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

11

OLYMPUS STORMED

Now the Olympian magic mountain opens itself before us, showing us its very roots.

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

NO PROPOSED SITE has ever fit Atlantis perfectly, and the challenges of finding a site in Sweden were, to say the least, daunting. Confidence, hope, and determination would be vital, because some of the difficulties were significant indeed.

No matter how hard Rudbeck and his land-surveying students tried, the exact size of the plain surrounding the legendary capital city could not be found. Very few Atlantis theories have satisfactorily resolved this dilemma—and with the vast dimensions, three thousand by two thousand stadia (approaching some 550 kilometers by 365 kilometers), it is not difficult to see why. The intricate web of canals that encircled the imposing city was also problematic, though Rudbeck’s answer was inventive.

As he saw it, Atlantis’s complex system of waterways was really the maze of channels formed within the thousands of islands and islets dotting the Stockholm archipelago. “The whole world together,” Rudbeck said, “probably did not have more islands than this peninsula [Sweden].” Later he would add a fascinating discussion of these narrow sea lanes and excellent rocky hideaways, showing how well they had served Swedish raiders and traders for centuries, from Atlantis to the Viking era to the present. Yet, however provocative a solution, these natural formations were still a far cry from Plato’s artificial, geometrically designed network of canals.

Studying the landscape also helped Rudbeck’s search for Atlantis’s grand royal palace. Although there was clearly no such building in sight, Rudbeck could trace out the bare outlines of its old foundation following Plato’s description of its location near the temple, the grove, and the springs, as well as the encouraging coincidence that the area was in fact known locally as Kungsgård, or royal garden. So Rudbeck marked the likely spot, and then looked on admiringly, imagining how the royal palace of Atlantis once rose out of the middle of Old Uppsala.

Looking in vain for any surviving physical traces of the magnificent edifice, Rudbeck ventured an explanation for the conspicuous absence. There were good reasons, he thought, why tangible remains were not readily at hand. When the palace was originally constructed, the Atlanteans would have used a combination of materials relying primarily on stone or wood. If they had preferred wood, then it was hardly surprising that the palace had not survived—the Norse sagas had made it perfectly clear that Atle’s great hall had burned. Even without a fire, though, few timber structures could have withstood so many centuries of exposure to the elements.

If the Atlanteans had opted for stone, as Plato indicated, then the gradually decaying building would have been quarried long ago for construction projects. Certainly Rudbeck knew many elderly gentlemen who remembered hearing tales in their childhood about how desperate the town dwellers had been to obtain all the necessary materials for building the large Vasa castle in Uppsala. Ransacking old monuments was unfortunately a timeless practice (Hadorph’s pioneering law had only recently granted the vulnerable monuments protection, at least legally). In any case the ruins of the Atlantis palace were probably lost for good, either consumed by the flames or recycled within the walls of nearby castles and churches.

One thing Rudbeck was sure about, though, was that the palace had not been destroyed exactly as Plato had claimed, swept away along with the rest of Atlantis in a massive earthquake and flood. Rudbeck was in fact amazed that anyone could believe that this part of Plato’s story was literally true. For instance, Plato had claimed that the destruction buried the civilization, leaving only “a barrier of impassable mud which prevents those who are sailing out from here to the ocean beyond from proceeding further.”

How could such a cataclysm produce so much mud that would, centuries later, still be unsettled, and make the nearby ocean an unnavigable graveyard? This, Rudbeck said, was “an explanation for children.” For readers who did not share Rudbeck’s interest or expertise in natural history, he provided another argument.

Plato’s words, quite simply, conflicted with sacred history. The book of Genesis recorded God’s promise never to flood the world again with another overwhelming deluge: “Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

According to Rudbeck, both sacred and natural history ruled out an actual annihilation of Atlantis. It made much more sense, he argued, to see Plato’s words as describing the figurative destruction of a society sinking into decline and oblivion—a degeneration brought on by their love of war and their tragic slide into corruption.

