In a Nutshell
What if Sweden had been the cradle of all mythology and civilisation? This is what Uppsala scholar Olof Rudbeck claimed at the end of the 17th century.
Frozen Atlantis – The Notebook is a writing project that accompanies our feature film “Frozen Atlantis”. Its illustrated articles explore myths, landscapes, and ideas that surround Olof Rudbeck’s 17th-century vision of Sweden as Atlantis, and how these stories of promise and wonder still resonate today.
The Notebook forms part of an outreach initiative in Public History that spans multiple media. Blending academic rigour with essayistic form and a touch of nature writing, it retraces personal encounters with the inner and outer landscapes of Rudbeck’s time and our present.
Olof Rudbeck and the Atlantica
At the beginning of this journey stands one of Europe’s last polymaths.
In 1679, Olof Rudbeck – a naturalist from Uppsala in Sweden – published the first volume of his Atlantica. In this monumental work, he argued that the promised places of antiquity – Atlantis, Elysium, the Island of the Blessed – were not fiction, but echoes of a truth rooted in the North. With striking visual power, his illustrations and maps redrew the geography of myth onto Scandinavia.
Why does this episode from Sweden’s Imperial Age – often awkward for modern Swedes – matter today? Because Rudbeck’s vision stands as one of the most visible outliers in a long tradition: the ongoing creation of stories that shape not only how we imagine, but also how we treat the North.
Across four volumes spanning thousands of pages, Rudbeck set out to prove that Sweden was the cradle of civilisation. In his view, the ancient culture and language of his homeland – but above all its nature – had inspired myths that later appeared in Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
These stories, he claimed, had been blurred by time and mistranslation. Yet their most pristine versions could still be found in Norse myths, texts which Swedish (and Danish) antiquarians were then racing to preserve from medieval manuscripts.
Amid this flux of stories, Rudbeck singled out one constant: the North itself – its flora and fauna, mountains and rivers, worlds of ice and light-filled summer nights. It was this awe-inspiring nature that he saw shimmering through classical myth – the same force he believed had inspired the earliest poets and would endure until the world’s end:
The land of Sweden itself is the foundation of my work – all its lakes, mountains, rivers, and the other things which designate our home, and which have been brought together by the most ancient writers – a foundation which will remain unchangeable and fixed until that stone from the book of Daniel, by which everything has been created, shatters and destroys them.
Olof Rudbeck, Atlantica, vol. I (1679), p. 887.
Cf. Book of Daniel 2:34–35.
To make this hidden layer visible, Rudbeck launched expeditions to the North and unleashed a torrent of evidence that encompassed botany, astronomy, history, archaeology, linguistics – even experimental reconstruction.
The result was notorious for its nationalistic speculations, digressions, and trails that Rudbeck never closed. In 1702, his decades of dominance over Swedish academia came to a sudden stop: That spring, the Great Fire of Uppsala consumed most of his work.
Scope of The Notebook
As a creative project within an academic framework, The Notebook opens pathways into one of intellectual history’s most fascinating, playful, and ambivalent works.
In the texts you find here, you can venture on side-tracks from the film, follow into mountains and river valleys that Rudbeck once charged with meaning, cross paths with books and objects from which he created his vision, and learn about encounters on the ways leading towards the film.
The result is neither an escape into a historical period that is as ambivalent as it is fascinating, nor is its point in proving whether Rudbeck was right. Frozen Atlantis – The Notebook is not about finding lost civilisations, but about lost orientation – about stories that embed us in a web of meaning larger than ourselves.
Centuries after, the vision Rudbeck projected on his home country still lingers on the North. At the same time, the landscapes he described have undergone – and are undergoing – rapid transformation, defying the idea of an unchanging nature that underlies his work.
The historical, epistemic, and natural premises that brought forth the Atlantica have long faded. Yet at its core remains a layer that still resonate with us today – the longing to see the world filled with wonder and connected in meaning.
Moving between libraries and shifting landscapes, The Notebook traces the streamlines of this curiosity through the reality of the 21st century. Ultimately, it revolves around ways of seeing – around a world we not only connect with through stories, but that we create through them.
The result remains personal – an invitation to read, think, and write as Rudbeck thought: associative and undisciplined.
Acknowledgments
Frozen Atlantis – The Notebook results from the research project “Reaching for Atlantis” accompanied by the outreach initiative “Frozen Atlantis”, both funded by the VolkswagenStiftung (not owned by or affiliated with Volkswagen AG).
The circle of supporters, enthusiasts, and public institutions who made this project work is wide. Special thanks go to Nolwenn Lecompte, who supported with proof-reading (all remaining mistakes and Germanisms are on me).
From the many people who crossed my path I’d like to thank the following (and apologise to everybody I forgot):
Rickard Åhlund, Peter Davidson, Felix Dobslaw, Åsa Evertsdotter, Annika Goldenbaum, Frederik Gylling, Ashley Hallock, Darren Hamlin, Gabriele Hansen, Taina Helme, Sabine Jehner, Martin Johansson, Daniel Kaute, Lars Larsson, Thorsten Logge, Inga Noffz, Joanna Oliveira, Tyrone Martinsson, Dominik Maschek, Markus Neuschäfer, Martin Olson, Libby Rohovit, Bernd Roling, Nikolaus Ruf, Thomas Schaeffer, Pierre Schwidlinski, Peter Sjökvist, Sverker Sörlin, Sven Widmalm.
Selected Bibliography
This section is limited to further readings on the historic core from which the project began. You can find more specific references at the end of each article.
For an accessible introduction to Rudbeck and his time in English language start from David King, Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World, New York, 2005.
For more in-depth scholarly study of Rudbeck and his impact on the European history of ideas see the authoritative work by Bernd Roling, Odin's Imperium. Der Rudbeckianismus als Paradigma an den skandinavischen Universitäten (1680–1860), 2 vols, Leiden 2020.
Aspects of that period are also illustrated in the contributions in English language published in Bernd Roling and Bernhard Schirg, Boreas Rising: Antiquarianism and National Narratives in 17th- and 18th-Century Scandinavia, Berlin 2019, and Bernd Roling, Bernhard Schirg, Stefan Bauhaus, Apotheosis of the North: the Swedish Appropriation of Classical Antiquity around the Baltic Sea and Beyond (1650 to 1800), Berlin 2017.
For a detailed introduction in Swedish see Gunnar Eriksson, Rudbeck 1630-1702: Liv, Lärdom, Dröm i Barockens Sverige, Stockholm 2002 (a more compact book by the same author was published in English as The Atlantic Vision: Olaus Rudbeck and Baroque Science, Canton (Mass.) 1994).
