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

6

GAZING AT THE FACE OF THOR

Not only I, but the whole world, seemed filled with delight. The animals, the houses, even the weather itself reflected the universal joy and serenity… .

—LUCIUS APULEIUS, THE GOLDEN ASS

THE MAN THEY HAD in mind was Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie, and he sat in a peculiar position. Called “the most beautiful man in the world,” he was a true cavalier who dazzled the court with his wit and charm. As the Chancellor of the Realm, controlling ambassadors, resident diplomats, and the machinery of foreign policy, De la Gardie effectively stood at the summit of authority at a time when Sweden had reached the zenith of its power.

Behind all the thundering pomp lay a colossal fortune. The count owned about one thousand farms and a couple of hundred estates spread all over Sweden and the Baltic region. Some of these properties were sizable indeed. His castle straddling the beautiful Lake Vänern in west Sweden, Läckö, for instance, had 248 rooms, and 176 servants caring for his every whim. That is, when the he happened to be there, and not at one of his other castles. There were four others alone just in Stockholm and on its outskirts. Ranging from stony medieval fortresses to sprawling baroque spectacles, at least two dozen castles then belonged to Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie.

Both Verelius and Loccenius knew that the count could, if he wanted, be of great assistance to Olof Rudbeck. He had the power, the wealth, and the status that they lacked—and, more than that, he was known to spend lavishly on parties as well as projects. One observer, an Italian ambassador writing a few months after the Uppsala scholars, noted De la Gardie’s restless pursuits:

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 celebration 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.

To find out more, Rudbeck would attempt to use every form of evidence that might conceivably shed light on this enigmatic people and their proposed home in Sweden. His search would, in the process, lead him to make a final break with traditional historians, whose work at that time consisted primarily in the interpreting and commenting on written accounts. In a sense, the deeper Rudbeck pressed into the old traditions, the more necessary it was to find new ways to understand what he saw as their true meaning. Sometimes the results were innovative; at other times they were odd at best.

RUDBECK WAS DETERMINED to show what the lyric poet Pindar would call “the wondrous way” to the blessed Hyperboreans. What if, however, this legendary people had never really existed, other than as the inhabitants of an imagined utopia, a dreamland for classical Greece? After all, it is striking to see how many ancients had their doubts. The oldest historian, Herodotus, for example, expressed his skepticism about the existence of the Hyperboreans:

I will not tell the tale of Abaris, who was supposed to have been a Hyperborean, and carried his arrow all round the world without eating a bite. Let me just add, however, that, if Hyperboreans exist “beyond the north-wind” there must also be Hypernotians “beyond the south.”

Other authorities from the geographer Strabo to the natural historian Pliny joined him in their hesitancy, though Rudbeck remained unfazed.

No wonder, he thought, that many intelligent people had questioned whether or not the Hyperboreans had existed. Knowledge of the north had somehow disappeared over time, leaving an unfortunate accumulation of errors that had confused the ancients. For example, many sources had stated that the Hyperborean isle was “not smaller than Sicily.” Yet, if you look at ancient maps, including those from the most famous and influential geographer, Ptolemy, Sweden would not even satisfy this minimal requirement. Antiquity’s greatest geographers had shrunk Sweden so much that it actually looked smaller than Sicily, mistaking the far southern tip of the peninsula, Skåne, for the entire country.

Ptolemy’s original error, Rudbeck conceded, was made worse by a certain lazy ignorance on the part of his successors. Instead of investigating the matter for themselves, many scholars had simply copied Ptolemy’s view and, in the process, his mistakes. As this happened for centuries, error built upon error, leaving the mistake firmly ingrained, and the discovery of the true identity of the Hyperboreans indefinitely postponed.

History was like mapmaking, Rudbeck suggested: a geographer could not make a map by uncritically following the statements of others, or by relying solely on the experiences of other people. Rudbeck showed the futility with a story:

One time, I called over a number of students here at Uppsala from each province of Sweden, and asked them where such-and-such place lay in such-and-such province. When one said west, the other said southwest, one two miles, the other four miles.

