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

7

THE QUEST FOR THE GOLDEN FLEECE

He has a genius equal to anything; but like all other genius requires the most delicate management to keep it from running into eccentricities.

—JOHN ADAMS, DESCRIBING HIS GRANDSON GEORGE WASHINGTON ADAMS

DURING THE SUMMER of 1674, a sophisticated Italian diplomat named Lorenzo Magalotti came to visit Sweden. Well connected and observant, the thirty-six-year-old Florentine noted the smallest details, leaving a vivid portrait of his experiences. His aim was to describe the host country with such clarity and precision that it would be unnecessary to add the phrase “this is Sweden.”

As part of his stay, Magalotti made a brief trip out to Rudbeck’s Uppsala. He saw the anatomy theater, visited the botanical garden, and heard about Professor Rudbeck, “a learned man in all areas.” Entering the main university building, Magalotti admired the council chamber with its benches “decorated in scarlet red cloth all around, and at the far end a canopy of red velvet.” He also glanced into the room of another important institution housed there: the College of Antiquities. This was a prestigious antiquarian society, founded by Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie to counter the “incuriosity” that plagued the past. Arguably Sweden’s first scientific academy, the College of Antiquities would loom large in Olof Rudbeck’s life.

Established in 1667, the college’s mandate was to preserve and promote all manuscripts, documents, and other matters that shed light on the ancient Swedish heritage. Special emphasis was placed on the study of language, “the foundation and most lofty pillar to all sound knowledge of the ancient Swedish writings and laws in the kingdom.” Of central importance, too, were the Norse manuscripts. Collections purchased, bestowed, or captured over the years were turned over to the society, and annual expeditions to Norway and Iceland were planned to discover additional material. Membership in this elite society certainly brought many privileges, not least the promise of funding for all future scholarly work.

With these aims, spirits had been high in late January 1668 as the College of Antiquities moved into its newly refurbished room in the Gustavianum for its historic first meeting. Seven full members had been selected, many of them leading scholars of Uppsala. The president was the poet and philosopher Georg Stiernhielm. The historian Johan Loccenius and the classical philologist Johan Schefferus were also selected as members, as was Olaus Verelius, professor of the antiquities of the fatherland. One person not invited to join, however, was Olof Rudbeck, who at this time had not yet been consumed by Swedish antiquities.

Even though it was only a few months old, the hopeful academy was already beginning to struggle. Rhetoric proved easier than adequate funding, and soon there was a noticeable gulf between scholarly ambitions and true financial health. The choice of leadership did not help all that much, either. The president of the college, the seventy-year-old Georg Stiernhielm, much preferred to stay at home in Stockholm than journey to Uppsala for the meetings. Not counting the inaugural ceremonies, Stiernhielm was not present at more than one or two meetings over the entire course of his term before his death in 1672.

Given the lackluster leadership threatening to paralyze the institution, a young scholar named Johan Hadorph was more than eager to fill the void. The same age as Rudbeck, Hadorph was a short, stocky, dark-haired man who was passionate about the past. He had begun his studies at Uppsala University at the age of eleven, and continued until he reached his thirtieth birthday—an unusually long time by any standards. Energetic and resourceful, Hadorph was the youngest member of the academy, and one of its most promising. His achievements were already considerable.

In addition to being one of the leading experts on the study of runes (the symbols carved on stone and wood found across Scandinavia), Hadorph had managed to persuade De la Gardie to push through an unprecedented law that deserves to be better known in the annals of historic preservation. Under his proposal, castles, fortresses, abbeys, manor houses, indeed any significant ruin or relic, including heaps of stone, would be protected against potential looters. Enacted in December 1666, with governors, bishops, and local officers authorized to enforce its stipulations and some two thousand daler silvermynt granted in funding, this was nothing less than Sweden’s first state law passed to care for its monuments—and perhaps the first of its kind in the world.

With his diligence and stamina, not to mention his endless stream of creative ideas, Hadorph was undeniably one of the most valuable members of the College of Antiquities. Yet he had his own ideas about how the fledgling society should develop, and he was not afraid to act on them, even if it meant bypassing the elderly absentee president. By simple force of will and the tacit acceptance of his colleagues, Hadorph had steadily gained in power and influence, until it seemed that he virtually controlled the college.

