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

violence and misery.

In the late 1660s, many unreservedly ranked this Hervararsaga as one of the oldest and most impressive texts illuminating Sweden’s distant past. What a thrill it must have been to pore over this treasured manuscript and prepare its first-ever publication. And to adorn it with the most up-to-date and valuable scholarly accessories, Verelius asked Olof Rudbeck to make a map of the many places mentioned in the saga.

This may seem like a strange favor to ask of a medical doctor. But Rudbeck had earned a reputation for producing high-quality maps. He excelled at sketching the mountains, hills, and rivers of the countryside, and then reducing them to a series of lines and dots on a flat surface. Measuring with a great concern for precision and calculating with a single-minded patience, cartography was virtually an extension of Rudbeck’s skill in technical areas. His curiosity and his own love for discovery, moreover, helped him understand the value of a good, accurate map. Many officials requested Olof Rudbeck’s services, including no less than Carl Gustaf Wrangel, one of Sweden’s most feared generals during the Thirty Years’ War.

But this time, when Rudbeck accepted the offer, no one could have known what this curious little manuscript would mean for Uppsala’s distinguished professor.

“It was like a dream,” he later recalled. Behind the story of the cursed sword, the deadly runic magic, and the wild, howling berserks whipped into a furious rage, Olof Rudbeck saw many strange parallels between the Norse world and what he remembered from classical Greek traditions. All through the manuscript, in fact, were many “remarkable correspondences.” Kings, queens, customs, and places—far too many features in this late Viking saga struck with a peculiar resonance.

What exactly it was that first captured Rudbeck’s attention and launched him on what would be a lifelong quest may never be known. His earliest notes on the search do not survive, and the first draft of his work was later destroyed. The list of possibilities is extensive. For instance, as Rudbeck combed the saga looking for material for his map, he would have encountered some extraordinary information. The very first line in the manuscript noted a beautiful kingdom that once flourished in the north of Sweden, called Glasisvellir. This may not at first sound even remotely classical, but when translated from the Old Norse glaes, “amber,” and vellir, “rolling landscape,” it would be something altogether different.

The Glasisvellir were the “Glittering Plains”—a name that would have evoked the brilliant and shining Elysian Fields of classical mythology. According to the oldest of the ancient Greek accounts, the Elysian Fields were the great plains at the end of the world where the mild, cooling breezes blew, and its inhabitants lived what the ancient poet Homer called “a dream of ease.” Now, too, in this old manuscript of the Hervararsaga, there were provocative images of a place in the far north that seemed to have more in common with those joyous fields than just their name.

As in the classical Elysian Fields, the fortunate residents of the Norse Glittering Plains enjoyed a happy existence, living to a great age and effectively banishing sickness from the realm. They were also, like their classical depictions, keen sportsmen who enjoyed tossing a goatskin back and forth, that is, when they were not reveling in the dances, songs, and feasts along the soft meadows and meandering riverbanks. Indeed, the Norse wrestled on the Glittering Plains, just as the classical warriors fought for fun in the Elysian Fields.

Located beyond Gandvik, literally “the Bay of Sorcery,” the Glittering Plains flourished in a mythical landscape that included yet other features that sounded familiar from classical mythology. There were the violent neighbors of Jotunheim, “the land of giants,” who recalled the Greek stories of the large, fierce creatures that waged war on Zeus and the Olympian gods. In Norse mythology, as Rudbeck would soon learn if he did not know already, the giants also fought relentlessly with Odin and the Aesir gods. Further, the king of the Glittering Plains was introduced in an evocative way. “A mighty man and wise,” King Gudmund held out against the forces of chaos and barbarism, ruling over a kingdom whose inhabitants reached such an advanced age that outsiders believed that “in his realm must lie the Land of the Undying, the region where sickness and old age depart from every man who enters it, and where no one can die.”

Wisdom, strength, longevity—all these factors made the northerners in the Glittering Plains seem like a blessed people, and their home a fabled “Land of the Undying.” Could this golden age kingdom really have existed, and could it have possibly been related to the Elysian Fields of classical mythology? For that matter, could this utopian civilization of the far north have had anything to do with the land of the Hyperboreans, another blessed people of classical mythology who were said, as their name suggests, to live somewhere “beyond the north wind”?

