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

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REMARKABLE CORRESPONDENCES

Just amusing myself by indulging in fantastic dreams. Toys! Yes, I suppose that’s what it is—toys!

—FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKI, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

IT WAS THE Hervararsaga that Olaus Verelius brought to his friend. Set in the dim and misty past, this was a fantastic tale of a sword named Tyrfing. Hammered in the hidden forges of two talented dwarves, this was the “keenest of all blades,” never failing to render its wielder victorious while shining all the time with the radiance of the sun. Tyrfing was something of a Norse Excalibur, a magical sword fit for a Viking King Arthur. There was, however, one important qualification: this sword carried a nasty curse. Once drawn, it had to take a human life, and then return to its scabbard still warm and red. Generation after generation suffered from the bitter truth that this irresistible sword with the golden hilt brought untold violence and misery.

In the late 1660s, many unreservedly ranked this Hervararsaga as one of the oldest and most impressive texts illuminating Sweden’s distant past. What a thrill it must have been to pore over this treasured manuscript and prepare its first-ever publication. And to adorn it with the most up-to-date and valuable scholarly accessories, Verelius asked Olof Rudbeck to make a map of the many places mentioned in the saga.

This may seem like a strange favor to ask of a medical doctor. But Rudbeck had earned a reputation for producing high-quality maps. He excelled at sketching the mountains, hills, and rivers of the countryside, and then reducing them to a series of lines and dots on a flat surface. Measuring with a great concern for precision and calculating with a single-minded patience, cartography was virtually an extension of Rudbeck’s skill in technical areas. His curiosity and his own love for discovery, moreover, helped him understand the value of a good, accurate map. Many officials requested Olof Rudbeck’s services, including no less than Carl Gustaf Wrangel, one of Sweden’s most feared generals during the Thirty Years’ War.

But this time, when Rudbeck accepted the offer, no one could have known what this curious little manuscript would mean for Uppsala’s distinguished professor.

“It was like a dream,” he later recalled. Behind the story of the cursed sword, the deadly runic magic, and the wild, howling berserks whipped into a furious rage, Olof Rudbeck saw many strange parallels between the Norse world and what he remembered from classical Greek traditions. All through the manuscript, in fact, were many “remarkable correspondences.” Kings, queens, customs, and places—far too many features in this late Viking saga struck with a peculiar resonance.

What exactly it was that first captured Rudbeck’s attention and launched him on what would be a lifelong quest may never be known. His earliest notes on the search do not survive, and the first draft of his work was later destroyed. The list of possibilities is extensive. For instance, as Rudbeck combed the saga looking for material for his map, he would have encountered some extraordinary information. The very first line in the manuscript noted a beautiful kingdom that once flourished in the north of Sweden, called Glasisvellir. This may not at first sound even remotely classical, but when translated from the Old Norse glaes, “amber,” and vellir, “rolling landscape,” it would be something altogether different.

The Glasisvellir were the “Glittering Plains”—a name that would have evoked the brilliant and shining Elysian Fields of classical mythology. According to the oldest of the ancient Greek accounts, the Elysian Fields were the great plains at the end of the world where the mild, cooling breezes blew, and its inhabitants lived what the ancient poet Homer called “a dream of ease.” Now, too, in this old manuscript of the Hervararsaga, there were provocative images of a place in the far north that seemed to have more in common with those joyous fields than just their name.

As in the classical Elysian Fields, the fortunate residents of the Norse Glittering Plains enjoyed a happy existence, living to a great age and effectively banishing sickness from the realm. They were also, like their classical depictions, keen sportsmen who enjoyed tossing a goatskin back and forth, that is, when they were not reveling in the dances, songs, and feasts along the soft meadows and meandering riverbanks. Indeed, the Norse wrestled on the Glittering Plains, just as the classical warriors fought for fun in the Elysian Fields.