Helping Hadorph obtain his prominence was a professor of history and one of Rudbeck’s old enemies, Claes Arrhenius. Elected in the second wave of nominations in 1670, Arrhenius had developed a close friendship and collaboration with Hadorph. One thing that bound the two antiquarians together was a vision of the college as the principal and most suitable interpreter of the Swedish past. Another thing they shared was a marked resistance to Olof Rudbeck’s rival antiquarian project. His conclusions were already being dismissed with easy and ruthless skepticism. All of it was pure nonsense, or, as Arrhenius once put it, “a cloud castle of hypotheses.”

Even Magalotti, who knew several members of the College of Antiquities, seemed to share this initial reaction, though tempered with nonchalance and bemusement. The Florentine gave one of our earliest known international verdicts on Rudbeck’s quest, and it is not favorable:

If this book can be a success, then I refer to the blind reverence for such a highly regarded and learned man. But I cannot however avoid making the observation that the Swedes are gullible in the highest degree, perhaps even more than the Germans.

So Rudbeck’s renegade pursuit was already raising eyebrows among expert antiquarians in the college, and rumors of De la Gardie’s enthusiasm were causing concerns. But at the same time there was a strong tendency to underestimate what this passionate physician was capable of accomplishing.

IT WAS BECOMING increasingly clear, at least to Olof Rudbeck, that the Scandinavian past had been known among the ancients. He was working with the “greatest energy” to find surviving memories of this lost world in ancient texts, in peasant villages, and anywhere else they might be found. Soon he came across a story that truly caught his imagination.

This was the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, the skin of a flying ram that had been sacrificed to the gods and was hanging in an oak grove somewhere among the barbarians. Surviving accounts of the journey tell how Jason and his band of heroes, named after their well-crafted ship the Argo, sailed from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea. According to Greek tradition, this was nothing less than the oldest sailing venture of all classical mythology. Some even thought that their mighty ship, the fifty-oared Argo, was the first large sailing vessel to ride “the wine-dark sea.”

When Rudbeck read the accounts, however, he became convinced that the Argonauts had, in their quest, sailed to Sweden. And his efforts to learn about this adventure would lead to what one seventeenth-century English gentleman called the “Heroik undertaking of incomparable Rudbeck,” indeed a “second Argonautick Expedition.”

A complex figure of classical mythology, Jason did not always show the proper behavior of a hero, and in some portraits he acted like a heartless scoundrel. His adventurous life had begun in great turmoil. As a newborn baby, son of King Aeson of Iolcus in northern Greece, Jason had been smuggled out of his hometown when his ambitious half-uncle Pelias seized the throne. This usurper imprisoned Jason’s father, the rightful king, and then proceeded to carry out a campaign of slaughter, putting to death any of Aeson’s relatives whom he could capture. Amid this bloodbath, the infant Jason was hurried out to the lonely mountain wilds around Mount Pelion.

There Jason would be raised by the half-man, half-horse centaur Chiron, a wise barbarian who incidentally would teach many future heroes, including the champion Achilles and the Trojan prince Aeneas. After years of training in the arts of life, Jason made his return to the city of Iolcus. With “locks of glorious hair … rippling down in gleaming streams unshorn upon his back,” and sporting a distinctive leopard skin, the young stranger was a sight to behold as he strolled in the town’s marketplace.

But it was not the hair or the leopard skin that caught his uncle’s attention. “Terror seized him when his glancing eye fell on the clear sign of the single sandal on the man’s right foot.” An ancient oracle had warned Pelias long ago to beware the stranger with the single sandal. Sure enough, there was an unrecognized man with one shoe, as the other had stuck in the mud immediately before his arrival when Jason helped an old woman across a river. That old woman, it turned out, had been the goddess Hera in disguise, and she was so impressed by Jason’s courtesy that she made him one of the few mortals ever to receive her patronage.

Recalling the warning and fearing its dire consequences, King Pelias saw an opportunity to get rid of this potential threat to his power. He agreed to allow Jason to succeed him on the throne, claiming that his old age was better suited to retirement than kingship. The catch, however, was that Jason would have to travel to the distant shores of Colchis, located on “the unfriendly sea,” to retrieve the famous Golden Fleece. This trophy was needed, the king said, to put a stop to the nasty famine that raged in the town of Iolcus. Pelias was effectively sending Jason on a wild-goose chase.

