rafts made of papyrus and balsa. His
Although a controversial method, still met with derision in some academic circles, this can be an effective way to learn about the past. And Rudbeck was one of the first to put it to use, albeit in a rudimentary fashion, and far from drifting 101 days on a balsa raft in the Pacific. The principle, however, was not completely alien. Rudbeck wanted to see if what he believed could in fact have been possible.
As his experiment with the passenger boat in his yacht service showed, the Argonauts
The quest for the Golden Fleece was yet another spectacular confirmation that such Swedish place-names had in fact existed in the most ancient times accessible to historians. Just as his archaeological dating method had shown to his satisfaction that the great antiquity of Sweden far preceded the Trojan War, here were Swedish towns already flourishing in the Arctic north in the earliest recorded sailing voyage, and observed at least one generation before that epic conflict. After all, when the
As for the temptation to see Jason’s voyage as “only a poem or a dream,” Rudbeck was ready with a response:
I would rather believe the dreams of this harper than the great mathematician Ptolemy, who, for all his mathematical art, was not able to find Sweden’s mountains, provinces, darkness, and Ice Sea, nor even its length, but made it a small island thirty Swedish miles long.
“So I would rather keep to the true dreamers than the untruthful writers.”
And for this dreamer in the middle of the 1670s, still wounded by the previous humiliations and insults, it was fairly clear that his beloved Sweden had also had a glorious past, one that was much better known among the ancients than had ever been imagined before.
RUDBECK’S DESCENT INTO the world of mythology was in many ways an addictive and fanciful escape. Following Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece was helping Rudbeck forget about his enemies, all their hateful accusations, and also some painful misfortunes at home.
Vendela had given birth to seven children, but alas not all had survived. In the past year, their oldest son, Johannes Caesar, had died at age sixteen. This tragic loss followed the death of their two-year-old daughter Magdalena, six years earlier. Unfortunately, within a couple of years, the family would also bury their toddler Karl. Although child mortality was high in the seventeenth century, and few parents at that time escaped its trauma, the death of a child was not necessarily any less heartbreaking than it is today. Olof and Vendela Rudbeck coped as best they could.
The other children in the household happily seemed to be healthy and prospering. The precocious fourteen- year-old Olof junior, tall, thin, and multifaceted in his abilities, was taking more after his father every day. Johanna Kristina, the oldest daughter, was showing her talents as well, especially in painting, drawing, and singing. Their son Gustaf, however, was more of a problem child. Less willing than the other children to please his parents, he was earning a reputation as a downright troublemaker. The youngest surviving child was their adorable six-year-old daughter, Vendela, who, like her older sister, was impressing others with her beautiful voice. Rudbeck must have been proud of his talented children, and pleased with the interest they had begun to show in his activities.
Reading the preliminary notes as soon as Rudbeck wrote them, Olaus Verelius was ecstatic. However, he also sensed the inherent risks and came again with a request. Verelius strongly encouraged Rudbeck to begin printing the book at once; he did not wish to see such an extraordinary work collapse under the weight of its own success. Rudbeck, too, knew the dangers of delay.
After presenting his discovery of the lymphatic system at Queen Christina’s court, Rudbeck had dragged his feet in writing up this great medical achievement. By the time he finally did, in the summer of 1653, another physician, Professor Thomas Bartholin at Copenhagen University, had managed to publish his account first, sparking the priority dispute of the early 1650s.
Not wanting to see his historical work suffer the same fate, Rudbeck took Verelius’s advice, and planned to publish as soon as possible. He would take his manuscript, as soon as it was ready, to the Uppsala University press, located in a little red building in the court around the Gustavianum. For the last twenty years this press had been in these cramped quarters. The offices were in one room, with another holding enormous stacks of paper, and a third serving as an attic or storehouse. The man in the middle of the mess was the printer Henrik Curio.
Apparently a learned man, the forty-four-year-old Curio spoke Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, English, Dutch, and Swedish, in addition to his native German. According to Rudbeck, he could also read Hebrew and Greek, a combination of ancient and modern languages that was certainly valuable in the growing international book trade of the seventeenth century. It was Rudbeck, in fact, who in 1661, after almost two years of attempts, had persuaded Curio to leave his work in a successful Stockholm printing house and open up shop at Uppsala University—a decision for which Rudbeck would later feel responsible, and eventually guilty.
Although the two men were different in many ways—Rudbeck alert, obsessive, and unrelenting, while Curio was more aloof and lackadaisical in his pursuits—they had become good friends over the years. Their relationship had grown closer after 1671, when Curio married Rudbeck’s cousin Disa. With these ties of family and friendship, it was important to Rudbeck that Curio would be the printer of his work.
But Curio was no angel. Since the early 1670s he had often been described as a slacker. His irregular habits, the critics complained, were undeniably affecting the quality of his work. He was careless, was a bit of a drunk, and did no proofreading whatsoever. The products were terrible and getting worse. Such negligence was also, people thought, bringing the press into chaos, and the university into disrepute. Soon “no one will be able to read [the books] at all.” Even observers uninvolved in the matter said his work was “unusually lousy.”
Complaints were getting louder, with demands for official inquiries and inventories of the press. Some professors were heard calling for Curio’s resignation. Overjoyed by his successes in finding the Hyperboreans and in his quest for the Golden Fleece, however, Rudbeck clearly did not realize how serious a threat was posed to Henrik Curio.
For the more Rudbeck looked, the more evidence he found of ancient Sweden, and the more his imagination helped him overcome the many difficulties that arose. Once he was on the trail of ancient heroes, it was apparent to Rudbeck that Jason and the Argonauts were not the only classical figures who had reached the far north.
ACCORDING TO ANCIENT MYTHS, many heroes had made the long, arduous journey to a land of “shadowy mists.” Retracing the path of these classical wanderers and examining what they had seen along the way, Rudbeck became convinced that these journeys to the kingdom of Hades were in fact trips to ancient Sweden.
The main clues for this startling, indeed mind-boggling, conclusion came from the oldest surviving descriptions of the dreaded Underworld. In Homer’s
