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

These were serious matters that needed to be addressed. As he tried to figure out why the ancient Scandinavians had not written more about their civilization, other than the “beautifully carved runes” adorning the stones, Rudbeck would venture into one of his many provocative discussions about the nature of history.

The lack of a written record, he conjectured, actually made perfect sense. Civilizations experiencing golden ages were not likely to write; presumably they were too busy enjoying peace, prosperity, and the good life. History as we know it comes only with more difficult times. Whether wars, invasions, or civil strife, conflict on a grand scale is needed to give rise to history, and to inspire stirring narratives. With no struggle, there was no history, he suggested. In the process, Rudbeck was anticipating some fertile musings about the “philosophy of history” that flourished among fashionable Romantic thinkers of the nineteenth century. One of these leading figures, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, put the idea more famously: “The periods of good fortune form [history’s] emptiest pages.”

Feeling that he had solved the problem of the silent golden age, Rudbeck did not, unfortunately, develop this thought, or the idea of struggle, further. If he had, his commentary would probably have made an interesting read. For the role of struggle in history would have a long life, not least with Hegel and one of his readers, Karl Marx, who elaborated the notion and made it a cornerstone of his understanding of the entire historical process. All history, Marx would later say, was about struggle: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” The centrality of conflict would indeed last a long time in standard historiography—that is, until the rise of analytical schools that would show other ways to craft the past that did not rely on clash-driven narratives.

As for the first and more immediate problem—the lack of references to Scandinavian civilization in ancient texts—there was a possible solution. Many Greek and Latin writers had recorded impressions about the Hyperboreans, and a number of Swedish thinkers had started to wonder if this enigmatic nation might have been located in the far north of Sweden. Olaus Verelius, for one, had already given much thought to the matter, and considered the possibility almost a certainty. So did his teacher, the poet and philosopher Georg Stiernhielm, as did his teacher Johan Bureus at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Even before that, some medieval continental thinkers, including Adam of Bremen and Albertus Krantzius, had placed the Hyperboreans on maps of Sweden.

Despite all the lively speculation, however, no one had been able to prove or disprove that the Hyperboreans had actually lived in Sweden. Both Bureus and Stiernhielm had devoted years to the study, but both, unfortunately, died before they could realize their ambitions. The vast majority of their reflections about this ancient people had in fact never been published, and existed only in the form of manuscripts.

Given this state of affairs, Verelius would prove to be highly useful to Rudbeck’s search. He knew the traditions about the Hyperboreans, having discussed them regularly in his commentaries to the sagas. He had access to the unpublished works of his teacher, Stiernhielm, which he almost certainly loaned to Rudbeck. By the early 1670s, too, Verelius was regularly reading Rudbeck’s own notes, gladly offering advice and guidance.

Verelius was, in many ways, helping Rudbeck navigate through the sea of speculation that placed the original home of the Hyperboreans everywhere from Celtic Britain to the Netherlands to Siberia (and in modern times, Oxford University’s professor of Greek E. R. Dodds proposed China). The Hyperboreans were placed all over the “north,” anywhere that could conceivably be understood as “beyond the north wind”—that is, when authorities did not dismiss them outright as myth, as most would do today.

The more Rudbeck read about the people, however, the more familiar the Hyperboreans sounded. Ancient travelers venturing into their lands described them as tall and healthy, and enjoying great fame for their wisdom, righteousness, and justice. They worshiped outdoors, in sacred groves. With flutes and lyres, laurel-wreathed Hyperboreans danced and sang praises to their chief deity, Apollo, the archer god with his silver bow who came down to visit them every nineteen years. Everything Rudbeck heard and read sounded like a portrait of his northerners, a people who were building burial mounds long before the beginnings of classical civilization.

With the help of Verelius and his manuscripts, Rudbeck would try to be the one who could finally find the Hyperboreans, and show that they had once lived in Sweden. The paths he blazed would be far from conventional.