Despite his suspicions about his uncle’s motivations, Jason eagerly took up the challenge. He recruited some of the best adventurers in Greece, legendary leaders who figure prominently in the oldest classical stories. The hot-tempered warrior Heracles, the talented harpist Orpheus, and, in some accounts, the beautiful hunter maiden Atalanta, all agreed to come along. Spurred on by the helpful prodding of Jason’s new patron goddess, Hera, the “flower of sailor-men” joined in this quest for the fleece of “gleaming gold.”

Understandably, many scholars were skeptical about this tale, believing it only a matter of myth or fiction. Over the course of their travels, the crew encountered fire-breathing bulls, men springing up from sown dragon teeth, and of course the giant dragon who guarded the prized Golden Fleece. When the Argo had sailed past the Hellespont into the Black Sea, it seemed that its heroes had entered a world of fantasy and marvels on the fringes of civilization. Yet when Rudbeck reread the oldest, most authoritative accounts of the myth, he became convinced that the voyage contained kernels of historical fact.

The deep streams, stormy lakes, and crashing rocks all along the way to the ends of the earth, where the shadowy mists prevailed, were not myth, but a somewhat accurate depiction of an actual voyage into the Arctic north.

THE FIRST TASK was to establish that there were genuine historical elements underlying the many fantastic adventures. In this regard, Rudbeck belonged to a solid historiographical tradition. The majority of ancient authors and some modern scholars had believed that the quest, in some form, had actually occurred.

Rudbeck, too, sensed the realistic undertones of the story. The ports of call, the amounts of time that passed between their stops, and the overall course of the expedition did not seem particularly strange for an ancient Mediterranean voyage. As Rudbeck’s notes showed, with his calculations still preserved in the archives of the Swedish National Library, the Argonauts made their way from the home port of Iolcus along the Magnesian coast with stops on the islands of Lemnos and Samothrace, as they headed toward the famed city of Troy. This was in line with the ancient way of sailing, which favored, as one modern expert put it, a strategy of “coastal navigation and island-hopping” to facing the open sea.

The Argonauts passed the difficult straits of the Hellespont (today called Bosporus) that bridged Europe and Asia; they then entered the Black Sea. Next, “hugging the right side of the coast,” they sailed on, overcoming challenges, until they reached the city of Colchis, situated in today’s Georgia. In this land of towering peaks and sweeping plains, the Argonauts accomplished their mission. They gained the renowned Golden Fleece, largely with the aid of the king’s daughter, the sorceress Medea, who had fallen madly in love with the Argo’s captain, Jason.

What interested Rudbeck most, however, was the journey after the Argonauts had snatched the Golden Fleece and escaped with the king’s daughter, her “maiden’s heart racked by love-cares.”

As they left Colchis with the king in hot pursuit, the Argonauts were blown off course. The events that followed were never agreed upon in the ancient tales of the myth, or in the many later efforts to penetrate this mystery. In fact, wildly different suggestions have been put forward for the exact path of their disoriented return home by those who have looked for some historical basis for the voyage.

Some have claimed that Jason came out of the Black Sea into the Caspian Sea, and then into the Indian Ocean, beating a return to the Mediterranean via Lake Tritonis in the Egyptian territories. Others see the Argo continuing along the shores of the Black Sea until it reaches the outlet on the Danube, then following the river down until it empties into the river Po in northern Italy. From here they entered familiar waters either on the Adriatic or the Rhone. Another favorite option was that the Argonauts simply returned the same way that they came, retracing their steps through the Hellespont back to their home in northern Greece. A look at the perils they saw and experienced afterwards, however, made Rudbeck offer a different proposal.

They did not return the same way they came, Rudbeck claimed, because that contradicted the words of the blind seer Phineus, who predicted a different route. He had been right with his predictions regarding just about everything else, and there was nothing in the text to show that he had been wrong in this case. For another thing, as Rudbeck might also have added, the westward sailing required to return home clashed with the natural system of winds and currents—so this route was hardly a likely possibility at a time when they were desperate to escape from the king’s fleet.