Discussing the last days of the old kingdom brought Rudbeck back to another challenge that has long bedeviled Atlantis hunters: the chronology of the events. In Critias, Plato dated the war with Atlantis about nine thousand years in the past, millennia before any advanced civilization is known to have flourished. But unlike many theorists who have attempted to solve this problem by simply dropping a zero to obtain a more workable nine hundred years, Rudbeck actually offered an explanation for his chronological acrobatics. He also, refreshingly, avoided attributing this significant change to a simple error in memory, transcription, or translation, or some other form of carelessness.

There was no reason to assume that the Atlanteans had used the Gregorian calendar or the older, less accurate Julian calendar, Rudbeck rightly noted. In fact it was highly unlikely. A calendar based on the sun was far from the easiest to discover, or even, for that matter, the most natural to use. Ancient astronomers were much more likely, Rudbeck the stargazer argued correctly, to devise a system of time reckoning based upon the moon. Unlike the sun, the moon passes through easily visible and predictable phases. At such an early time in history, there was no recorded evidence that the solar year had even been discovered.

As a result, the chronology of the Atlanteans could be much better explained as consisting of periods of time based on the regular movements of the moon. If this was correct, then a quick calculation reduced Plato’s 9400 B.C., at one stroke, to about 1350 B.C. (Plato’s “nine thousand years in the past” divided by twelve converts to 750 solar years, which is then added to the starting point, which Rudbeck traced back to Solon’s discussion with the Egyptian priests, about 600 B.C.). This calculation also inserts neatly into Rudbeck’s reconstructed chronology of ancient Sweden, based on measuring the distinctions in the soil around the oldest ruins. The Atlanteans’ war and destruction would have occurred around 1350 B.C., about one thousand years after Sweden was first settled.

Despite some manifest difficulties that still needed to be ironed out, Rudbeck believed that Plato’s words described Sweden “as clear as day.” No other place on earth had even a fraction of the evidence for Atlantis that he had found in Sweden. So close was the fit that, Rudbeck said, a Swedish blind man hearing the tale could sense with his cane the very landscape of Atlantis under his feet. Ten years later Rudbeck would still be proclaiming his theory with even more evidence and greater enthusiasm, gladly taking visitors to Uppsala on a guided tour of the lost world of Atlantis. Another ten years into the search, Rudbeck would issue a challenge to any scholar in Europe to come to Sweden and prove him wrong. Rudbeck would, he said, cover the expenses.

Yet no matter how many tours he would give, or challenges he would offer, some difficulties still remained, as if to taunt him. Rudbeck was virtually incapable of resting as long as any doubt or ambiguity lingered about his Atlantis. Even the slightest hint of uncertainty would be assaulted with an astonishing vigor, as if the search itself were under threat. Such striving for perfection drove Rudbeck deeper into the labyrinths of myth, and further into the realm of obsession.

ENJOYING THE THRILL of the search, Rudbeck was spending less time at the medical school. His lectures were languishing, and university authorities were once again warning him about neglecting his duties. Fortunately for Rudbeck, his old friend Professor Petrus Hoffvenius was picking up the slack, though it was clear that he could not continue to do so indefinitely.

Rudbeck’s waterworks system, meanwhile, had broken down; its pipes had burst in a severe winter a few years earlier. His anatomy theater needed a new roof, and one of his suspension bridges over the town river had collapsed in a recent spring flood. There were many matters that needed attention, but Rudbeck had first to be satisfied with his work on Atlantis.

Hunting down every possible claim about the legendary civilization, Rudbeck came across one of the great unsung heroes in the tradition of Atlantis: the first-century-B.C. historian Diodorus Siculus.

