spelled as Hereker, Herakled, or other variants), meaning one dressed or armed as a warrior (Atl. I, 473–74). Rudbeck presented a list of verbs, nouns, and adjectives with variant spellings found in Norse sagas to support his theory (Atl. I, 471–73). Had he looked into Pindar’s Olympian III, he would have been delighted to read about Hercules’ visit to the Hyperboreans, bringing the olive tree back for the Olympian Games. The story was seconded by Pausanias, who called the Hyperborean origins a local tradition in Description of Greece 5.7.7.
But, despite Rudbeck’s use of Germania, Tacitus would probably not have agreed with his interpretation of the Pillars of Hercules. The Roman historian continued: “It may be that Hercules did go there [the rumored northern pillars]; or perhaps it is only that we by common consent ascribe any remarkable achievement in any place to his famous name” (Germania 34). Rudbeck’s discussion also overlooks many alternative explanations, including the views of writers he held in high esteem, like Diodorus Siculus’s Library of History IV.18.4–5 or Pliny’s Natural History III, 3–4, both of which support the more traditional location of Gibraltar.
“Not a single one” and Rudbeck’s commentary on Plato’s Atlantis as “looking into a mirror” are in Atl. I, 181. Given how well he understood Sweden, Plato was the “wisest” of the Greeks, clearly capturing the northern landscape (Atl. I, 335 and 485); his golden words (336). Rudbeck’s words on the “102 Platonic oars” comes from Atl. I, 190, translated by Eriksson (1994), 23.
The war with Denmark was starting to affect Rudbeck and the town of Uppsala (21 May 1676, Annerstedt, Bref II, 132–33). The war was also threatening the university’s income (3 September 1678, Annerstedt, Bref II, 161–62), not to mention the lives of many professors. Hadorph, for instance, feared that the Danes would learn from Gotland fishermen how easy it would be to move inland. Swedes were starting to hide valuables in the forests, a fact Hadorph mentioned in a letter published by Schuck in Hadorph, 217–20.
Rudbeck had printed an invitation to a dissection in his anatomy theater in Swedish, 1 May 1677 (Annerstedt, Bref II, 148–49). Annerstedt also published Rudbeck’s program intending to bury a dissected body, 28 May 1677 (Bref II, 155). On Rudbeck’s building projects, see Ragnar Josephson, Det hyperboreiska Uppsala (1945), particularly 61–84. That the survival of Atlantis was dependent on its virtues is stated in Plato’s Critias 120D–121C and in Atl. I, 187–88.
CHAPTER 11: OLYMPUS STORMED
The epigraph is from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, translated by Francis Golffing (1956), 29. The dimensions of the Atlantis plain, 3,000 stadia long and 2,000 wide, are found in Plato’s Critias, 118A. One scholar who has worked meticulously to find such a large plain is J. M. Allen, though he had to cut the measurement of the stadium in half; see Atlantis, the Andes Solution: The Discovery of South America as the Legendary Continent (1997). The royal palace of Atlantis is discussed by Plato in Critias 115C–115D, and Rudbeck’s connection with Kungsgard in Atl. I, 115ff., with a discussion of the use of the “Atlantis” stones to build the Uppsala castle in Atl. I, 180–81. On the lack of walls surfacing in his site, Rudbeck found assistance from another member of the Riksrad, Gabriel Oxenstierna, who informed him that the surrounding forests and hills were sometimes called “walls” in the past (Atl. I, 120).
Rudbeck’s arguments on why Plato’s story about the destruction of the island was not literally correct is found in Atl. I, 183–88. Information on the “barrier of mud” is found in Critias 109A. The reference to the Great Flood comes from Genesis 9:11. Two other points about Plato’s account that Rudbeck said were incorrect were Atlantis’s elephants and wine. The wine was actually Swedish mead, and the elephants were wolves (and later, at the suggestion of De la Gardie’s son, moose) (Atl. I, 183–85). Rudbeck’s argument based on the lunar calendar appears in Atl. I, 187, 485. In his interpretation of Critias 108E, Rudbeck counts the nine thousand years from the time of Solon’s visit to Egypt, and not from the time of Socrates’ Hermocrates, Timaeus, and Critias discussion about Atlantis. See notes on the chronology of Atlantis in the notes for chapter 7. Allen, who discussed how the Incans had long used the lunar calendar, is one prominent exception to the tendency noted in the text.