As for deciding among the other possible return routes, Rudbeck immediately recognized that the widely differing options were mainly a function of the plethora of surviving accounts of the adventure. Besides the short references in Herodotus’s histories and elsewhere, the most influential versions were the fifth-century-B.C. lyric poet Pindar, particularly his fourth Pythian ode. Encyclopedists from Apollodorus to Diodorus Siculus also recounted the tale in summary form. Even more comprehensive was the third-century-B.C. Apollonius of Rhodes, who gave a stirring treatment in his epic Argonautica. Latin authors came in force as well, with Ovid’s eloquent Metamorphoses and the first-century Roman Valerius Flaccus’s somewhat artificial though never finished Argonautica. The fact that these authorities often contradicted each other made the story even more entangled and difficult to unravel.

All things being equal, Rudbeck believed that the oldest texts were most likely to capture the truth. Coming nearest in time to the events they purported to describe, the primary accounts had had the least opportunity for errors, envy, and other distortions to intervene. The case of the Argonauts was a classic example of this principle, and Rudbeck proposed going back to the very beginning, before the popular, though late, Hellenistic and Roman versions to the oldest source available.

With only a few exceptions, classical scholars at the time deemed the so-called Argonautica Orphica vastly older than all other accounts of the quest. According to the standard interpretation, this short, fourteen-hundred-line poem was viewed as part of the secret traditions of the ancient Orphic cult, written by an initiate into those mysteries, probably even by the leader, the legendary guru-shaman Orpheus himself. Although this poem is known today as a much later work, unlikely to be placed earlier than the fourth century A.D. and probably coming even later, Rudbeck was in good company when he traced it back to the mystic leader Orpheus, whose “beautiful music charmed the stubborn rocks upon the mountains and the course of rivers.”

Relying mainly on the Argonautica Orphica, believed then even to predate Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Rudbeck retraced the steps of the Argonauts’ voyage. Moving north from the Black Sea, they would have passed the swampy marshes and sailed on some rivers through the forests of southern Russia. “Orpheus does not mention the names of the rivers,” Rudbeck acknowledged, and neither did any surviving account. Nevertheless, the terrain of the narrative fit perfectly with the area north of the Black Sea. It was “pure vanity,” Rudbeck thought, to seek the rivers, portages, and immense forests or other topographical features along the Danube, the Caspian, or anywhere other than this likely choice.

The desire to know if Jason and the Argonauts had in fact reached the Arctic north led to yet another remarkable chapter in Rudbeck’s adventure. For the crux of this theory rested on the assumption that the Argonauts would have sailed from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, and then into the Baltic Sea by navigating on the Russian rivers. This would mean that the heroes would have followed the river Tanais, today called the Don, all the way to its sources, where they must have disembarked and pulled their ship over a stretch of land (from Lake Fronovo to the Lovat River) until they reached the mighty Volga. From here they would have passed along other Russian rivers and waterways (the Volshova River, Lake Ladoga) until finally they came out in the “northern sea,” or the Baltic. At this point Jason and the crew would have sailed to the edge of Rudbeck’s lost world.

This proposed journey would have been daunting but, according to Rudbeck, not far-fetched. Actually this path had been used many times, he said, by Viking raiders in the Norse sagas that he was reading (and that his printing press would soon start publishing, in many cases for the very first time). Besides, the Vikings had a much more difficult challenge than the Argonauts, that is, pulling a small fleet as opposed to only one vessel. The tradition of dragging a ship was very important in that region, still a common feature of daily life for many Russian peasants, Rudbeck added, with plenty of examples of this practice.

The dotted lines show possible routes of Jason and the Argonauts after they had retrieved the Golden Fleece. Rudbeck believed that the voyagers had sailed from the Black Sea to Sweden, following along the Russian rivers.

So, in short, Rudbeck asked himself: If the Vikings had taken this route to the south, could the Argonauts not have taken it to the north? With three boats that he intended to use for his own postal service and commercial passenger transport system (the first in Sweden), and with the help of some faithful volunteers, Rudbeck set out to test the possibility of the heroic voyagers’ visit to the ancient golden age under the North Star.

