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

EPILOGUE

IN SEPTEMBER 1702, only a few months after the great fire, Olof Rudbeck fell ill and died peacefully in bed. His death passed without a proper memorial, as the university was too strapped for funds and preoccupied with rebuilding the town. When a public ceremony was finally held, a year later, authorities raised a plaque over his tomb that read, “This testifies to Olof Rudbeck’s mortality, but Atlantica his immortality.” By this time, however, Rudbeck’s theories were enjoying their last days of acceptance in the scholarly community.

Their demise did not, ironically, result from proven deficiencies in the theories themselves. Confidence in Rudbeck’s lost civilization seems rather to have suffered more from the fall of the Swedish empire. Off to a roaring start in the Great Northern War, the last of Sweden’s warrior kings, Charles XII, had won some spectacular victories, humiliating Russian armies against sometimes staggering odds. The battle of Narva in 1700, for instance, saw a heavily outnumbered Swedish force, probably about four to one, trounce Tsar Peter’s Russian army. Yet, as Napoleon and Hitler would also later experience, Charles XII’s invasion of Russia would ultimately bog down under the harsh attacks of General Winter and General Famine.

By the end of the Great Northern War in 1721, Sweden had been crushed, and Russia had gobbled up most of its Baltic territories. Other European neighbors, particularly Prussia, still a relatively minor power, came in for the kill. The Swedish empire was eagerly carved up, and only a few lone places were left, including a reduced Finland and a slice of Pomerania. Sweden would never again be a military power in the way that it had been in Rudbeck’s lifetime, and its sudden collapse would in time make his views of ancient Sweden look absurd.

Along with these largely unforeseen military disasters, Rudbeck’s once lauded theory suffered from changes in the craft of history. Historians in the Enlightenment turned increasingly to written evidence of books and documents, making Rudbeck’s methods look peculiar at best. By the early eighteenth century Atlantica had fallen into the realm of parody. Rudbeck’s name was becoming synonymous, at least in some circles, with wild theorizing—the author of Atlantica living on, for a time, in a new verb coined to describe such bold, uncontrolled speculation: att Rudbeckisera, or “to Rudbeck.”

Yet, given advances in the study of history, we can now see how pioneering Rudbeck’s work actually was. Despite the many etymological derivations that were indeed outrageous and hopelessly far-fetched, some of his conclusions were years ahead of his time. He correctly deduced, for example, the central importance of rivers in the rise of civilization, outlining his impressive discussion in Atlantica some fifty years before Isaac Newton’s celebrated theory. Likewise, his insights into the interconnectedness of languages were later developed and proven true when scholars discovered the Indo-European roots of many ancient and modern languages (though of course this root wasn’t even close to Swedish).

Perhaps most visionary, however, were the extraordinary ways in which he advanced his search. Unlike the authors of previous efforts to locate lands relegated to the realm of myth and legend, Rudbeck was not content to speculate or theorize within the cozy confines of a library. Rather he set out to find his lost world, and chase down any remains that might have escaped the ravages of time. As he would later put it, it was the difference between sitting on a beach wondering about the mysteries of the ocean and actually hopping into the waters to find out for yourself.

Growing up between Galileo and Isaac Newton, Rudbeck also knew the value of the new scientific method for revolutionizing our knowledge and reached the conclusion that traditional historians had scarcely harnessed its potential. Painstakingly calculating, measuring, and adopting an exceptional empirical approach that stressed direct observation, Olof Rudbeck would indeed be a pioneer in using the scientific method for interpreting evidence of the distant past.

No longer could one only sit comfortably in a warm cottage, his nose in a book, and think up arguments. Rather, a true and more accurate knowledge could be obtained only with physical labor—hands blackened by experiments, back aching from closely examining plants and minerals, and eyes weary from gazing at distant stars in the night sky. This comment shows very much Rudbeck’s approach to the ancient past, seeking clues wherever they might be found.

Characteristically, as Rudbeck chased Atlantis, each new discovery sparked another, and this in turn led him to undertake even bolder measures. He put his postal fleet and commercial transportation service to use in testing the possibility of an Argonaut voyage in the Baltic—a brilliant development that inaugurated what we today call experimental archaeology. But Rudbeck’s most startling contribution was probably his invention of an early archaeological dating method. Field archaeologists all over the world still rely on measuring distinctions in rock and soil layers, now called stratigraphy, to determine the approximate age of objects found in the ground. Almost two hundred years before such an important method of investigation would be borrowed from geologists, Rudbeck had put it to good use on Swedish burial mounds and standing stones to date the remains of his lost civilization.

Absolutely convinced as he was of his theory, Rudbeck applied his ingenuity and enthusiasm to overcome the many difficulties he encountered. Nothing stood in his way, at least not for long. And that, essentially, is one of the main problems with his work. He had very little sense of limit and virtually no ability to accept a fact—any fact—that conflicted with his theory. Rudbeck was very much the victim of his own problem-solving talent. He succumbed, too, it must be said, to the power of his own instinct, his imagination, and his love for his country.

So, in the end, this is a very human story—the story of a dreamer whose passion took him to great extremes. His curiosity, creativity, and resourcefulness made him a great pioneer, yet all his talents and expertise, combined with his scientific methods, only took him further into the realm of fantasy. The more pioneering he became, the farther astray he went—and the more ingenuous his solutions, the more it all descended into delusion. But what a spectacular and beautiful vision, and what an adventure!

For me, the story of this adventure closes in our own backyard. In many gardens and meadows grows a lovely flower called “black-eyed Susan.” This plant belongs to the family Rudbeckia, named in honor of Olof Rudbeck and his son. Appropriately, it is a hardy flower, capable of surviving great stress and thriving in an impressive array of conditions. This flower stands today as a cheerful reminder of Olof Rudbeck and his remarkable search.