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

by David King

  IF APOLLO WAS Swedish, and his mother Swedish, what about the father—could Zeus also be Swedish? Logically, building upon the Apollo-Balder identity, you might think that Rudbeck would look for Apollo’s dad in Balder’s dad, the Norse god Odin.

  After all, both Zeus and Odin were regarded as the chiefs of their respective worlds, Olympus and Valhalla. With long white beards and unrivaled authority, Zeus and Odin alike sat on their thrones, beholding the vast panorama of divine and human events as they unfolded. They had also reached this lofty summit in a similar way, that is, with the violent overthrow of their rivals. Even the means of destruction were similar. Zeus had disposed of the Titan Cronos in a gruesome way, usually depicted as castration, and Odin had likewise, as the Edda tells us, “dismembered” the frost giant Ymir.

  But Rudbeck did not make the Zeus-Odin connection, probably because the difficulties of trying to reconcile such formidable figures would soon have been overwhelming. For the more one looks into the stories about Zeus and Odin, the more different they seem. Zeus was insatiable in his lust, chasing goddesses, mortals, and indeed just about anything that moved. This sex-crazed god was almost literally the father of all things. Although Odin was also known to engage in a few affairs and was specifically called “All-Father,” this Norse god was admittedly something of a contrast.

  Odin often seemed far away from the moment, brooding over the terrible things that awaited. He took less pleasure in his food, eating no meat and, unlike his fellow gods, drinking only wine. The stern figure just gave his portions to the two wolves at his side, and listened attentively to the two ravens perched on his shoulder who returned to the great hall each night at dinner with tidings from around the world. Odin’s great loves seemed to be knowledge and poetry, with no better illustration than the time he gave one of his eyes in exchange for a drink at the well of wit and wisdom. On inspection, the two chiefs of Olympus and Valhalla indeed marched in different directions: Zeus the protector of the laws, and Odin the patron god of thieves, outlaws, and the hanged. In so many important ways, one-eyed Odin, who spoke only in rhyme, seemed quite a bit different from the hardheaded Zeus.

  So with Rudbeck’s dexterity very much at work, another possibility would not have been far away, and this one had unlimited potential. For in many ways, an intriguing counterpart to Zeus could be seen in the Norse god Thor.

  Thor had the strength that was often attributed to the Olympian. “What lunatics, to quarrel with Zeus!” Hera said at one point in the Iliad. “For brute strength he is beyond question first among the gods.” Zeus was not above confirming his own prowess, bragging about how he could easily take on all the other gods put together. Thor worked better than Odin here, as a strong god, stronger than Odin, and, in the words of the Edda, quite simply the “strongest of all the gods.”

  Also, Zeus and Thor were quite close in temper and disposition. Both had violent outbursts and warlike spirits, and when the situation became dire, they would be called upon by the other gods for rescue. Again and again, in the battles with enemies, in both cases giants, the gods were staying alive, sometimes barely so, only because Thor or Zeus tipped the balance with his robust deeds.

  So when Zeus “the cloud gatherer” storms, Thor thunders—reveling in letting his own brand of “white-hot thunderbolts” fly, scorching his enemies to a crisp. He seems to enjoy nothing more than a good fight, bashing skulls and splitting heads. Thor was a wild force of nature, unpredictable in his explosions, and at times, like Zeus, with more than his share of the comical. Thor was more simpleminded than the subtle and crafty Odin; Thor’s immediate reaction was usually to swing his mighty hammer Miollnir, so “well-known to the frost-giants and the mountain-giants.” And for Zeus as well as Thor, this was the ultimate protector of order in the universe, and held in highest regard for preserving divine justice.

  Given all this and more, Rudbeck believed that Zeus and Thor had originally been the same figure. Indeed, in Rudbeck’s opinion, Zeus was a Swedish word, deriving from an old-fashioned term that meant, appropriately enough, “god.” Scholars had speculated for centuries on the meaning of Zeus’s name, proposing everything from “living,” “fertile,” and, referring perhaps to the lightning bolts, “heat.” None of these really impressed Rudbeck, who saw them as contradictory, incomplete, or just plain unsatisfactory, and wrote, “It is no wonder that they have made so many uncertain guesses on this matter, as Thor was foreign to them.”