With this method, it would be difficult to find anything. Because the students sometimes took different paths to the destinations, and some were better than others at measuring distance, the result was chaos. Even when he took advantage of actual maps of the regions, Rudbeck still could not make any sense out of the conflicting reports about the distant provinces as long as he sat hundreds of miles away, in a comfortable study in Uppsala. “How would Ptolemy, who sat down in Egypt and drew his maps as best he could using many writings of ancients and others, do any better?” he asked.

Once Rudbeck gained more confidence in peeling away the layers of errors, he would try to overcome the other objections by showing how much of the Hyperborean legacy still existed in Sweden. In this task, Rudbeck’s ingenuity and resourcefulness had few limits. When the ancients described the Hyperboreans as tall and healthy, Rudbeck knew how to find out. He wrote, “I have diligently examined all the large burial mounds, where skulls and whole skeletons have been found.” The size of the skeletons was sometimes enormous. “The largest ones have been five to six aln [ten to twelve feet!], although there were not many of them, but I have found countless skeletons four aln long [eight feet] or thereabouts.”

Rudbeck used many original manuscripts of Norse sagas in his search for Atlantis. This image, for example, comes from Snorri Sturluson’s Edda.

Too bad Rudbeck did not elaborate more on this rather odd passage. Hurrying to keep up with the rapid flow of his ideas, Rudbeck just noted how these skeletons showed the great height that the ancients attributed to the Hyperboreans, and then moved on to discuss other exciting finds. Legends of northern giants were well preserved in many places, not least in the Norse sagas.

The opening of Snorri’s Edda, the Gylfaginning, “the tricking of Gylfi,” told the memorable story of Thor and his companions’ journey to the land of the giants. When they entered the region called Utgard, somewhere in the far northeast, they saw a castle so enormous that they had to “bend their heads back to touch their spines before they could see up over.” The door alone was too large for Thor to open, leaving the gods, ungracefully, to squeeze their way into the giant stronghold in “between the bars” and slip into the great hall.

Besides fanciful and imaginative stories that held some kernels of truth, Rudbeck found evidence of the tall Hyperboreans in many other places. One time he assembled a number of Uppsala students and measured them. Dividing them into categories, according to their home provinces in the kingdom, Rudbeck dutifully measured and correlated his results. The tallest students indeed came from the north. He believed that height increased broadly the farther north one went, reaching a climax at about the 68th degree of latitude before dropping off significantly with the nomadic Saami in the farthest north.

Another prominent characteristic that had almost invariably appeared in the ancient discussions was that the giant Hyperboreans enjoyed a reputation for great health. Drawing on his experiences as a physician, Rudbeck was convinced that these stories reflected a truth he had often observed in his medical practice: the Swedes rarely succumbed to typhus fever, leprosy, the plague, and other nightmare contagions that struck so frequently on the Continent. Swedish health, he added, was not due to any inborn racial advantage, but stemmed instead from fundamental differences in the environment.

The legendary Hyperborean health was, in other words, explained by Sweden’s cold, brisk weather, which hardened the body’s resistance to disease, and a well-rounded diet also enhanced immunity. Apples, carrots, walnuts, and chestnuts formed a large part of the Swedish diet, Rudbeck noted, especially compared with other countries. Even more, his countrymen regularly consumed many kinds of meat like ox, pork, ham, and “countless fish and birds,” and this went, remarkably, also for the Swedish peasant. An entire day of food in Italy, he suspected, would equal only a hearty “Swedish breakfast.”

Such a fortunate combination of climate and diet was one reason why so many had marveled at the northerners’ resiliency, from the geographer Strabo, writing at the height of the Roman Empire, to Adam of Bremen, writing one thousand years later in the Holy Roman Empire. The Norse texts were also full of references to immortal realms of the north—not of course literally immortal, Rudbeck added, but rather references to the fact that the people lived such happy and healthy lives, overcoming sickness. In Rudbeck’s mind, Hyperborean tendencies and traditions had lived on in the stories of the legendary lands of the Undying, like that of King Gudmund in the Hervararsaga.