Whatever it was that first captured Rudbeck’s attention, it virtually sounded a call to action. Ideas swirled in his head, and “for some peace of mind,” he said, he had to “put pen to paper.”

ONE DAY RUDBECK showed his notes to his friend Verelius, the eccentric but undisputed authority on Scandinavian runes and Norse sagas. Recently appointed to a brand-new post as Sweden’s first and for a long time its only “Professor of the Antiquities of the Fatherland,” Verelius was charged with the responsibility of seeking out old manuscripts, gathering them together, and promoting anything “that can serve to enlighten the deeds of the ancient past.” In this respect, he had found his scholarly niche. He lectured widely on Swedish history—its runes, its Viking sagas, and many other aspects of the pagan past. Despite the fiery patriotism that heated up his accounts, Verelius’s lectures have been described as some of the most pioneering and erudite given at Uppsala University in his time. Unfortunately, though, as he lamented, this was usually only to the benefit of three or perhaps four students who made it to the early-morning lecture in the otherwise empty hall.

Rudbeck’s notes were hastily written, as he put it himself, “not polished, or even once read all the way through.” But Verelius was greatly pleased, and he praised Rudbeck’s “many excellent conclusions and exemplary deductions.” In a letter written much later, shortly after Christmas 1673, Verelius described his own reaction to Rudbeck’s work. He had been particularly impressed with the rich proposals for bringing order to the chaos of Swedish history. These outlines could in fact build a foundation for a true chronology of ancient Sweden, something he admitted “up until now we have never hoped to establish with any certainty.” Rudbeck, he added, “has taken it much further than I had ever expected.”

As he also cheerfully noted, Rudbeck had succeeded in “correcting” many errors that often prevailed in the image of the Swedes abroad. This was a reference to the medieval Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, whose colorful early-thirteenth-century account of the far north showcased the heroics of Sweden’s archenemy, the Danes (and by the way, Saxo’s history includes our oldest account of the misfortunes of Prince Amled, elaborated centuries later in Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, Prince of Denmark). Composed in a lofty Latin that even drew praise from no less a stylist than Erasmus of Rotterdam, Saxo’s work dismissed many parts of Swedish history with the haughty disdain of a man at the center of a powerful Danish kingdom looking down at the backward periphery.

To Verelius’s mind, the implications of Rudbeck’s work were vast: if he was correct, he would have uncovered some major problems in Saxo’s influential history. The Swedes could finally expose some errors enshrined in the standard histories, sickening “lies” that had long offended Swedish sensibilities.

Pleased with the prospects of such a work, Verelius asked Rudbeck to speak with another authority, Professor Johannes (Johan) Loccenius. This was a stern, scholarly man, a former Royal Historiographer and a renowned expert in Swedish antiquities. Called over from Germany in the middle of the century, Loccenius had emerged as one of Uppsala’s prized scholars. He lectured regularly on ancient authorities such as Livy, Tacitus, and Cicero, and he seemed to be a man who, in modern parlance, “lived completely for science.” After Loccenius took up the history of his new homeland with a burning passion, his ambitious histories earned him praise for producing Sweden’s “first truly critical work.” A tireless scholar who trudged through the material slowly and cautiously, building his way to reasonable conclusions, Loccenius had earned his reputation as one of the greatest living experts on ancient Scandinavia.

When this scholar first saw Rudbeck’s notes, he was also visibly delighted. The seventy-year-old Loccenius burst into tears of joy and expressed his wonder: “How many times have I and other historians read [these texts] and never realized that they referred to Sweden.” As he put it, Rudbeck was working on an unparalleled project; in fact, it was unlike anything Sweden had ever seen before.

RICH IN IMPLICATIONS, Rudbeck’s “remarkable correspondences” were especially thrilling in the vibrant atmosphere of the late seventeenth century. Like its rival, Denmark, Sweden was then in the throes of a “Norse renaissance.” Patriotic scholars working in the universities of Copenhagen and Uppsala were experiencing an enthusiastic, somewhat romantic revival of interest in the old Vikings. Drinking horns, magical spells written in strange runic scripts, and dragon-headed prows adorning oak longships, the fact and fantasy of the Viking Age