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

(roughly A.D. 800–1050), had long been sealed off into a virtually lost world.

A number of Scandinavian antiquarians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Arngrimur Jonsson, Christiern Pedersen, and Brynjolfur Sveinsson, began rediscovering this Norse heritage. Forgotten and unheralded though they are today, it is largely through their efforts that so much of our material about the Viking world has survived. They hunted down the old manuscripts in the original language wherever they might be found, gathered them together into collections, and sought to add these to the accumulated treasury of history. Given the merits of the cherished rediscovered sagas, these Scandinavian antiquarians “brooded over them like the dragon on his gold.”

Such enthusiasm for all things Norse flourished in the aftermath of the classical Renaissance, the dramatic rebirth of interest in ancient Rome and Greece that began centuries before in the Italian city-states. After spreading across the Alps, this revival had splintered into a cluster of movements that, for better or worse, came for a long time to shape the ways historians viewed the past. One thing the many Renaissance thinkers had in common, though, was a firm belief in the great importance of antiquity. Some went so far as to celebrate the classical past as the source of almost all our knowledge.

But as northern thinkers delved deeper into the Greek and Latin texts, they came across curious references to their own past. The plains, forests, and wastelands at the edge of the classical world swarmed with hordes of northern tribes—Celts, Cimbrians, Sarmatians, and countless others. They were not always well known, and were often subject to glorification, vilification, mystification, or just plain error. Yet all these peoples, however represented and interpreted, were, to the classical mind, simply barbarians.

The word barbarian did not, of course, have a pleasant ring, deriving originally from the observation that the nonclassical outsiders spoke a different language—one that sounded to ancient Greeks like incomprehensible gibberish, which they mimicked as “bar-bar-bar.” The name stuck, expanding to a general term of scorn. The barbarian world seemed primitive and insignificant next to the monumental achievements of the Greco- Roman civilization, with its baths, aqueducts, amphitheaters, and thriving cities, not to mention its rich cultural legacy.

Of all the outlandish barbarians mentioned in the texts, Swedish humanists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came to focus on one tribe in particular: the ancient Goths. Long a terror on the frontiers of the Roman Empire, the Goths had swept south through the Balkans and humiliated the legions that powered the relentless Roman fighting machine. If that were not shocking enough, the Goths had stormed the gates of Rome in A.D. 410 and sacked the Eternal City itself. The Romans, who had conquered a vast empire reaching from the Scottish moors to the Sahara Desert, were now themselves forced to pay ransom. Trying their best to intimidate the rough invaders at their gates, Roman officials warned of a fierce resistance from one million imperial citizens. Unfazed, the Gothic king Alaric replied, “The thicker the hay, the more easily it is mowed.”

Reading about this martial people, Swedish humanists believed that the Goths had come originally from somewhere in central or southern Sweden. Most prominent among the new champions of the Gothic past were two brothers, Johannes and Olaus Magnus, the last Catholic archbishops in the country. In their wide-ranging works, both had tapped into a long and deep medieval tradition that linked the Goths to the north.

But even if the vision of a heroic Gothic past extended back for centuries, it would be the Protestant Reformation that truly rekindled the Gothic fire. Sweden had regained its independence from Denmark in 1523, and had broken away from the Catholic Church in the 1530s. Both changes had fueled the great burst of enthusiasm about the Goths, whom they claimed as their own ancestors. The humanists started also to shake off the Greco- Roman prejudice, revived along with the classical texts themselves. They celebrated other, more redeeming qualities in the seemingly uncouth and barbaric illiterates—qualities such as valor, honesty, and simplicity. The large tomes of the Magnus brothers and their followers marked the beginning of a gradual yet monumental shift from shame to a renewed pride in their wild, untamed ancestors who, they claimed, had overthrown the Roman Empire.

And as many northern countries broke away from the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, it seemed that Rome had once again been stormed. The Goths, this time wearing the modern guise of sober, black-clad Protestants, had punished the empire a second time for its unbridled decadence. And after 1630, history again seemed to repeat itself. During the Thirty Years’ War, King Gustavus Adolphus’s Swedes were modern Goths carrying the Protestant banner, indeed perhaps saving the Protestant cause from what then looked like certain destruction at the hands of the determined Holy Roman Empire of the Hapsburgs.

