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

really impressed Rudbeck, who saw them as contradictory, incomplete, or just plain unsatisfactory, and wrote, “It is no wonder that they have made so many uncertain guesses on this matter, as Thor was foreign to them.”

Had classical scholars been able to read Swedish and the Norse stories about Thor, they could have recognized Zeus long ago, realizing his name came from Thius, two compounds of “god” and “earth” (dy-), and son (someone born). In the meantime, if Thor was Zeus, as he believed he had proved, where did that leave Odin?

Placing the stories side by side, and plotting out the various relationships, there was one glaring possibility for Odin in the king of the Underworld, Hades. The two, Hades and Odin, shared more than might at first appear. Like Hades ruling over the dead in classical mythology, Odin was the patron of dead soldiers, with his winged companions, the Valkyries, riding out to battlefields and choosing the slain to come to Odin’s hall, Valhalla, literally “hall of the slain.” After all, Rudbeck had already found the kingdom of Hades in the far north, indeed where the Norse sagas had arguably placed Odin’s halls. Rudbeck would mine classical and Norse mythologies for every similarity he could find to bring the dark, brooding Hades into Odin’s Valhalla.

By linking the Swedish Thor to the Greek Zeus, and the Swedish Odin to the classical Hades, not to mention the sea god Niord to the classical Neptune or Poseidon, Rudbeck had come full circle in his investigation, all the way back to Plato and the dialogues on lost Atlantis, when the armies of the power-crazed kingdom undertook ambitious wars of expansion. Could these ancient Greek figures, Zeus, Apollo, and the other Olympians, be surviving memories of that Atlantean aggression which Rudbeck believed had brought the Swedes to the banks of the Nile and the rocky hills of Athens?

The Norse gods Odin, Thor, and Frigge, once rulers of Atlantis.

To the bitter end, Rudbeck would be convinced of this startling revision of world history, and see it as yet further evidence that Atlantis, despite some temporary missing links, had been found in Sweden.

SUCH SENSATIONAL DISCOVERIES were undoubtedly affecting Rudbeck’s behavior. He began to dress more simply than ever, much as he envisioned the ideals of the ancient Swedes before their fall. Quite radically, he decided to print university programs in Swedish, not Latin, as he believed that this Atlantic, or Swedish, language lay at the root of both Latin and Greek. Rudbeck was one of the first scholars ever to use Swedish so prominently at a university. He explained his reasoning thus: since he had not yet discovered “that Aristotle or Cicero ever honored the Gothic or Scythian tongue (which is the oldest),” Rudbeck planned to do the same. He would address the university “in good, pure Swedish, our mother tongue.”

Such maverick disregard for tradition outraged many of his enemies, who feared that foreign scholars would mock Uppsala for discarding the international language of the learned. As one member of the College of Antiquities grumbled, “They will think this is only a school for children.”

As was often the case with Rudbeck, his ambitions would grow with time, and one can only wonder at his plans for the future. For if he could not find the palace of Atlantis in Old Uppsala, then perhaps he felt he could at least build it in the heart of the university. His design for the new main university building, which he had been asked to draw up, shows more than a passing resemblance to the great royal palace of Atlantis. It was enormous like the palace Plato had described; and the decorations for the new university building were Atlantean right down to the Nereids, the sea nymphs riding dolphins that were to adorn the columns of the magnificent facade.

The project was, however, never fulfilled, given the great expenses involved and the sluggish economy of the 1670s. Unfortunately the same forces were straining Rudbeck’s search for Atlantis, and threatening to make it end up like his unrealized plans for the university building.

Almost immediately after his book went to press, in March 1677, enormous sums of money were being consumed by this antiquarian project. By April the investment was costing a staggering fifty-four daler a week just to keep the production running, and soon even this did not suffice. By November, eight months later, Rudbeck had already pledged two thousand daler silvermynt to cover the labor of the printer and another thousand for purchasing the huge stacks of paper required to print the bulging text—in both Swedish and Latin parallel texts—with an ambitious initial print run of five hundred copies.

Another couple of hundred daler silvermynt went for larger-sized paper to be used in the lavish volume of images and maps. After all, with the Argonauts’ reconstructed voyage, the finds at the capital city of Atlantis, and the images from the expedition to the Underworld, these once luxurious accessories were quickly becoming a necessity, perhaps even a priority. New maps of ancient Sweden were also drafted, and none of this was exactly cheap. Together they added another two thousand daler silvermynt for the wood and copper engravings, as well as six hundred in wages for the assistants in the printer’s shop.

Rudbeck’s salary as a professor simply could not cover all these expenses. Just six months after Atlantica went to press, the costs of printing ran to almost six thousand daler silvermynt—and this at a time when a professor’s annual earnings were about seven hundred! At the same time, nothing in this figure even remotely made allowances for all the time and energy that Rudbeck had devoted to the project, or his own personal financing of the expeditions to the Underworld, or to observe the Hyperborean mountains.

Given the epic proportions of the search and the equally colossal costs, what had initially looked like a dream now seemed a nightmare. The professor could not ask the count for the shortfall. Although always generous with his gold, De la Gardie no longer had so much to give; the combination of lavish lifestyle and a severe downturn in the Swedish economy had considerably reduced his treasury. Worse by far were the nasty politics of the time. The losses in the war were blamed on the regency, and increasingly De la Gardie took most of the responsibility for the sorry state of affairs.

And one year after the king’s coronation in 1675, the financial support promised by Charles XI had not arrived. “Times were difficult,” Rudbeck tried to explain, and a lot of people in town were on edge, waiting for him to pay off the debts he had accumulated. Another year passed and Rudbeck was still politely asking the count to remind the king of the money. Unfortunately, though, De la Gardie was finding himself far outside the royal inner circle. As the war with Denmark intensified and Sweden strove to marshal available resources, the prospects of receiving the king’s gold seemed more distant than ever.

But the project must not die. As though it were a gigantic puzzle, Rudbeck was finding novel solutions to some of the oldest, most perplexing problems in ancient history—and gradually putting together the missing pieces to form a spectacular picture of the past. Classical mythology continued to bend under the weight of Rudbeck’s erudition, his enthusiasm, and indeed his obsession. In his mind, everything pointed to this ancient golden age of ice and frost under the North Star.

With the count mired in his difficulties and the king’s money nowhere to be found, Rudbeck scrambled to keep the search afloat. He borrowed money from friends, sold paper he had set aside for his books, begged for extra time in paying the printing costs, and even took loans from students—anything to prevent the work from suffering an early death. In the end Rudbeck even pawned the family silver.

His frantic actions kept the project alive for the moment, but trouble came from an unexpected source.

12

HANGING BY A THREAD

Dorian is far too wise not to do foolish things now and then, my dear Basil.

—OSCAR WILDE, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

DESPITE ANGERED COUNCIL members, theologians retrenched for battle, and antiquarians still grumbling over Rudbeck’s audacious moves to protect his printer, the new challenge was not to come from the most likely camps. Nor was it even that someone was offended when the Swedish physician dared to place the halls of Hades in their homeland, or pulled the pagan temple of Atlantis out from the walls of a prominent church. The problem, actually, was worse.

This was a simple, nonpartisan objection that was inspired at first by largely intellectual motivations. Back in the 1650s, while Rudbeck was still busy avoiding his anatomy lectures and dabbling in his new botanical garden, a