RUDBECK AND HIS men would have to perform this feat, dragging the ship along at top speeds, in accordance with the time constraints recorded in the epic. One of the great authorities, the seventeenth-century historian Georgius Hornius, had calculated that Jason and his fellow Argonauts would have to have covered a distance of some four hundred Greek stades, or some forty-five (American) miles, and completed the task in only twelve days. This made for an exhausting but, Rudbeck ventured, imminently possible advance of just under four miles per day.

The boats were fifty-foot yachts built in Rudbeck’s shipyard, and normally they would have been used to transport passengers, for a small fee of two mark silvermynt, between Uppsala and Stockholm. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday during the prime sailing season, Rudbeck’s ships departed from the harbors of the capital city and the university town at precisely 8:00 and 11:00 a.m. Space was even provided for passengers who wished to smoke tobacco, though Rudbeck insisted that this be done in a special, restricted area on deck, “in the fresh air.”

The first of the ships, constructed “about the size of the Argo,” was carried from Rudbeck’s shipyard down to the water, a distance of some 2,400 feet. This attempt was not very successful. It took a full eighty men, straining with all their might, to transport the fifty-footer, and the pace was excruciatingly slow, far too slow to cover the distance in the specified time. The exhausted volunteers must have been relieved when the day was over—Rudbeck did not exactly have a reputation for being the easiest man to work for. As demanding of others as he was of himself, Rudbeck had little patience for the work ethic of the contemporary boatsman, who preferred, he huffed, to stretch out on deck in the warm sun, porridge ladle in one hand and pipe in the other.

Undeterred by the disappointing first effort, Rudbeck tried again, this time dragging the boat over poles. Much more successfully, they moved at approximately three times the speed of the men who had tried to carry the ship. Then, in another attempt, Rudbeck had the crew smear grease on the well-rounded logs and drag the ship to the harbor—moving at the fastest time yet, and requiring the work of only fifty men! Allowing for eating, sleeping, and resting, and assuming ten hours of labor a day, “so long as it is believed that they could have worked,” Rudbeck concluded, Jason and the Argonauts could easily have covered the required distance in the twelve-day period.

This rather quixotic episode was an early attempt at what we now call experimental archaeology, the effort to test a hypothesis by re-creating its conditions, put to such dramatic effect in our time by the late Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl. Until his death in 2002, Heyerdahl made many pioneering voyages to show how the ancients could have accomplished some very difficult deeds that he had suggested, namely sailing the oceans in rafts made of papyrus and balsa. His Kon-Tiki, most famously, crossed from Callao, Peru, a full 4,300 nautical miles to the Polynesian island of Tuamotu in the South Pacific.

Although a controversial method, still met with derision in some academic circles, this can be an effective way to learn about the past. And Rudbeck was one of the first to put it to use, albeit in a rudimentary fashion, and far from drifting 101 days on a balsa raft in the Pacific. The principle, however, was not completely alien. Rudbeck wanted to see if what he believed could in fact have been possible.

As his experiment with the passenger boat in his yacht service showed, the Argonauts could have dragged the ship the required distance in the given time, and thus overcome what he saw as the main obstacle to the voyage actually reaching the north. Interestingly, too, the names of the places that the Argonauts saw after they emerged from their ship-dragging hike through the unknown forests sounded strikingly familiar. Orpheus, for instance, sang about Leulo—and right in the very spot where the Argonauts would have come out in Rudbeck’s proposed course was the Swedish town called Luleå (pronounced loo-le-oh). Orpheus described the town of Pacto, and Rudbeck connected it with the Swedish town Piteå, while Orpheus’s Casby showed up in the Swedish Kassaby, or perhaps the smaller village Kasby. Rudbeck marveled at how well it all fell into place; if Orpheus had not lived almost “three thousand years ago,” he would have concluded that the poet had read a book about Swedish geography.

The quest for the Golden Fleece was yet another spectacular confirmation that such Swedish place-names had in fact existed in the most ancient times accessible to historians. Just as his archaeological dating method had shown to his satisfaction that the great antiquity of Sweden far preceded the Trojan War, here were Swedish towns already flourishing in the Arctic north in the earliest recorded sailing voyage, and observed at least one generation before that epic conflict. After all, when the Argo first rowed away on its mission, the future Trojan War hero Achilles was still a baby. He had been carried down by his guardians, the centaurs Chiron and his wife, who galloped down to see the Argonauts off, with Chiron’s “great forehoof waving them on their way.”