Located beyond Gandvik, literally “the Bay of Sorcery,” the Glittering Plains flourished in a mythical landscape that included yet other features that sounded familiar from classical mythology. There were the violent neighbors of Jotunheim, “the land of giants,” who recalled the Greek stories of the large, fierce creatures that waged war on Zeus and the Olympian gods. In Norse mythology, as Rudbeck would soon learn if he did not know already, the giants also fought relentlessly with Odin and the Aesir gods. Further, the king of the Glittering Plains was introduced in an evocative way. “A mighty man and wise,” King Gudmund held out against the forces of chaos and barbarism, ruling over a kingdom whose inhabitants reached such an advanced age that outsiders believed that “in his realm must lie the Land of the Undying, the region where sickness and old age depart from every man who enters it, and where no one can die.”

Wisdom, strength, longevity—all these factors made the northerners in the Glittering Plains seem like a blessed people, and their home a fabled “Land of the Undying.” Could this golden age kingdom really have existed, and could it have possibly been related to the Elysian Fields of classical mythology? For that matter, could this utopian civilization of the far north have had anything to do with the land of the Hyperboreans, another blessed people of classical mythology who were said, as their name suggests, to live somewhere “beyond the north wind”?

Whatever it was that first captured Rudbeck’s attention, it virtually sounded a call to action. Ideas swirled in his head, and “for some peace of mind,” he said, he had to “put pen to paper.”

ONE DAY RUDBECK showed his notes to his friend Verelius, the eccentric but undisputed authority on Scandinavian runes and Norse sagas. Recently appointed to a brand-new post as Sweden’s first and for a long time its only “Professor of the Antiquities of the Fatherland,” Verelius was charged with the responsibility of seeking out old manuscripts, gathering them together, and promoting anything “that can serve to enlighten the deeds of the ancient past.” In this respect, he had found his scholarly niche. He lectured widely on Swedish history—its runes, its Viking sagas, and many other aspects of the pagan past. Despite the fiery patriotism that heated up his accounts, Verelius’s lectures have been described as some of the most pioneering and erudite given at Uppsala University in his time. Unfortunately, though, as he lamented, this was usually only to the benefit of three or perhaps four students who made it to the early-morning lecture in the otherwise empty hall.

Rudbeck’s notes were hastily written, as he put it himself, “not polished, or even once read all the way through.” But Verelius was greatly pleased, and he praised Rudbeck’s “many excellent conclusions and exemplary deductions.” In a letter written much later, shortly after Christmas 1673, Verelius described his own reaction to Rudbeck’s work. He had been particularly impressed with the rich proposals for bringing order to the chaos of Swedish history. These outlines could in fact build a foundation for a true chronology of ancient Sweden, something he admitted “up until now we have never hoped to establish with any certainty.” Rudbeck, he added, “has taken it much further than I had ever expected.”

As he also cheerfully noted, Rudbeck had succeeded in “correcting” many errors that often prevailed in the image of the Swedes abroad. This was a reference to the medieval Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, whose colorful early-thirteenth-century account of the far north showcased the heroics of Sweden’s archenemy, the Danes (and by the way, Saxo’s history includes our oldest account of the misfortunes of Prince Amled, elaborated centuries later in Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, Prince of Denmark). Composed in a lofty Latin that even drew praise from no less a stylist than Erasmus of Rotterdam, Saxo’s work dismissed many parts of Swedish history with the haughty disdain of a man at the center of a powerful Danish kingdom looking down at the backward periphery.

To Verelius’s mind, the implications of Rudbeck’s work were vast: if he was correct, he would have uncovered some major problems in Saxo’s influential history. The Swedes could finally expose some errors enshrined in the standard histories, sickening “lies” that had long offended Swedish sensibilities.

Pleased with the prospects of such a work, Verelius asked Rudbeck to speak with another authority, Professor Johannes (Johan) Loccenius. This was a stern, scholarly man, a former Royal Historiographer and a renowned expert in Swedish antiquities. Called over from Germany in the middle of the century, Loccenius had emerged as one of Uppsala’s prized scholars. He lectured regularly on ancient authorities such as Livy, Tacitus, and Cicero, and he seemed to be a man who, in modern parlance, “lived completely for science.” After Loccenius took up the history of his new homeland with a burning passion, his ambitious histories earned him praise for producing Sweden’s “first truly critical work.” A tireless scholar who trudged through the material slowly and cautiously, building his way to reasonable conclusions, Loccenius had earned his reputation as one of the greatest living experts on ancient Scandinavia.