Writing during the bloody upheavals that tore Rome apart during the last days of the republic, this Sicilian-born scholar spent three decades gathering materials for his monumental work, the Library of History. Originally spanning forty books, Diodorus’s collection aimed to present an overall sweep of the past, a universal history that began with the earliest recorded events and made its way up to Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars (58–50 B.C.). The ten surviving books show a certain idiosyncrasy in the selection and treatment of its subject matter. Indeed, for this historian, the citizens of Atlantis were just as real as the Romans, Greeks, Gauls, or any other ancient people he discussed.

Although Diodorus does not earn much praise today as a reliable authority, he nevertheless preserved many invaluable traditions that would otherwise have been lost. By the time his eccentric chronicle reached the history of Atlantis, he essentially took Plato’s vision of an advanced civilization and magnified it considerably. Even more, Diodorus added a twist to the tale; he claimed to have access to the traditions of the Atlanteans themselves.

After this rather surprising revelation, Diodorus really dropped a bomb. Zeus, Poseidon, and the gods of ancient Greece had, according to these same records, come originally from the island of Atlantis! Such a claim was “in agreement with the most renowned of the Greek poets, Homer.” In the Iliad, for instance, the Olympian goddess Hera thus announces her plans for an upcoming journey: “I am going to the ends of the fruitful earth to visit Ocean, the forebear of the gods, and Mother Tethys, who treated me kindly and brought me up in their home.” And this “Mother Tethys” was, Diodorus added, an ancient queen of Atlantis.

From the vantage point of 1670s Sweden, these were extraordinary words. In the version of the classical myth most widely known, Tethys was an important though hazy figure who had married Oceanus and played at least some role in raising Hera, if not also the other gods as Homer sometimes seems to suggest. Now the assiduous collector of old traditions, Diodorus Siculus, had preserved some vague legend that connected Tethys to the island of Atlantis. Rudbeck could only wonder about how well this information fitted with his own emerging vision of the past. For Tethys sounded strangely close to a place on his Atlantis, called Tethis Fiord, which was located firmly in the far north, at the sixty-eighth meridian, indeed, as Homer put it, “at the ends of the fruitful earth.”

But Tethys was also known to be a Titan, and some descriptions of this powerful race of giants have actually survived. In the oldest extant account that offers some detail, the eighth-century-B.C. Greek poet Hesiod described their home as “hidden under misty gloom, in a dank place where are the ends of the huge earth.” The shepherd poet further described their “awful home of murky Night wrapped in dark clouds.” Where Tethys and the Titans dwelt, “the glowing Sun never looks upon them with his beams,” just as actually happens, every winter, at Tethis Fiord in northern Scandinavia.

DIODORUS SICULUS WAS not only greatly encouraging the Swedish doctor, but now also helping direct his enormous energies. Rudbeck had started to follow some fascinating leads, particularly about the classical gods and those vague, supposed traditions connecting them with the kingdom of Atlantis.

Zeus, Apollo, and the other gods of Mount Olympus were known to every educated person in Rudbeck’s day. Needless to say, nowhere the Olympians were said to have lived, visited, or otherwise had anything to do with Sweden or with the Scandinavian far north. All the oldest surviving accounts clearly place the Olympians somewhere within the ancient Greek world. Tradition associated Zeus with Crete, Hera with Argos and Mycenae, and Aphrodite with Cyprus; Hephaestus “fell” on the island of Lemnos; and so on. The locations of their birth, the sites of many of their known deeds, and their main shrines all were placed mainly within the limits of the ancient Mediterranean.

Yet the idea of the Swedish origin of the classical gods had caught Rudbeck’s attention, and the flamboyant Renaissance man could not let go of this possibility. Faint signs of uncertainty and dissension about the gods, however subtle and hinted, would be chased down and pounced upon with an overwhelming fixation, as Rudbeck obsessively tried to root up Mount Olympus and situate it in his homeland, not far from where he had reconstructed ancient Atlantis. His imagination could, as one scholar put it, take on a frightening quality.