As for the temptation to see Jason’s voyage as “only a poem or a dream,” Rudbeck was ready with a response:

I would rather believe the dreams of this harper than the great mathematician Ptolemy, who, for all his mathematical art, was not able to find Sweden’s mountains, provinces, darkness, and Ice Sea, nor even its length, but made it a small island thirty Swedish miles long.

“So I would rather keep to the true dreamers than the untruthful writers.”

And for this dreamer in the middle of the 1670s, still wounded by the previous humiliations and insults, it was fairly clear that his beloved Sweden had also had a glorious past, one that was much better known among the ancients than had ever been imagined before.

RUDBECK’S DESCENT INTO the world of mythology was in many ways an addictive and fanciful escape. Following Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece was helping Rudbeck forget about his enemies, all their hateful accusations, and also some painful misfortunes at home.

Vendela had given birth to seven children, but alas not all had survived. In the past year, their oldest son, Johannes Caesar, had died at age sixteen. This tragic loss followed the death of their two-year-old daughter Magdalena, six years earlier. Unfortunately, within a couple of years, the family would also bury their toddler Karl. Although child mortality was high in the seventeenth century, and few parents at that time escaped its trauma, the death of a child was not necessarily any less heartbreaking than it is today. Olof and Vendela Rudbeck coped as best they could.

The other children in the household happily seemed to be healthy and prospering. The precocious fourteen-year-old Olof junior, tall, thin, and multifaceted in his abilities, was taking more after his father every day. Johanna Kristina, the oldest daughter, was showing her talents as well, especially in painting, drawing, and singing. Their son Gustaf, however, was more of a problem child. Less willing than the other children to please his parents, he was earning a reputation as a downright troublemaker. The youngest surviving child was their adorable six-year-old daughter, Vendela, who, like her older sister, was impressing others with her beautiful voice. Rudbeck must have been proud of his talented children, and pleased with the interest they had begun to show in his activities.

Reading the preliminary notes as soon as Rudbeck wrote them, Olaus Verelius was ecstatic. However, he also sensed the inherent risks and came again with a request. Verelius strongly encouraged Rudbeck to begin printing the book at once; he did not wish to see such an extraordinary work collapse under the weight of its own success. Rudbeck, too, knew the dangers of delay.

After presenting his discovery of the lymphatic system at Queen Christina’s court, Rudbeck had dragged his feet in writing up this great medical achievement. By the time he finally did, in the summer of 1653, another physician, Professor Thomas Bartholin at Copenhagen University, had managed to publish his account first, sparking the priority dispute of the early 1650s.

Not wanting to see his historical work suffer the same fate, Rudbeck took Verelius’s advice, and planned to publish as soon as possible. He would take his manuscript, as soon as it was ready, to the Uppsala University press, located in a little red building in the court around the Gustavianum. For the last twenty years this press had been in these cramped quarters. The offices were in one room, with another holding enormous stacks of paper, and a third serving as an attic or storehouse. The man in the middle of the mess was the printer Henrik Curio.

Apparently a learned man, the forty-four-year-old Curio spoke Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, English, Dutch, and Swedish, in addition to his native German. According to Rudbeck, he could also read Hebrew and Greek, a combination of ancient and modern languages that was certainly valuable in the growing international book trade of the seventeenth century. It was Rudbeck, in fact, who in 1661, after almost two years of attempts, had persuaded Curio to leave his work in a successful Stockholm printing house and open up shop at Uppsala University—a decision for which Rudbeck would later feel responsible, and eventually guilty.

Although the two men were different in many ways—Rudbeck alert, obsessive, and unrelenting, while Curio was more aloof and lackadaisical in his pursuits—they had become good friends over the years. Their relationship had grown closer after 1671, when Curio married Rudbeck’s cousin Disa. With these ties of family and friendship, it was important to Rudbeck that Curio would be the printer of his work.

But Curio was no angel. Since the early 1670s he had often been described as a slacker. His irregular habits, the critics complained, were undeniably affecting the quality of his work. He was careless, was a bit of a drunk, and did no proofreading whatsoever. The products were terrible and getting worse. Such negligence was also, people thought, bringing the press into chaos, and the university into disrepute. Soon “no one will be able to read [the books] at all.” Even observers uninvolved in the matter said his work was “unusually lousy.”