When this scholar first saw Rudbeck’s notes, he was also visibly delighted. The seventy-year-old Loccenius burst into tears of joy and expressed his wonder: “How many times have I and other historians read [these texts] and never realized that they referred to Sweden.” As he put it, Rudbeck was working on an unparalleled project; in fact, it was unlike anything Sweden had ever seen before.

RICH IN IMPLICATIONS, Rudbeck’s “remarkable correspondences” were especially thrilling in the vibrant atmosphere of the late seventeenth century. Like its rival, Denmark, Sweden was then in the throes of a “Norse renaissance.” Patriotic scholars working in the universities of Copenhagen and Uppsala were experiencing an enthusiastic, somewhat romantic revival of interest in the old Vikings. Drinking horns, magical spells written in strange runic scripts, and dragon-headed prows adorning oak longships, the fact and fantasy of the Viking Age (roughly A.D. 800–1050), had long been sealed off into a virtually lost world.

A number of Scandinavian antiquarians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Arngrimur Jónsson, Christiern Pedersen, and Brynjólfur Sveinsson, began rediscovering this Norse heritage. Forgotten and unheralded though they are today, it is largely through their efforts that so much of our material about the Viking world has survived. They hunted down the old manuscripts in the original language wherever they might be found, gathered them together into collections, and sought to add these to the accumulated treasury of history. Given the merits of the cherished rediscovered sagas, these Scandinavian antiquarians “brooded over them like the dragon on his gold.”

Such enthusiasm for all things Norse flourished in the aftermath of the classical Renaissance, the dramatic rebirth of interest in ancient Rome and Greece that began centuries before in the Italian city-states. After spreading across the Alps, this revival had splintered into a cluster of movements that, for better or worse, came for a long time to shape the ways historians viewed the past. One thing the many Renaissance thinkers had in common, though, was a firm belief in the great importance of antiquity. Some went so far as to celebrate the classical past as the source of almost all our knowledge.

But as northern thinkers delved deeper into the Greek and Latin texts, they came across curious references to their own past. The plains, forests, and wastelands at the edge of the classical world swarmed with hordes of northern tribes—Celts, Cimbrians, Sarmatians, and countless others. They were not always well known, and were often subject to glorification, vilification, mystification, or just plain error. Yet all these peoples, however represented and interpreted, were, to the classical mind, simply barbarians.

The word barbarian did not, of course, have a pleasant ring, deriving originally from the observation that the nonclassical outsiders spoke a different language—one that sounded to ancient Greeks like incomprehensible gibberish, which they mimicked as “bar-bar-bar.” The name stuck, expanding to a general term of scorn. The barbarian world seemed primitive and insignificant next to the monumental achievements of the Greco-Roman civilization, with its baths, aqueducts, amphitheaters, and thriving cities, not to mention its rich cultural legacy.

Of all the outlandish barbarians mentioned in the texts, Swedish humanists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came to focus on one tribe in particular: the ancient Goths. Long a terror on the frontiers of the Roman Empire, the Goths had swept south through the Balkans and humiliated the legions that powered the relentless Roman fighting machine. If that were not shocking enough, the Goths had stormed the gates of Rome in A.D. 410 and sacked the Eternal City itself. The Romans, who had conquered a vast empire reaching from the Scottish moors to the Sahara Desert, were now themselves forced to pay ransom. Trying their best to intimidate the rough invaders at their gates, Roman officials warned of a fierce resistance from one million imperial citizens. Unfazed, the Gothic king Alaric replied, “The thicker the hay, the more easily it is mowed.”

Reading about this martial people, Swedish humanists believed that the Goths had come originally from somewhere in central or southern Sweden. Most prominent among the new champions of the Gothic past were two brothers, Johannes and Olaus Magnus, the last Catholic archbishops in the country. In their wide-ranging works, both had tapped into a long and deep medieval tradition that linked the Goths to the north.