  Had classical scholars been able to read Swedish and the Norse stories about Thor, they could have recognized Zeus long ago, realizing his name came from Thius, two compounds of “god” and “earth” (dy-), and son (someone born). In the meantime, if Thor was Zeus, as he believed he had proved, where did that leave Odin?

  Placing the stories side by side, and plotting out the various relationships, there was one glaring possibility for Odin in the king of the Underworld, Hades. The two, Hades and Odin, shared more than might at first appear. Like Hades ruling over the dead in classical mythology, Odin was the patron of dead soldiers, with his winged companions, the Valkyries, riding out to battlefields and choosing the slain to come to Odin’s hall, Valhalla, literally “hall of the slain.” After all, Rudbeck had already found the kingdom of Hades in the far north, indeed where the Norse sagas had arguably placed Odin’s halls. Rudbeck would mine classical and Norse mythologies for every similarity he could find to bring the dark, brooding Hades into Odin’s Valhalla.

  By linking the Swedish Thor to the Greek Zeus, and the Swedish Odin to the classical Hades, not to mention the sea god Niord to the classical Neptune or Poseidon, Rudbeck had come full circle in his investigation, all the way back to Plato and the dialogues on lost Atlantis, when the armies of the power-crazed kingdom undertook ambitious wars of expansion. Could these ancient Greek figures, Zeus, Apollo, and the other Olympians, be surviving memories of that Atlantean aggression which Rudbeck believed had brought the Swedes to the banks of the Nile and the rocky hills of Athens?

  The Norse gods Odin, Thor, and Frigge, once rulers of Atlantis.

  To the bitter end, Rudbeck would be convinced of this startling revision of world history, and see it as yet further evidence that Atlantis, despite some temporary missing links, had been found in Sweden.

  SUCH SENSATIONAL DISCOVERIES were undoubtedly affecting Rudbeck’s behavior. He began to dress more simply than ever, much as he envisioned the ideals of the ancient Swedes before their fall. Quite radically, he decided to print university programs in Swedish, not Latin, as he believed that this Atlantic, or Swedish, language lay at the root of both Latin and Greek. Rudbeck was one of the first scholars ever to use Swedish so prominently at a university. He explained his reasoning thus: since he had not yet discovered “that Aristotle or Cicero ever honored the Gothic or Scythian tongue (which is the oldest),” Rudbeck planned to do the same. He would address the university “in good, pure Swedish, our mother tongue.”

  Such maverick disregard for tradition outraged many of his enemies, who feared that foreign scholars would mock Uppsala for discarding the international language of the learned. As one member of the College of Antiquities grumbled, “They will think this is only a school for children.”

  As was often the case with Rudbeck, his ambitions would grow with time, and one can only wonder at his plans for the future. For if he could not find the palace of Atlantis in Old Uppsala, then perhaps he felt he could at least build it in the heart of the university. His design for the new main university building, which he had been asked to draw up, shows more than a passing resemblance to the great royal palace of Atlantis. It was enormous like the palace Plato had described; and the decorations for the new university building were Atlantean right down to the Nereids, the sea nymphs riding dolphins that were to adorn the columns of the magnificent façade.

  The project was, however, never fulfilled, given the great expenses involved and the sluggish economy of the 1670s. Unfortunately the same forces were straining Rudbeck’s search
for Atlantis, and threatening to make it end up like his unrealized plans for the university building.

  Almost immediately after his book went to press, in March 1677, enormous sums of money were being consumed by this antiquarian project. By April the investment was costing a staggering fifty-four daler a week just to keep the production running, and soon even this did not suffice. By November, eight months later, Rudbeck had already pledged two thousand daler silvermynt to cover the labor of the printer and another thousand for purchasing the huge stacks of paper required to print the bulging text—in both Swedish and Latin parallel texts—with an ambitious initial print run of five hundred copies.