Complaints were getting louder, with demands for official inquiries and inventories of the press. Some professors were heard calling for Curio’s resignation. Overjoyed by his successes in finding the Hyperboreans and in his quest for the Golden Fleece, however, Rudbeck clearly did not realize how serious a threat was posed to Henrik Curio.

For the more Rudbeck looked, the more evidence he found of ancient Sweden, and the more his imagination helped him overcome the many difficulties that arose. Once he was on the trail of ancient heroes, it was apparent to Rudbeck that Jason and the Argonauts were not the only classical figures who had reached the far north.

ACCORDING TO ANCIENT MYTHS, many heroes had made the long, arduous journey to a land of “shadowy mists.” Retracing the path of these classical wanderers and examining what they had seen along the way, Rudbeck became convinced that these journeys to the kingdom of Hades were in fact trips to ancient Sweden.

The main clues for this startling, indeed mind-boggling, conclusion came from the oldest surviving descriptions of the dreaded Underworld. In Homer’s Odyssey, the Greek warrior Odysseus made the daring voyage. The crafty king of Ithaca described what he saw as he approached its distant shores:

By night, our ship ran onward toward the Ocean’s bourne,

the realm and region of the Men of the Winter,

hidden in mist and cloud. Never the flaming

eye of Helios lights on those men

at morning, when he climbs the sky of stars,

nor in descending earthward out of heaven;

ruinous night being rove over those wretches.

Few would disagree that the “Helios [that] lights on those men at morning, when he climbs the sky of stars” refers to the Sun. Helios was literally the Greek word for “sun,” with the “flaming eye” one of its common representations. The Greek root helio- is seen in our language, too, in the heliocentric theory, which places the sun at the center of our solar system, and helium, the element named after its discovery on the sun. So when the Odyssey notes that “Never the flaming eye of Helios lights on those men,” Rudbeck believed that the poet’s words needed very little commentary. This was not fantasy, but rather a clear description of actual phenomena that take place in the far north, above the Arctic Circle.

For three long months at that high latitude, Sweden indeed looked like what Homer called the “sunless Underworld.” Scandinavians living near and around the Arctic have long adjusted to the harsh environment. As Rudbeck saw it, they skated and skied, rode sleighs and pulled sledges, and even held markets on the thick winter ice. Cold weather provided natural refrigeration that kept fish fresh for four, five, and sometimes six months with no need of salt. The same ice also created spectacular vistas, hanging down from roofs of houses and heated cabins “like tallow candles or lances, with different colors and in various positions, as though the pipes of an organ were placed vertically next to the walls.”

As for the “mist and cloud” predominating at the entrance to the Underworld, this was another well-known feature of Rudbeck’s far northern location. Frost, snow, and mist created a dreadful concoction that inspired Homer’s Hades, or what he called “the realm and region of the Men of the Winter.” Pools and lakes emerged on the high ground, and the cold weather in turn hardened them into ice. When additional water came from nearby caves and channels, the traveler saw “the waters throw up a steamy mist into the heights and in their descent form inverted pyramids of ice at the sea.”

One of the big objections to Rudbeck’s emerging theory of Hades was of course the fact that classical mythology presented the Underworld as the abode of the dead. But under the sway of his imagination, Rudbeck cast this problem aside without much ado. Indeed, his reading of the ancient myths made him question that part of the tale. As Odysseus himself showed, the Underworld was not literally a home of the dead. Not only did he and his crew sail there, but, even more remarkably, they returned! Many other ancient heroes sailed to the Underworld—Hercules, Perseus, Theseus, Orpheus, and so on—and they, too, returned from the voyage. With so many arrivals and departures, the halls of Hades did not exist in the classical imagination as only a place for departed souls.

In fact, Rudbeck believed that Homer had made it absolutely clear that the kingdom of the Underworld was located not only aboveground, but also in the far north. When Odysseus arrived at the abyss, for instance, some of the shades showed surprise at how far he had traveled. But it was not a surprise, as Odysseus’s guide, the beautiful witch Circe, had given him unmistakable sailing instructions for reaching this kingdom at the world’s end:

Odysseus, master of land ways and sea ways,

feel no dismay because you lack a pilot;

only set your mast and haul your canvas

to the fresh blowing North.