But even if the vision of a heroic Gothic past extended back for centuries, it would be the Protestant Reformation that truly rekindled the Gothic fire. Sweden had regained its independence from Denmark in 1523, and had broken away from the Catholic Church in the 1530s. Both changes had fueled the great burst of enthusiasm about the Goths, whom they claimed as their own ancestors. The humanists started also to shake off the Greco-Roman prejudice, revived along with the classical texts themselves. They celebrated other, more redeeming qualities in the seemingly uncouth and barbaric illiterates—qualities such as valor, honesty, and simplicity. The large tomes of the Magnus brothers and their followers marked the beginning of a gradual yet monumental shift from shame to a renewed pride in their wild, untamed ancestors who, they claimed, had overthrown the Roman Empire.

And as many northern countries broke away from the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, it seemed that Rome had once again been stormed. The Goths, this time wearing the modern guise of sober, black-clad Protestants, had punished the empire a second time for its unbridled decadence. And after 1630, history again seemed to repeat itself. During the Thirty Years’ War, King Gustavus Adolphus’s Swedes were modern Goths carrying the Protestant banner, indeed perhaps saving the Protestant cause from what then looked like certain destruction at the hands of the determined Holy Roman Empire of the Hapsburgs.

The Swedish king played the part well, too. With his broad shoulders, his rotund figure, his golden beard groomed to a point, the musket ball still lodged deep in his neck, Gustavus Adolphus looked and acted like a modern Goth. At the royal coronation, he had literally dressed up as the Gothic king Berik. He gave speeches challenging the Swedes to uphold the old Gothic virtues, admonishing the noblemen, for instance, “to bring renewed luster to the Gothic fame of their forefathers.” His march from victory to victory indeed made Europe think it was seeing the rejuvenation of the barbarians. Sweden’s sudden rise to great power had made possible—and even demanded—a greater, more dramatic past.

INTO THIS GLORIFIED vision of history were swept the ornately copied pieces of parchment found in hamlets of Iceland and Norway. Exciting tales of tall, fierce Vikings launching many adventurous raids seemed to fit quite seamlessly into this larger Gothic framework of Swedish history. Many of the original manuscripts would in fact end up in Uppsala, through purchases, gifts, and other, more sordid means. In 1658, for instance, the Swedish army looted Danish libraries and estates, carrying off many priceless manuscripts, in a way strangely reminiscent of the old Vikings that they would soon be celebrating.

The saga that would start our saga, however, did not come by conquest or piracy. The manuscript of the Hervararsaga was carried over by a young, talented Icelandic student named Jonas Rugman, or, as Rudbeck affectionately called him, “Icelandic Jonas.” Rugman had come to Uppsala by accident. Leaving his native Iceland, he was planning to continue his studies at Copenhagen University. But a terrible storm blew his ship off course, forcing the crew to seek shelter in the Swedish west coast harbor of Gothenburg. Given the tense state of affairs between Denmark and Sweden and the fact that hostilities had once again flared up into open conflict, the Danish crew of the ship found themselves taken captive. Rugman was now unable to make his way to Copenhagen. Instead he decided to try his fortunes in this new country, and eventually ended up at Uppsala, where he started to work with Olaus Verelius.

A native speaker of Icelandic, the closest of all Scandinavian languages to Old Norse, Rugman was a “gift sent from heaven” for Verelius and the circle of Viking enthusiasts at Uppsala. Besides invaluable knowledge of the old language and its culture, Rugman had something else in his possession: a chest full of old Icelandic manuscripts! Most of these had never been seen before anywhere outside the small villages and homesteads of Iceland.