  Another couple of hundred daler silvermynt went for larger-sized paper to be used in the lavish volume of images and maps. After all, with the Argonauts’ reconstructed voyage, the finds at the capital city of Atlantis, and the images from the expedition to the Underworld, these once luxurious accessories were quickly becoming a necessity, perhaps even a priority. New maps of ancient Sweden were also drafted, and none of this was exactly cheap. Together they added another two thousand daler silvermynt for the wood and copper engravings, as well as six hundred in wages for the assistants in the printer’s shop.

  Rudbeck’s salary as a professor simply could not cover all these expenses. Just six months after Atlantica went to press, the costs of printing ran to almost six thousand daler silvermynt—and this at a time when a professor’s annual earnings were about seven hundred! At the same time, nothing in this figure even remotely made allowances for all the time and energy that Rudbeck had devoted to the project, or his own personal financing of the expeditions to the Underworld, or to observe the Hyperborean mountains.

  Given the epic proportions of the search and the equally colossal costs, what had initially looked like a dream now seemed a nightmare. The professor could not ask the count for the shortfall. Although always generous with his gold, De la Gardie no longer had so much to give; the combination of lavish lifestyle and a severe downturn in the Swedish economy had considerably reduced his treasury. Worse by far were the nasty politics of the time. The losses in the war were blamed on the regency, and increasingly De la Gardie took most of the responsibility for the sorry state of affairs.

  And one year after the king’s coronation in 1675, the financial support promised by Charles XI had not arrived. “Times were difficult,” Rudbeck tried to explain, and a lot of people in town were on edge, waiting for him to pay off the debts he had accumulated. Another year passed and Rudbeck was still politely asking the count to remind the king of the money. Unfortunately, though, De la Gardie was finding himself far outside the royal inner circle. As the war with Denmark intensified and Sweden strove to marshal available resources, the prospects of receiving the king’s gold seemed more distant than ever.

  But the project must not die. As though it were a gigantic puzzle, Rudbeck was finding novel solutions to some of the oldest, most perplexing problems in ancient history—and gradually putting together the missing pieces to form a spectacular picture of the past. Classical mythology continued to bend under the weight of Rudbeck’s erudition, his enthusiasm, and indeed his obsession. In his mind, everything pointed to this ancient golden age of ice and frost under the North Star.

  With the count mired in his difficulties and the king’s money nowhere to be found, Rudbeck scrambled to keep the search afloat. He borrowed money from friends, sold paper he had set aside for his books, begged for extra time in paying the printing costs, and even took loans from students—anything to prevent the work from suffering an early death. In the end Rudbeck even pawned the family silver.

  His frantic actions kept the project alive for the moment, but trouble came from an unexpected source.

  12

  HANGING BY A THREAD

  Dorian is far too wise not to do foolish things now and then, my dear Basil.

  —OSCAR WILDE, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

  DESPITE ANGERED COUNCIL members, theologians retrenched for battle, and antiquarians still grumbling over Rudbeck’s audacious moves to protect his printer, the new challenge was not to come from the most likely camps. Nor was it even that someone was offended when the Swedish physician dared to place the halls of Hades in their homeland, or pulled the pagan temple of Atlantis out from the walls of a prominent church. The problem, actually, was worse.

  This was a simple, nonpartisan objection that was inspired at first by largely intellectual motivations. Back in the 1650s, while Rudbeck was still busy avoiding his anatomy lectures and dabbling in his new botanical garden, a celebrated classical scholar named Johannes Schefferus had begun his own investigations into the early history of Uppsala.

  A short man with a long nose, who reportedly always wore a silk cape, Schefferus was probably Sweden’s most prominent classical humanist. He had married the daughter of Professor Loccenius, the president of the College of Antiquities, and on the occasion of his wedding ceremony, he danced for the only time in his life. Like his father-in-law, Schefferus was another serious, talented German thinker who had come over to Uppsala University and found himself smitten by the glowing patriotism of his adopted country. Locking himself in his study overlooking the river, Schefferus devoted almost every waking hour to unhampered scholarship.