Years later, for instance, when Sweden was considering a comprehensive reform of its calendar, a committee of experts requested Rudbeck’s opinion. He agreed that the old Julian calendar needed to be abandoned, but unexpectedly he did not favor switching over to the Gregorian, as many European countries had already done. Instead Rudbeck proposed that Sweden adopt a calendar based on the runes of Atlantis! This rather unusual choice would mean losing a few minutes every year, but that did not really matter, Rudbeck said, because the end of the world was near anyway. The committee had difficulty determining whether he was serious, and his imaginative proposal was politely turned down.

Back in the search for the classical gods, two important traditions were probably guiding Rudbeck in his ever-growing ambition. The first was a nearly universal belief that traced the ancestry of the classical gods back to the Titans. Usually the parents were identified as Cronos and Rhea, though some preferred another minor and perhaps older tradition that suggested Oceanus and Tethys. At any rate, the oldest Olympians were in all accounts the children of the Titans.

The second tradition was a popular way of viewing mythology that had flourished for centuries, now called Euhemerism after the early-third-century-B.C. philosopher Euhemerus of Messene, who sought real historical figures behind the stories of the gods. They were, in other words, kings, queens, heroes, sages, or people who had performed such memorable deeds that they were, with the passage of time, remembered as gods. And for Rudbeck, looking at the ancient gods and working within this tradition, the temptations must have been irresistible.

For, according to standard accounts of classical mythology, especially Hesiod’s Theogony, the Titans once ruled the universe. Fearing the loss of power, the leader of the Titans, Cronos, decided to launch a preemptive strike. He would eat his children. Hestia, Poseidon, Hades, Demeter, Hera—the entire family of Olympians—were swallowed. By the time the sixth and youngest child, Zeus, had been born, the Titan mother Rhea had had enough. When Cronos prepared to devour her new son in the usual fashion, Rhea tricked him by presenting a stone wrapped up as an infant. In the meantime she smuggled the baby Zeus to safety on the island of Crete.

After reaching maturity, Zeus rescued his siblings, who were magically disgorged unharmed, and rallied them to victory over Cronos and the whole Titan lot. That is, except his mother, Rhea, who would move into the new home of the gods on Mount Olympus. Oceanus and Tethys also escaped the harsh punishment. The ultimate reason is not specifically stated, though this was probably because of Olympian loyalty to their kind rearers, as hinted in the Iliad, or perhaps it was gratitude for their valuable services in the war against the Titans.

Now Rudbeck put the fragmented pieces together into a stunning proposition. Could it be that, after winning this war of liberation, Zeus and the gods left their Titan overseers imprisoned in the dark abode at the ends of the earth, that is, around the arctic Tethis Fiord, and then made their way, for the first time, into Crete, Mycenae, Argos, and all the places that held their early sanctuaries and that were also undoubtedly some of the oldest known settlements of the ancient Greek world? Could memories of these events still be encoded in the oldest, most obscure stories of classical mythology?

To Rudbeck, who was willing to entertain any potential solution, even the most daring and revolutionary, this was certainly a possibility. Soon his enthusiasm would make it a probability, indeed almost a certainty, in the unfolding vision of the past that he was desperately trying to capture on paper. Yet before he could pursue this specific point further, there was another idea that must have struck his imagination and convinced him even more of the Atlantis-Titans-Sweden connection.

All the whimsical and wrathful Olympians who usually displayed the full gamut of human passions looked like another rowdy, boisterous gang Rudbeck had come across. Unlike the classical gods, however, this was a family that was known only to a select few who had access to their adventures, recorded in some of the world’s rarest books and still unpublished manuscripts housed in Scandinavia: the gods of Asgard.

How similar were the classical gods who feasted on nectar and ambrosia atop snowy Mount Olympus to the Norse gods who dined on mead and boar in Valhalla! How similar, too, were Zeus, Poseidon, and the classical gods who fought the Titans to Odin, Thor, and the Norse gods who waged war against their archenemies, the monstrous giants! Once again, Rudbeck’s head swirled as he contemplated the possible implications.