Icelandic Jonas’s treasure chest of sagas was indeed an invalu-able trove of material about a still undetermined ancient past, and Verelius was one of the first in the world to lay eyes again on these old stories. Among these was a copy of Rolf and Gautrek’s Saga, a beautiful tale loosely focused on an old Swedish king named Gautrek. After losing his wife, the king suffers a tremendous grief, finding his only solace in sitting on her burial mound and flying his favorite hawk. There was also the rollicking Herraud and Bose’s Saga, which deals with the long friendship between an odd pair: Herraud, the son of a Swedish king, and Bose, a tough peasant. Many other sagas, too, were in Rugman’s case, though he had left a handful behind, pawned in a tailor’s shop to cover the costs of his expensive taste.

Grateful for the privilege of seeing these sagas, Verelius paid for the food, housing, and expenses of Jonas Rugman for the first year and a half of the young man’s stay in Uppsala. This was perhaps only fair, given the incalculable benefit the impoverished student had provided. Brand-new stories were just waiting to be read, translated, and culled for original insights into Scandinavia’s heritage. They were full of figures only dimly perceived before, if known at all. Rugman’s sagas made it painfully obvious how little the Swedish past was really understood.

AS RUDBECK LOOKED through the manuscript of the Hervararsaga closely and drew his map of Sweden, a spectacular new world was indeed opening before his eyes. The Hervararsaga offered a fresh account of the distant past of Europe’s newest great power, and its tantalizing suggestions would send Rudbeck to the heights of enthusiasm. Yet as breathtaking as the vistas were, it was not simply a matter of chasing down books and following leads.

This is because Rudbeck was already committed to an ambitious program of teaching at the university. Besides lecturing on anatomy and botany, Rudbeck would take students on strolls in his garden, emphasizing the importance of firsthand knowledge of the properties of plants. He had also pledged to give informal instruction in other technical subjects, including architecture and shipbuilding, just two of the many classes he taught at his factory down by the river. Some of the kingdom’s most prominent future technicians and engineers would indeed be trained by Rudbeck. His absolute favorite course, however, was pyrotechnics; he loved to send up his own homemade fireworks to light up the Uppsala night sky.

Perhaps an even more serious challenge than his teaching commitments, though, was the array of other projects fighting for his attention. Since Rudbeck had built the anatomy theater, for instance, he was expected to actually use it. Some professors were already heard mumbling about this great expense, complaining that Rudbeck, in characteristic fashion, had built the theater way out of proportion to what was actually needed. At a time when the number of students in the medical school was at best ninety and at worst only three, Rudbeck had built a theater of approximately two hundred seats.

The academy could of course fill this capacity by opening its doors and selling admission tickets to public dissections, as did on occasion happen, but some had already started to notice the glaring lack of dissections taking place there. In fact, no more than two or three dissections were ever held under Rudbeck’s leadership in that expensive theater.

His botanical garden was another concern, though for a slightly different reason. It required regular care and constant vigilance, planting, watering, and cultivating, as well as maintaining the small buildings Rudbeck had constructed on its site. Given the expense, this scientific luxury was often dangerously close to being axed from the university budget. Many professors did in fact want to close it, and Rudbeck had to defend it many times. The common professors did not value this particular garden, Rudbeck once sarcastically explained, because it did not give them any delicious “cabbage, carrots, or turnips.”

Besides that, Rudbeck was trying to keep another one of his typically ambitious projects up and running: the waterworks system. With one man, one horse, one pump, and an elaborate network of underground pipes, Rudbeck had devised a rather ingenious scheme to bring water from the river to many places around town. For the time it ran during the 1660s and early 1670s, many people in Uppsala enjoyed having water carried right to their doorsteps. Beneficiaries included the royal castle, the bishop’s estate, and, according to Rudbeck’s design, even the house of Olaus Verelius. The waterworks also served his botanical garden and even the Community House, so that even the most underprivileged in the university town, quite radically, shared the luxury of fresh water with Sweden’s royalty and their guests at the castle.

The theater, the garden, the waterworks, the Community House—so many projects, so many interests, so many considerations for a man of Rudbeck’s passions. A great deal indeed depended on the investment of Rudbeck’s time and energy. Additionally, as a high-ranking official at Uppsala University, he was obliged to attend countless meetings in the council chamber. And now, as old stories from Norse manuscripts caught his fancy, the dilemmas of being a Renaissance man were all too clear.