READING WIDELY IN ancient Greek accounts, Rudbeck felt that he had stumbled upon a fundamental error that had long caused confusion, and had kept the Hyperboreans enveloped in a gilded mist. He explained, “It often happens that when one people hears the name of another people, and cannot determine its meaning, they willingly interpret it according to their own language.”

Ancient Greeks had, in other words, heard the name of the Hyperboreans and, not knowing its original meaning, had interpreted it as if it were a word in their own language: hyper meaning “beyond” and borea referring to Boreas, the north wind. This etymology made sense, at least in Greek, and sounded poetic, but Rudbeck wondered how a foreign people, Hyperboreans, with their own distinct language, could have a name that might meaningfully be reduced to Greek etymologies. Such an interpretation was bound to make mistakes, and create what Rudbeck called “strange animals.”

In his mind, the word Hyperborean was clearly Swedish, and he had found evidence in the village of Ekholm, outside Uppsala.

There stood a stone with two intertwining dragons, and carved on the back of one of them was the word Yfwerborne (pronounced ew-ver-BOR-nuh). The Greek word for the Hyperboreans is pronounced hew-per-BOR-eh-oi. Their similarities can be seen below:

The main difference between these two words, as Rudbeck saw it, was the second syllable, with an f sound in Swedish and a p (?) sound in Greek. This could, however, easily be explained by the dynamics of the consonant shift that show how easily f and p change over time and across borders. Rudbeck cited many examples of this phenomenon: from the word for father, Swedish fader and Greek pater , to the word for fire, Swedish fyr and Greek pyr . (As for the suffixes, ne and oi, these were just standard plural endings.) In other words, the Swedish runic inscription Yfwerborne was basically a direct match to the Greek .

With his burning interest in antiquities, Rudbeck quickly realized that this was not a stray find. Surviving examples of the Swedish Hyperboreans were turning up in many places. There was, for instance, a preservation of this memory in an old song he knew, a tune that ended every refrain with the thunderous words, “The Yfwerborne Swedes who conquered every land.”

The breakthrough discovery about this people, however, came when Rudbeck pored over the old Norse sagas and eddas. In an old manuscript of the Icelandic poet Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, actually one of the oldest copies in existence, Rudbeck found a reference to a figure that was described in typically Hyperborean terms: “beautiful in appearance, big and powerful.” The name of this northerner was, interestingly, Bore. He was the founder of a family that would be praised to the skies. According to Norse mythology, Bore was the first god who appeared on earth, and his son Bor would be the father of Odin, “the greatest and most glorious that we know.” In other words, this Bore—whoever he was—was remembered as the ancestor of Odin, his wife Frigg, and, as the Edda made clear, many of the leading Aesir gods who would rule “heavens and earth.” The manuscript would also credit the children of Bor for going on to do many splendid deeds, from creating the first human beings to constructing Midgard, the fortress of the earth.

Inside this passage were many “riddles” that Rudbeck felt needed clarification, and indeed he would spend most of his life trying to separate the history from the mythology. For now, though, the claim that Bor’s children ruled over the “heavens and earth” could be seen as a poetic celebration of ancient kings, much like the praises that Egyptian priests heaped on the pharaohs for commanding the sun to rise and the Nile to flood. The more Rudbeck read the stories of the children of Bor, the more he thought that these tales preserved distant memories of an advanced people who were building civilization in the north. Their deeds were so illustrious that they had been remembered over time as the achievements of gods.

So far the legacy of the Hyperboreans was revealed by the fallen warriors in the burial mounds, the figures commemorated on the standing stones, the Yfwerborne celebrated in the tavern song, and the mythic “children of Bor” honored in the old Norse manuscripts. A glance at a map of Sweden showed many other surviving memories as well. The names Bore and Bor had lived on in many places around the kingdom: Boresland in the north (Terra Borealis), Borsfiord (Mare Borealis), Boro (Bore’s Island), Bore’s sion (Bore’s Sea),