants, the Boreades, or, alternatively, it came from the Swedish words yfwer, “high,” and borne, “born,” referring to the “highborn” or elite Boreades who surrounded the king. Either way, these were the true Hyperboreans of classical legend.