The Swedish king played the part well, too. With his broad shoulders, his rotund figure, his golden beard groomed to a point, the musket ball still lodged deep in his neck, Gustavus Adolphus looked and acted like a modern Goth. At the royal coronation, he had literally dressed up as the Gothic king Berik. He gave speeches challenging the Swedes to uphold the old Gothic virtues, admonishing the noblemen, for instance, “to bring renewed luster to the Gothic fame of their forefathers.” His march from victory to victory indeed made Europe think it was seeing the rejuvenation of the barbarians. Sweden’s sudden rise to great power had made possible—and even demanded—a greater, more dramatic past.

INTO THIS GLORIFIED vision of history were swept the ornately copied pieces of parchment found in hamlets of Iceland and Norway. Exciting tales of tall, fierce Vikings launching many adventurous raids seemed to fit quite seamlessly into this larger Gothic framework of Swedish history. Many of the original manuscripts would in fact end up in Uppsala, through purchases, gifts, and other, more sordid means. In 1658, for instance, the Swedish army looted Danish libraries and estates, carrying off many priceless manuscripts, in a way strangely reminiscent of the old Vikings that they would soon be celebrating.

The saga that would start our saga, however, did not come by conquest or piracy. The manuscript of the Hervararsaga was carried over by a young, talented Icelandic student named Jonas Rugman, or, as Rudbeck affectionately called him, “Icelandic Jonas.” Rugman had come to Uppsala by accident. Leaving his native Iceland, he was planning to continue his studies at Copenhagen University. But a terrible storm blew his ship off course, forcing the crew to seek shelter in the Swedish west coast harbor of Gothenburg. Given the tense state of affairs between Denmark and Sweden and the fact that hostilities had once again flared up into open conflict, the Danish crew of the ship found themselves taken captive. Rugman was now unable to make his way to Copenhagen. Instead he decided to try his fortunes in this new country, and eventually ended up at Uppsala, where he started to work with Olaus Verelius.

A native speaker of Icelandic, the closest of all Scandinavian languages to Old Norse, Rugman was a “gift sent from heaven” for Verelius and the circle of Viking enthusiasts at Uppsala. Besides invaluable knowledge of the old language and its culture, Rugman had something else in his possession: a chest full of old Icelandic manuscripts! Most of these had never been seen before anywhere outside the small villages and homesteads of Iceland.

Icelandic Jonas’s treasure chest of sagas was indeed an invalu-able trove of material about a still undetermined ancient past, and Verelius was one of the first in the world to lay eyes again on these old stories. Among these was a copy of Rolf and Gautrek’s Saga, a beautiful tale loosely focused on an old Swedish king named Gautrek. After losing his wife, the king suffers a tremendous grief, finding his only solace in sitting on her burial mound and flying his favorite hawk. There was also the rollicking Herraud and Bose’s Saga, which deals with the long friendship between an odd pair: Herraud, the son of a Swedish king, and Bose, a tough peasant. Many other sagas, too, were in Rugman’s case, though he had left a handful behind, pawned in a tailor’s shop to cover the costs of his expensive taste.

Grateful for the privilege of seeing these sagas, Verelius paid for the food, housing, and expenses of Jonas Rugman for the first year and a half of the young man’s stay in Uppsala. This was perhaps only fair, given the incalculable benefit the impoverished student had provided. Brand-new stories were just waiting to be read, translated, and culled for original insights into Scandinavia’s heritage. They were full of figures only dimly perceived before, if known at all. Rugman’s sagas made it painfully obvious how little the Swedish past was really understood.

AS RUDBECK LOOKED through the manuscript of the Hervararsaga closely and drew his map of Sweden, a spectacular new world was indeed opening before his eyes. The Hervararsaga offered a fresh account of the distant past of Europe’s newest great power, and its tantalizing suggestions would send Rudbeck to the heights of enthusiasm. Yet as breathtaking as the vistas were, it was not simply a matter of chasing down books and following leads.

This is because Rudbeck was already committed to an ambitious program of teaching at the university.