What were those “Atlantean traditions” that Diodorus Siculus had mentioned, anyway? Could they have been preserved in Sweden, where, after all, Rudbeck had found Atlantis and, it seemed, a possible home for the Titan Tethys? Could they have anything to do with those mysterious runes carved on stone, wood, and metal? Better yet, could they have something to do with the much more elaborate Norse sagas and eddas that Rudbeck was starting to appreciate with a new passion? Although most were obviously written down in the Middle Ages, could these brittle manuscripts contain memories of older, lost Atlantean stories, perhaps fragments of fragments? Even if Diodorus was not the most authoritative of sources, must he necessarily be wrong about every single point?

It was time to investigate the worlds of Olympus and Valhalla. Looking to learn everything he could, Rudbeck pored over the oldest and most authoritative accounts of ancient history and mythology. After rowing with 102 Platonic oars to Atlantis, Rudbeck would effectively “hoist sail with Homer” and embark on his own maverick odyssey into the dreamy world of his own creation.

EVEN BEFORE RUDBECK had stumbled upon the quest for Atlantis and attempted to storm Mount Olympus, there was an unmistakable sense of urgency about the venture. He was already six hundred pages deep in the writing of the work, and, as he started to worry, he had not even made it a quarter of the way through to the desired end. Rushing to cram all his new discoveries, which were expanding exponentially almost each way he turned, Rudbeck could not work fast enough to keep up the hectic pace. Seven hundred pages into the text, there was still no end in sight.

Raising the stakes in this race against time, Rudbeck had earlier taken the advice of his friend Olaus Verelius. He had decided to begin printing as early as February 1675, though the many new discoveries had delayed it further, not to mention the firing of Curio the printer and the uproar over the subsequent lawsuits. The legal manipulations and the suit, however, were not looking all that good. “Only the Lord knows what will happen to him,” Rudbeck said to his friend Count de la Gardie as the prospects in the case looked worse and worse.

Given the looming uncertainty, the prudent thing, Verelius and Rudbeck agreed, was to start printing at once. As soon as new pages were written, they were immediately rushed to Curio’s press. Atlantica, as the work would be called after Rudbeck’s discovery of Atland or Atlantis, would be printed a few pages at a time, sheet by sheet, right after he finished writing them.

Regardless of Curio’s fate, which Rudbeck’s clever maneuvering had at least for the moment managed to forestall, the costs of the search for the lost world were quickly adding up. He had taken Verelius’s advice about another matter as well. Originally Rudbeck had planned to publish the Atlantica only in Swedish, and if the scholarly community deemed his work worthwhile, then he was confident that someone would come along to translate it into the more accessible Latin or French “just as often happens to other men’s books.”

Verelius, however, had insisted that Rudbeck adorn the work with a Latin translation, and other scholars at Uppsala who read the drafts agreed. “A good friend,” Rudbeck said, was recruited for the task. Rudbeck hardly had the time for this translation himself, not to mention the fact that he had “long since stopped worrying his head with such grammatical curiosities.”

The unnamed friend who would assume the task of translating this unwieldy volume was most likely the classical scholar and professor of eloquence Anders Norcopensis. A child prodigy with a wonderful grasp of Latin, he certainly added much with his translation of the work. By all accounts, it was a stellar performance. Few have failed to notice how Norcopensis sometimes “cleaned up” Rudbeck’s rather hurried and idiosyncratic text, written as it was in an almost stream-of-consciousness style under great pressure of time.

Within a few years this choice of translator would in another respect be of no small consequence. In the 1680s, Norcopensis would be appointed personal tutor to the Swedish crown prince, the future king Charles XII, the romantic and quite controversial ruler who would be the last of Sweden’s warrior kings.

In the meantime, however, if Verelius’s advice about fitting the text with a Latin translation helped ensure a much wider readership, it also significantly increased the strains in an already monumental undertaking.

