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

Boreswik (Bore’s Bay), Borristelle (Bore’s Place), and so on.

All of this added up to Rudbeck’s new understanding of the word Hyperborean. The ancient Greeks had spelled the word correctly, though they had made a mistake in interpreting its origin and its meaning. The term did not stem from Greek words meaning “beyond the north wind,” but instead, coming from the Swedish Yfwerborne, the word derived from one of two possibilities. Either it referred to the founding king Bore and his illustrious descendants, the Boreades, or, alternatively, it came from the Swedish words yfwer, “high,” and borne, “born,” referring to the “highborn” or elite Boreades who surrounded the king. Either way, these were the true Hyperboreans of classical legend.

To find out more, Rudbeck would attempt to use every form of evidence that might conceivably shed light on this enigmatic people and their proposed home in Sweden. His search would, in the process, lead him to make a final break with traditional historians, whose work at that time consisted primarily in the interpreting and commenting on written accounts. In a sense, the deeper Rudbeck pressed into the old traditions, the more necessary it was to find new ways to understand what he saw as their true meaning. Sometimes the results were innovative; at other times they were odd at best.

RUDBECK WAS DETERMINED to show what the lyric poet Pindar would call “the wondrous way” to the blessed Hyperboreans. What if, however, this legendary people had never really existed, other than as the inhabitants of an imagined utopia, a dreamland for classical Greece? After all, it is striking to see how many ancients had their doubts. The oldest historian, Herodotus, for example, expressed his skepticism about the existence of the Hyperboreans:

I will not tell the tale of Abaris, who was supposed to have been a Hyperborean, and carried his arrow all round the world without eating a bite. Let me just add, however, that, if Hyperboreans exist “beyond the north- wind” there must also be Hypernotians “beyond the south.”

Other authorities from the geographer Strabo to the natural historian Pliny joined him in their hesitancy, though Rudbeck remained unfazed.

No wonder, he thought, that many intelligent people had questioned whether or not the Hyperboreans had existed. Knowledge of the north had somehow disappeared over time, leaving an unfortunate accumulation of errors that had confused the ancients. For example, many sources had stated that the Hyperborean isle was “not smaller than Sicily.” Yet, if you look at ancient maps, including those from the most famous and influential geographer, Ptolemy, Sweden would not even satisfy this minimal requirement. Antiquity’s greatest geographers had shrunk Sweden so much that it actually looked smaller than Sicily, mistaking the far southern tip of the peninsula, Skane, for the entire country.

Ptolemy’s original error, Rudbeck conceded, was made worse by a certain lazy ignorance on the part of his successors. Instead of investigating the matter for themselves, many scholars had simply copied Ptolemy’s view and, in the process, his mistakes. As this happened for centuries, error built upon error, leaving the mistake firmly ingrained, and the discovery of the true identity of the Hyperboreans indefinitely postponed.

History was like mapmaking, Rudbeck suggested: a geographer could not make a map by uncritically following the statements of others, or by relying solely on the experiences of other people. Rudbeck showed the futility with a story:

One time, I called over a number of students here at Uppsala from each province of Sweden, and asked them where such-and-such place lay in such-and-such province. When one said west, the other said southwest, one two miles, the other four miles.

With this method, it would be difficult to find anything. Because the students sometimes took different paths to the destinations, and some were better than others at measuring distance, the result was chaos. Even when he took advantage of actual maps of the regions, Rudbeck still could not make any sense out of the conflicting reports about the distant provinces as long as he sat hundreds of miles away, in a comfortable study in Uppsala. “How would Ptolemy, who sat down in Egypt and drew his maps as best he could using many writings of ancients and others, do any better?” he asked.

Once Rudbeck gained more confidence in peeling away the layers of errors, he would try to overcome the other objections by showing how much of the Hyperborean legacy still existed in Sweden. In this task, Rudbeck’s ingenuity and resourcefulness had few limits. When the ancients described the Hyperboreans as tall and healthy, Rudbeck knew how to find out. He wrote, “I have diligently examined all the large burial mounds, where skulls and whole skeletons have been found.” The size of the skeletons was sometimes enormous. “The largest ones have been five to six aln [ten to twelve feet!], although there were not many of them, but I have found countless skeletons four aln long [eight feet] or thereabouts.”

Rudbeck used many original manuscripts of Norse sagas in his search for Atlantis. This image, for example, comes from Snorri Sturluson’s Edda.

Too bad Rudbeck did not elaborate more on this rather odd passage. Hurrying to keep up with the rapid flow of his ideas, Rudbeck just noted how these skeletons showed the great height that the ancients attributed to the Hyperboreans, and then moved on to discuss other exciting finds. Legends of northern giants were well preserved in many places, not least in the Norse sagas.

The opening of Snorri’s Edda, the Gylfaginning, “the tricking of Gylfi,” told the memorable story of Thor and his companions’ journey to the land of the giants. When they entered the region called Utgard, somewhere in the far northeast, they saw a castle so enormous that they had to “bend their heads back to touch their spines before they could see up over.” The door alone was too large for Thor to open, leaving the gods, ungracefully, to squeeze their way into the giant stronghold in “between the bars” and slip into the great hall.

Besides fanciful and imaginative stories that held some kernels of truth, Rudbeck found evidence of the tall Hyperboreans in many other places. One time he assembled a number of Uppsala students and measured them. Dividing them into categories, according to their home provinces in the kingdom, Rudbeck dutifully measured and correlated his results. The tallest students indeed came from the north. He believed that height increased broadly the farther north one went, reaching a climax at about the 68th degree of latitude before dropping off significantly with the nomadic Saami in the farthest north.

Another prominent characteristic that had almost invariably appeared in the ancient discussions was that the giant Hyperboreans enjoyed a reputation for great health. Drawing on his experiences as a physician, Rudbeck was convinced that these stories reflected a truth he had often observed in his medical practice: the Swedes rarely succumbed to typhus fever, leprosy, the plague, and other nightmare contagions that struck so frequently on the Continent. Swedish health, he added, was not due to any inborn racial advantage, but stemmed instead from fundamental differences in the environment.

The legendary Hyperborean health was, in other words, explained by Sweden’s cold, brisk weather, which hardened the body’s resistance to disease, and a well-rounded diet also enhanced immunity. Apples, carrots, walnuts, and chestnuts formed a large part of the Swedish diet, Rudbeck noted, especially compared with other countries. Even more, his countrymen regularly consumed many kinds of meat like ox, pork, ham, and “countless fish and birds,” and this went, remarkably, also for the Swedish peasant. An entire day of food in Italy, he suspected, would equal only a hearty “Swedish breakfast.”

Such a fortunate combination of climate and diet was one reason why so many had marveled at the northerners’ resiliency, from the geographer Strabo, writing at the height of the Roman Empire, to Adam of Bremen, writing one thousand years later in the Holy Roman Empire. The Norse texts were also full of references to immortal realms of the north—not of course literally immortal, Rudbeck added, but rather references to the fact that the people lived such happy and healthy lives, overcoming sickness. In Rudbeck’s mind, Hyperborean tendencies and traditions had lived on in the stories of the legendary lands of the Undying, like that of King Gudmund in the Hervararsaga.

To show how this Hyperborean trait was a Swedish characteristic, Rudbeck asked his brother Nicholas for some help. As bishop of their hometown, Vasteras, Nicholas Rudbeck granted access to the records of baptism for