In one of his typically bold plans, Bureus had once proposed that Sweden replace its current alphabet with a revived form of the older, nobler, and more mystical runes. He thought the Latin-derived Swedish script was too closely bound up with the Roman Catholic Church, whose triumphant march had gone hand in hand with the progress of the Latin language. Returning to the runes, Bureus argued, would spark a new renaissance in Sweden and unlock enormous creative energies. One law was actually passed in 1611 forbidding the publication of the regular Swedish grammar books in favor of the runes, and Bureus worked on inventing a more flexible, cursive form. But otherwise this dreamy plan does not seem to have gotten very far.
Neither, for that matter, did most of Bureus’s literary works. He had a very difficult time completing his projects, and so, at the time of his death in 1652, virtually the entire bulk of his life’s work remained buried in unfinished manuscripts. Rudbeck, however, was more than glad to continue investigating the runes where Bureus and his successors had stopped.
APPLYING HIS MEASURING staff to the soil around the stones, Rudbeck read the layers of humus, the accumulations of the rich fertile soil that, given their position, could have gathered only after the erection of the pillars. The age of the stones varied tremendously. Some were set up rather late, during the period A.D. 600–1100, a very conventional date for the many late Viking inscriptions found around Uppsala. But other inscriptions, Rudbeck was convinced, must have been significantly older. Some, he thought, dated all the way back to 2300–2200 B.C. And if this calculation was accurate, then the findings would be extraordinary.
This would mean that the Swedes had started carving the runic letters only a few hundred years after they had arrived in the land around Uppsala. Given conventional chronologies, this was an exceptionally early date, about one thousand years before the Trojan War or the first Olympic games. In other words, if Rudbeck’s measurements were correct—and a reported twelve thousand tests had convinced him they were an “infallible” method of dating —then Bureus had been right: Sweden had one of the oldest alphabets in the world.
Further explorations in the countryside followed, and other surprising implications ensued. After closely reading the inscriptions found on the runic monoliths, Rudbeck had come to believe that these mysterious letters were actually the
One crucial piece of evidence came from the first-century Roman natural historian Pliny, who discussed the history of the Greek language in his multivolume
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
The other eight letters—? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?—were added later.
This piece of information from the cautious collector came as a revelation to Olof Rudbeck. He began to wonder even more about traditional accounts of the origins of the ancient Greek alphabet. According to these, the Greeks developed their letters from the Phoenicians, the ancient Semitic people living on the far eastern shores of the Mediterranean and still today credited with creating the oldest alphabet. But Pliny’s passing comment raised an intriguing question. If the Phoenician script had twenty-two letters, as modern authorities from Joseph Scaliger to Samuel Bochart knew, then Rudbeck asked: How did the Greeks end up with only sixteen of the twenty-two letters they had supposedly borrowed? Why would they prefer to take only part of a script, and what happened to the other Phoenician letters?
It was highly unlikely, Rudbeck ventured, that the ancients would take a more complete and self-sufficient script and turn it into a truncated and incomplete one. No one would do that, he said, in his pragmatic approach to the question. Additionally, there was the strange case of the letters that the Greeks certainly had but were nowhere to be found in Phoenician. How, for instance, did the Greeks end up with alpha (?), epsilon (?), iota (?), upsilon (?), or any other vowel, when no such letters existed among the Phoenicians? Besides, Rudbeck’s crash initiation into eastern antiquities, together with his typically unapologetic directness, made him think that the Greek letters were simply too different from their alleged counterparts to conclude that they were at one time the same letters. The runes adorning the standing stones in the Swedish landscape, on the other hand, were an altogether different matter.
To Rudbeck, the sixteen original Greek letters seemed very similar to the sixteen symbols that he believed to be the oldest runic script. Placing the two alphabets side by side, Rudbeck saw, through his Atlantis-tinted glasses, a string of correspondences between the Greek and the runic. How similar they sounded! How similar the letters looked! How similarly they were drawn! The short, simple angular thrusts, in linear fashion, without any adornment, made Rudbeck absolutely sure that Swedish runic and ancient Greek were once the same script.
Alpha (?), beta (?), gamma (?), delta (?), right down the list, no less than thirteen of the original sixteen Greek letters fit like a glove (see table on facing page). The last three letters, ?, ?, and ?, however, were not as easily found.
Unable to solve this riddle, Rudbeck began to look at specific Greek words that used these letters and then compare them with words in Old Swedish that meant the same thing. In this way, for instance, Rudbeck came to believe that the Greek ? (kappa) was derived from the Swedish H. The Swedish word for “heart,”
The Greek pi (?) likewise revealed itself in the Swedish F. Rudbeck saw common words such as 
, sensing what is now a well-established link shared among Indo- European languages. The famous figure of Greek mythology, Pan, or 
the horned, goat- legged, and mischievous god of antiquity, known for startling travelers (hence a “panic”), was originally the Swedish Fan, another horned, goat-legged figure who haunted the forests, and whose name is the word that today still is used in Swedish for “devil.” However ludicrous this may sound, Rudbeck had not lost his mind. What he had lost was perspective and, all too often, a sense of reality. And so Rudbeck went on happily deriving many Greek words from a Swedish origin, each one adding to the accumulating pile of evidence about the Swedish impact on the ancient past, and each one, at the same time, showing how ingenious his delusions could be.
PROBABLY ONE OF the most creative pieces of evidence about the runic origins of ancient Greek developed naturally from Rudbeck’s previous work on the Olympian god Hermes.
As the half-brother of Apollo, and the herald of Zeus, both already found in Sweden, Hermes must have seemed a natural candidate for a Swedish Atlantean. Equipped with his golden winged sandals and winged hat, he was also the chosen guide for escorting many souls through the “dank ways,” over the “snowy rock,” and past the “narrows of the sunset,” to the “wastes at the world’s end,” that is, to the kingdom of the Underworld, which Rudbeck had also already located in the Arctic north.
Sure enough, Rudbeck believed that he had come across the original inspiration for the Olympian Hermes in the north: the Aesir god Heimdall. Like Hermes, who was praised for keeping watch over the house, the business, the family (perhaps explaining why Hermes was the most often sculptured of all the classical gods), “splendid Heimdall” was the watchman for the Norse Aesir. As Hermes relayed messages to mortals and immortals alike, Heimdall was the communicator for the Aesir gods. The similarities between the classical and Norse deities continued, though Rudbeck had to force them somewhat.
With his position as herald, guide, messenger, interpreter, and even diplomat of the gods, Hermes held a position of great responsibility. This “sophisticated rogue” had effectively developed into the favorite servant of Zeus. Such great importance for Hermes was, in Rudbeck’s vision, based on the esteem of Heimdall, whose official functions had been enshrined in his name, which drew on the Swedish words