Everything fit so well for Rudbeck’s theory, he thought that Plato’s words on the “hot baths” of Atlantis were ancient references to the Swedish love of saunas (Critias 117B and Atl. I, 166, 409). As Rudbeck would later put it, “To say that Atlantis is sunk is a greater vanity than all vanity” (Atl. II, 28).
Complaints about Rudbeck’s neglect of his teaching in these years are treated in Annerstedt, Bref II, cxix–cxx, and the waterworks system’s not working by 1676 is noted in Annerstedt, Bref I, ix. For more background on the waterworks system, see Rudbeck’s letter to the Inquisition, 7 March 1685, Annerstedt, Bref III, 219–26, especially 223–26. The need for a new roof on the anatomy theater was noted by Rudbeck in a letter to De la Gardie, 24 February 1675, printed in Annerstedt, Bref II, 100, and the collapsed bridge in a letter of 1 May 1677, Annerstedt, Bref II, 147.
Diodorus Siculus’s comments on Atlantis come from his Library of History III, 56– 61. With his discussion of King Atlas, the empire, and the many achievements, Diodorus almost offers a blueprint for Rudbeck and many other Atlantis enthusiasts: “The great majority of the most ancient heroes trace their descent back to the Atlantides” (III.60.5). Hera’s words in the narrative come originally from Homer’s Iliad XIV, lines 200–205. Hesiod describes the mythic home of the Titans “hidden under a misty gloom, in a dank place where are the ends of the huge earth” in Theogony 729–31, and the words “ends of gloomy earth” and “home of murky night” appear at 736–46. “The glowing Sun never looks upon them,” Theogony 758–60.
The Norse sagas at Rudbeck’s disposal included original manuscripts of the Poetic Edda, Snorri’s Edda, his Heimskringla, and many others. Most of the Norse sagas were written during the Middle Ages, especially in the thirteenth century. Some, however, were only copies from even later times. At least a few were written down in the seventeenth century, probably before being carried over by an Icelandic student.
Hephaestus fell a few times from the sky, according to the Iliad, Books I and XVIII. That the ancient Greek gods came from abroad was a belief that could be read in Herodotus’s Histories, which specifically traced them back to Egypt. The only exceptions, the historian claimed, were Hera, Hestia, Themis, the Dioscuri, the Graces, the Nereids, and Poseidon, who, he said, came from the Pelasgians or, in the case of Poseidon, Libya (II, 50). Cronos, Rhea, and the devouring of their “splendid children” is in Theogony 453ff. It is well known that the Titans, in ancient myth, were imprisoned after their loss in the war, but there was also a tradition of Zeus releasing them, or at least Cronos, Rhea, and Prometheus, as reported in Pindar, Pythian IV, 291, and Pindar, Fragment 35, not to mention Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, which uses a chorus of Titans. Hesiod’s Works and Days mentions it, too (173b, and Theogony 525ff.), though this passage seems to have been added later. (Richard Stoneman’s notes to Pindar’s Odes and Selected Fragments [1997], 143.) Setting sail with Homer was Rudbeck’s phrase, Atl. I, 191.
Rudbeck was worrying about being only one-fourth of the way through his planned work, Atl. I, on page 428 of which was really page 682 in the 1679 edition. At about this point in the search (Atl. I, 408, or 649 in the original), the references to future continuations become more and more frequent.
Verelius’s advice about the necessity of printing the work immediately and equipping it with a Latin translation is found in Rudbeck’s dedication to Atl. I, 4–5. Scholars are virtually unanimous that the translator, an unnamed “good friend” (page 5), was Anders Norcopensis. He would later be ennobled as Nordenhielm, and appointed tutor of the future king Charles XII, according to Nelson’s commentary on Atl. I, 567; II, 696; see also Strindberg (1937), 317; as well as R. M. Hatton’s
