temple was clearly seen in the existing church and hence, by deduction, this must have been part of the original Old Uppsala.
Even if few outside the most fanatical believers would accept the testimony of these handpicked German prisoners as independent or of decisive importance in the controversy, Rudbeck knew the value of such an expedition. Scholars were debating about words in texts, when the actual place stood there for examination. “No documents are more certain about the truth of a thing than the thing itself,” Rudbeck wrote to the count. The fact that he was deeply convinced that Schefferus was wrong and highly confident that he could prove it made the situation more frustrating.
While this quixotic outing to Old Uppsala was apparently having no significant effect in overturning the prohibition, Rudbeck emphasized the seriousness of the issue. “The life of our antiquities,” he said, “seems to hang by a thread.” But then something happened that has raised eyebrows ever since.
DURING THIS TIME OF confusion, probably late 1677 and definitely by early 1678, a curious document turned up in Uppsala. This was a loose manuscript, supposedly a summary of an older lost chronicle written by a thirteenth-century bishop of Vasteras. Bishop Karl’s Chronicle, as the document came to be known, had much to say about the controversy.
According to this newly discovered chronicle, the construction of Sweden’s first cathedral had begun in the year 1138, and its bishop, Sverker the Elder, had chosen the site of Old Uppsala. Additionally, this document confirmed that the builders had used the ruins of the old pagan temple, which another ruler, Yggemund, had destroyed.
What a dramatic find—and it simply could not have come to light at a better time. Here, all of a sudden, was an old authority, a bishop no less, who seemed almost miraculously to confirm Rudbeck’s basic assumption about the location of Old Uppsala. Curiously, too, this document was found in a suspicious place: it had been inserted in the pages of an old medieval herbal treatise shelved in Olof Rudbeck’s own library.
No wonder questions have been raised about the authenticity of the so-called Bishop Karl’s Chronicle. Could Rudbeck and Verelius really have enjoyed the good fortune of stumbling on such valuable evidence in this time of need? For many, it was simply too convenient. Schefferus, for one, smelled a rat, and cried forgery.
Why, after all, did the bishop of Vasteras spend so much time writing about Uppsala, a town outside his administration? Who could help but notice that this so-called thirteenth-century account managed to address just about every concern of the current debate in 1677—and displayed little interest in matters beyond this controversy? Other oddities, too, arose upon inspection of this document. Bishop Karl showed an unusual preference for some seventeenth-century terms, as opposed to the words often favored by medieval chroniclers. Most glaringly, the ink on the old manuscript seemed suspiciously modern.
All these questions were buzzing in the late spring of 1678 when Olaus Verelius decided to disregard the ban and publish the discovery. Verelius’s annotated excerpts of Bishop Karl’s Chronicle,
Schefferus was enraged. He was convinced that the entire manuscript was a forgery, “a most foul-ugly fraud” about to be imposed on the learned world (
As Schefferus knew all too well, recent problems between the two scholars were still fresh in Verelius’s mind. Just as Rudbeck no longer felt welcome in the council chamber, Verelius had been experiencing his own ostracism from the College of Antiquities. Bitterly he had complained that several members of this body acted like “sworn enemies,” contriving to remove him from the scene. They held meetings, he charged, without bothering to invite him or even to notify him of the date, time, and location. He also felt that Schefferus and his fellow antiquarians made sure that he did not receive his promised salary. For his work as Professor of the Fatherland’s Antiquities, Verelius had been paid only two times in the last fifteen years.
From the college’s perspective, it was all a misunderstanding. The withholding of his salary was unfortunately true, but that was not an isolated case, and reflected only the overall financial problems that the college faced. Verelius, they said, was the one who showed no interest in the meetings. He would not take time to come into the university to check on the society’s events, and when he happened to be in town, he always seemed too preoccupied to attend the gatherings. Accusations flew from both sides of this heated dispute. Whatever the merits of his complaints, most certainly exaggerated, one thing was clear: Verelius felt hostility and a sense of persecution, which at times seemed to run on parallel lines with Rudbeck’s own impressions, drawing the two even closer together.
So, given how much these resentments were breaking apart the former friends in the College of Antiquities, Schefferus could only wonder if Verelius had orchestrated this strange episode of Bishop Karl’s Chronicle. He certainly had a motive. The printing of the old manuscript would promote his own work, settle the score over past animosities, and help his friend Rudbeck, whose own theory about Old Uppsala was threatening to come apart.
As the controversy simmered during the spring and summer of 1678, with the publication of
A more likely culprit might be Olof Rudbeck himself. Would he not have more to gain than Verelius, who could, if he were exposed, forever be remembered for having edited and commented on a forged script? Rudbeck also had quite an authoritarian streak, and often found it difficult to control himself when he felt challenged or provoked. Given the articulate doubts of Sweden’s most esteemed humanist, it is not difficult to imagine Rudbeck becoming defensive with an almost explosive zeal. So much money, so much time, so much energy had already been committed, and Rudbeck felt that he was on the brink of finding that essential, irrefutable piece of evidence which would establish without doubt the truth of his lost world.
Besides, Rudbeck was famous for finding, or creating, loopholes and ways out of the worst predicaments. Here was a document that was not specifically forbidden by the chancellor’s prohibition. It could help him respond to Schefferus’s errors, indeed dangerous errors that threatened to keep knowledge of Old Uppsala, or Atlantis, out of public knowledge.
Stacks and stacks of halfway printed books littering the printer’s shop were not to be in vain. Nor was Rudbeck’s rash abandonment of university affairs, or his hasty, somewhat impulsive plunge into the complex study of the past. Rudbeck was driven to bolder, more audacious acts of desperation. Otherwise his
But, for some reason, no one has ever seriously accused Rudbeck of forging this document. Such a claim would imply many things that are hard to establish, especially the difficulty of imagining Rudbeck using his friend Verelius in this manner. Given the lack of supporting evidence, not to mention the fact that the original
Indeed, before his death in 1679, Schefferus would absolve Rudbeck of any possible guilt in the matter, and Verelius would go to his grave passionately affirming his own innocence. It is actually possible that both Rudbeck and Verelius were innocent. There was another man who was increasingly seen at Rudbeck’s side, his good friend Carl Lundius, an ambitious thirty-nine-year-old scholar who had married Vendela’s sister Gertrude. Lundius is overwhelmingly associated with a number of questionable documents. At this time, however, his reputation was impeccable.
Pursuing his lifelong goal of becoming a lawyer like his father, Carl Lundius was a professor of law quickly rising in esteem. He excelled in jurisprudence, Swedish law, Roman law, and influential natural-law doctrines of the