LOOKING INTO THE intricate genealogies of ancient mythology, one of the most promising leads in the search for the Olympians was the god Apollo. Armed with golden lyre and silver bow, shining Apollo was the healing, music-loving god of reason and archery. To many scholars today, he seems the “most Greek” of the classical pantheon. To Rudbeck, on the other hand, Apollo looked as Swedish as Gustavus Adolphus.

Rudbeck already knew that this god was held in special reverence among the Hyperboreans. Virtually every ancient source touching on the legendary northerners agreed on this fact, and many told the story that Apollo’s mother, Leto, had actually been a Hyperborean. In his book The Nature of the Gods, the first-century Roman prince of orators, Cicero, was still aware of this tale, writing, “This is Apollo who tradition says came to Delphi from the land of the Hyperboreans.”

Whether he was born on the Greek isle of Delos or came into the Mediterranean from a distant land “beyond the north wind,” the conclusion was essentially the same. Would this not make Apollo seem, in Rudbeckian logic, at least partially Hyperborean, or Swedish, indeed Atlantean, since Diodorus’s tradition had said that the gods came from there anyway?

Yet, aside from this string of hypotheticals, were there any possible reasons to believe that Apollo had actually been Swedish? For Rudbeck, the answer was obvious, almost instantaneously showing itself in the old manuscripts through the Norse god Balder. The similarities, at least at first glance, were many.

Just as the ancients praised Apollo for his justice and beauty, a child “lovely above all the sons of heaven,” Balder was noticeably hailed in Norse accounts as the most just and the most beautiful of the gods. Both were known for their gift of prophecy. When Homer sang in the Iliad that “the past, the present, and the future held no secrets” for Apollo, Balder the Good “dreamed great dreams” about future dangers, terrible premonitions that prompted his mother Frigg to fear for his life and seek the oath of every living thing not to harm her child (again perhaps the basis for the fears that forced Apollo’s mom, Leto, to travel around seeking a safe haven to give birth to her children).

Additionally, both figures were related in other fundamental ways. While Apollo was the god of light, and some later traditions even associated him with the sun, Balder was “so fair in appearance and so bright that light shines from him.” Apollo’s justice, reasoning, and clear logical thought were echoed in Balder’s fame as “the wisest of the Aesir,” and Apollo’s eloquence likewise made its appearance when the Edda knew Balder as “the most beautifully spoken.” As for Apollo’s celebrated magnificence, attested to by the number of his shrines and sanctuaries, Balder was also “the most merciful,” and as the Edda put it, the “best and all praise him.” And so on.

Despite the obvious lack of correspondence in every possible tradition, Rudbeck saw enough key similarities between the classical and Norse figures to think that he was on the trail of the original Olympian that, as Diodorus’s lost sources allegedly claimed, came from Atlantis to the Mediterranean. Besides, the oldest and most complete genealogies available about the classical gods made the question even more provocative.

Apollo’s reputed Hyperborean heritage could be found to have deeper roots. His mother, Leto, it turned out, not only was regarded as a Hyperborean, but also was the daughter of a Titan—a Titan who lived in dark, “misty gloom … at the ends of the huge earth,” and actually a brother of Tethys, whose name Rudbeck thought had survived in the name of Tethis Fiord, which is located at the actual dark “ends of the huge earth.” With the testimony of the oldest known works in classical mythology, all these coincidences could only reinforce Rudbeck’s suspicion, indeed his conviction, that he was on the right track. The classical Apollo was merely a pale reflection of an original Balder cult that came from the far north.

“I could still put forth endless reasons,” Rudbeck said, “but I will save them for another place.” Given Rudbeck’s tremendous ability to make connections, no matter how far removed, this was no idle boast. Elaborations about the northern elements surviving in the classical myth of Apollo would indeed be plentiful, but they would have to wait. So much else was on the agenda in this bizarre hunt for the Swedish Olympians.

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.