Then she added, just “sit down and steer, and hold the wind.”

What clearer words, Rudbeck thought, on the need to sail north to reach the Underworld, “the gloom at the world’s end.” There Homer’s “region of winter” seemed to correspond well with the deep, dark winters known to prevail in the Arctic. The poet had also given another possible name for “the Men of the Winter”: the Cimmerii, or Cimmerians. This name survives in many modern translations of the Odyssey. To Rudbeck, though, the name raised even more questions, for if you pull out a map of the north, you will find this name of the Cimmerii, remarkably, almost verbatim.

More exactly the name was Kimmi or Kimmerii, and it was found all over the north. There was a region called Kimme-Lapmarck, located on a peninsula called Kimmer-näs. There was also the Kemi River, which flowed through northern Finland, not to mention Kimmi town and Nort-Kimm and Kimmi marsh, bordering on the White Sea. So many other examples were also close at hand. By Rudbeck’s derivation, the Kimmi or Kimmerii drew their name literally from the Old Swedish for “darkness”—no surprise, as Homer’s Cimmerii were said to live in perpetual darkness somewhere near the entrance to the Underworld.

But why had the ancient mariner pointed his rudder north? Because he needed to know the future, and according to Rudbeck, there was no better place to consult seers, soothsayers, and sorcerers than northern Sweden.

Indeed, many branches of fortune-telling and superstition thrived particularly well in the small villages around the Arctic Circle. Some of the dwellers excelled in predicting the future, reading everything from the flights of birds to the movements of vapors rising from the distant mountains. Some knew spells to enchant victims, and to summon the good, favorable winds for distressed ship captains. There were others who claimed to be adept in shape-changing, and there were even some who could “put out the stars, melt the mountains, solidify springs,” and perform striking feats of wind magic. With its soothsayers and magicians, the northernmost lands were still, as one observer put it, “as learned in witchcraft as if it had had Zoroaster the Persian for its instructor in this damnable science.”

On his visit to Sweden, Magalotti had also noted how deeply rooted witchcraft was during the 1670s: “Never does one hear anything else spoken about in the northern provinces, Boshuslän, Dalarne, and Lappland, than witchcraft.”

There was not enough ink and paper, Rudbeck said, to record all the stories about this art of magic, prophecy, and dream interpretation that flourished in the bubbling witches’ pot he was finding in the far north. Most spectacularly, Rudbeck believed that he had found a connection between the seer Odysseus sought in the Underworld and a traditional authority among the indigenous peoples of the Arctic. Tiresias, the blind seer who foretold Odysseus’s future, was a Saami shaman, a Tyreas, who went into ecstatic trances and claimed to tell the future.

Hyperborean Mountains surveyed by Rudbeck’s students in an expedition to the far north of Sweden.

Odysseus’s perilous voyage to the Underworld was not simply a good story told for entertainment as the minstrel strummed the harp and the wine went around the warrior’s halls of Bronze Age Greece. The very details of Odysseus’s journey could be seen in the far north of Sweden. The Cimmerians, the darkness, the mists, the seer Tiresias, and the reputation for wisdom were all there, around the Arctic Circle. Before long, Rudbeck would also have proposals for other missing elements. The name of Charon, the boatman who ferried souls to the Underworld, was derived from baron, a funeral barge used among the indigenous peoples in the largely unexplored regions of the far north. Cerberus, too, the three-headed guard dog of Hades, was originally Garm, the fierce hound of Hel remembered in the Old Norse sagas, and probably, Rudbeck thought, a survival of an ancient bodyguard force stationed at the entrance to the kingdom.

So, full of excitement, Rudbeck was amazed at how closely Homer’s vision of Hades fit his proposed Arctic home. He made plans to send some of his mathematical students on a scientific expedition to survey the mountains and rivers of what he now claimed was the original kingdom of Hades. As thrilling as it was tantalizing, every clue suggested a new understanding about the forgotten golden age of the north.

Rudbeck pledged to continue writing “as long as God gives me health, and the moon continues to become full.” What he found next would lead into the tangled web of one of the greatest and most enduring enigmas of all time—and cause his sharpest critics to think it was really a result of moonstruck lunacy.