  With this love of learning, Schefferus had tackled the early history of Uppsala, publishing his discoveries in a lavish work of scholarship, Upsalia (1666). The product of over a decade of study, Upsalia traced the history of the university town from its pagan origins through the conversion to Christianity and the flourishing of the modern diocese centered in the majestic cathedral. In this work, Schefferus advanced an argument that the famous temple of Old Uppsala had not actually been in Old Uppsala. It had stood instead, he claimed, right in the heart of the modern town of Uppsala, down from the cathedral and near the present Trinity Church.

  In fact, by the time Schefferus was through with his study, Old Uppsala itself was not even in Old Uppsala—that, too, was located in the modern university town. Although this theory is now known to be incorrect, Schefferus’s revision was certainly still plausible in the seventeenth century. And with a forceful advocate in Professor Schefferus, this rival theory could potentially have much appeal in the learned world. It could also, undoubtedly, cause considerable trouble for Olof Rudbeck, making his work in progress, as he would later say, “not worth reading, much less printing.”

  The first salvos in this controversy had been fired by Olaus Verelius when he published his edition of the Hervararsaga in 1672. While he was working on his scholarly notes for this Norse tale, Verelius found many shortcomings with Schefferus’s theory, which he thought relied too heavily on late evidence of questionable value. Indeed it was fairly easy for him to undermine the basis of Schefferus’s position.

  Verelius also received help from Rudbeck, whose investigations of the Old Uppsala burial mounds satisfactorily showed the great antiquity of the Swedish civilization. Rudbeck’s new staff confirmed that there were no older burial mounds than those found at the traditional location. No fewer than 665 burial mounds dated back almost four thousand years, to 2100 B.C., years before the outbreak of the Trojan War and the brilliant flowering of classical civilization.

  This very point made Schefferus’s work all the more indigestible. When placing the old temple and the town in modern Uppsala, Schefferus had also claimed that the famous pagan temple was not really all that old. He pointed to the historical sources, such as the Norse chronicler Snorri Sturluson, who claimed that the temple had not been founded until the reign of King Frei, that is, just before the birth of Christ. And if this temple dated back only to the first century, how could it have been, as Rudbeck was in the process of claiming, the lost golden temple of Atlantis? Besides, what would Schefferus’s claim, if proved, have to say about the reliability of Rudbeck’s archaeological dating methods, which had repeatedly confirmed a much greater antiquity?

  Schefferus’s Upsalia, in other words, challeng
ed the very basis of Rudbeck’s work in progress. Initially the dispute was conducted in the usual scholarly fashion of debate and discussion. Schefferus pointed to his sources, which were mainly medieval textual references to the Old Uppsala temple. Verelius was quick to answer with powerful counterarguments, complete with support from even older Norse manuscripts in De la Gardie’s collection, which Schefferus had not seen, and supplemented further by Rudbeck’s discoveries in the field. At this point, in the late spring of 1677, Schefferus opted for a different strategy. He asked the chancellor of Uppsala University, Count de la Gardie, to impose an act of censorship, strictly forbidding any further discussion of this issue.

  This was an excellent time for Schefferus’s unexpected request. De la Gardie could not have been more distracted, given the war, his fears of his enemies’ plots in Stockholm, and his obvious unease as these same rivals were making themselves indispensable to the young king. In May 1677 the count’s reply reached Uppsala. Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie expressed his displeasure at the behavior of the dueling scholars Verelius and Schefferus. Then he stressed the importance, indeed the necessity, of putting a stop to this incessant quarreling. He felt so “tired and sorry” about the state of affairs at the academy, with the scholarly disputes so “inconveniently and unreasonably” feeding on each other. No longer would any printer be allowed to churn the presses to contribute to this rotten state. The count ordered an immediate ban on the printing of materials related to this dispute.

  What must have particularly upset Rudbeck and Verelius was that immediately before making this appeal, Professor Schefferus had finished writing his own commentary on the controversy and then rushed it out of town to be printed secretly in Stockholm. Without following the customary procedures, Schefferus raced the work from the printer to the market at a “dizzying speed.”