To show how this Hyperborean trait was a Swedish characteristic, Rudbeck asked his brother Nicholas for some help. As bishop of their hometown, Västerås, Nicholas Rudbeck granted access to the records of baptism for some twelve parishes between the years 1600 and 1673.

No fewer than 230 people had lived past the age of ninety in these years. There were some rather memorable examples, which Rudbeck of course relished. One old man named Israel in a small village supposedly had lived to the age of 156, and another one, Tor Ulfsson, was said to have lived to 260! He would then have lived, Rudbeck noted, to see his great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren, some “six, seven, or eight generations.”

During the course of his investigations, Rudbeck met many villagers whose wisdom intrigued him, when others would have scoffed. In a village outside Uppsala, Rudbeck learned to read runic staffs from a “wise peasant named Anders.” A runic staff was a roughly three-foot-long wooden staff that bore intricately carved runes, the ancient written language of Scandinavia. It was essentially a calendar that could work for every single year. Once you had a code, a symbol for a particular year, you could use that symbol to read the “heavenly clock,” and date the seasonal events. Uppsala’s distinguished professor would sit down and take lessons from the humblest of peasants.

One of Rudbeck’s most memorable experiences came years later, when one illiterate man taught him to use medieval runic staffs to predict celestial phenomena. Rudbeck the astronomer walked away amazed at how his colleagues of the scientific revolution were just learning to grasp the understanding of the stars shown by his special teacher, one “wise gray-haired peasant.”

The runic staff helped the Swedish peasant in everything from setting the dates of movable feasts to predicting “the characteristics of the coming year.”

Reflecting on these unexpected encounters ignited a chain of thoughts that would enable him to gain a deeper appreciation of ancient history. He had come to the stunning realization that the ancient wisdom of the Hyperboreans had indeed survived! It lived on in Sweden, though more in some places than in others.

This wisdom was not to be sought near seacoasts or borders with other countries, which often undergo rapid change through trade, war, and a host of other interactions. Nor could it be found in royal and princely courts, so subject to changing fashions, which made language “taste like a well-flavored and cinnamon-sweetened porridge.” Nor, for that matter, should one seek out the oldest wisdom among the well-traveled and the learned, who have often drunk up traditions in their wide variety of experiences, with the many new, outside influences slipping in unsuspected, causing a historian to go astray. One should go instead far into the countryside, and deep into the distant parts of the kingdom, into the humblest villages. There the bearded peasant offered a mirror onto antiquity, where the past was most preserved and far from tapped out as a historical resource. Pondering the experience years later, Rudbeck described a sense of appreciation:

When I see … Anders Tomeson, who is a man over 115 years old who is still able to go by foot to Uppsala, and has a rosy face, white hair, and a long beard which covers his chest, shining as the snow, I think that then I have seen the original image of our old gods and kings… .

Then, after a digression on the history of beards, including a lament on how the long beards had unfortunately gone out of fashion in most places in Europe by about 1600, replaced instead by the thin, “catlike whiskers,” Rudbeck added his wish “that to the end of the world, our peasants would want to hold the image of the old gods in their body and their honorable beards.” For there was pleasure and knowledge in close contact with the peasant. Sometimes, indeed, it seemed like gazing at the face of Thor.

A peasant with a long beard conjured up, in Rudbeck’s mind, an image of Old Norse gods.

In this state of affairs, even common expressions, children’s games, and drinking songs were immensely valuable sources in the quest to reveal a world otherwise lost. Rudbeck was indeed to become one of the first modern collectors of folk customs. All the more remarkable, this was during a century dominated by an aristocratic elite that dismissed peasants as socially and intellectually inferior. It was also well over one hundred years before Romantic collectors such as the Grimm brothers would work to save classic tales from certain disappearance.

There was, in short, not a single quality of the Hyperboreans that Rudbeck, with the talents of a Renaissance man and the exceptional ability to put his expertise to use in innovative ways, could not place in the far north. And the ease with which he made the discoveries only convinced him of their truth and whetted his appetite for more. From now on, the lure of the anatomy theater would pale beside the attraction of the past—for his knife would be more productive dissecting our misunderstandings about the ancient world.