In the memory of Tyrone Martinsson.

Glimpses of Time

My first pick from the table was a pack wrapped in artist paper.

In the basement of Uppsala University Library, the curators had prepared notebooks and maps for me, survey records and photographs – material from three decades that a Swedish mineralogist spent in the most inaccessible region of his country.

The package weighed heavy in my hands, marked with a note in pencil on the paper.

Mikka Glaciär, Sarek (1907).

From its inside I unwrapped three glass negatives.

Some 110 years ago, reindeer carried the fragile load packed in light-tight boxes, bobbing in wooden crates on the animals’ backs next to tripods, tent sheets, surveying instruments, and supplies calculated to last for weeks.

Between my fingertips, I felt the rough edges of the 18x24cm plate.

In August 1907, a man removed it from the protective envelope, fixating it with metal clamps in the housing of a wooden camera. Stabilising the tripod on rocky ground, he centred its angle on a mountain across a glacier valley.

Eyes locked on the pointers of his pocket watch, he removed the lid.

For an exact amount of seconds, the light of Arctic summer fell through the lens. At the back of the camera, its rays reacted with the chemicals thinly spread across the plate.

More than a century later, the mountain’s white silhouette appeared again on my light table, flickering like a ghost as the lamp fizzed alive.

The anvil-shape of Jållok, and beneath, the tongue of Mikka Glacier oozing into the valley, its edges furrowed like the cut of a salmon.

Vantage Points

The path I had followed to the map room at Uppsala had started in a book.

At the Royal Library in Stockholm, I had prepared my map for a solo crossing of Sweden’s most alpine region. During this time, I had come across Frusna ögonblick (‘Moments Frozen in Time’).

In the artfully illustrated book, Tyrone Martinson and Per Holmlund presented the history of photography above the Arctic Circle.1 One of the chapters covered Axel Hamberg, a founding father of modern glaciology – and the man who had made Sarek visible in photography.2

What struck me just as much as the histories the book related was its artistic dimension. Not only had its authors sifted through archives of photographs, or even of early coastal drawings. They had made an effort to identify the spots from where they were taken, many decades and even centuries before – and photographed them anew.

In its visual language, the book intuitively unfolded the chronological dimension of landscapes and the speed of change in Nordic environments.

To both authors I wrote after reading Frusna ögonblick. Both of them replied.

Some weeks before I set out for Sarek I met with Per at Stockholm University. Sarek is the home to 100 glaciers. In 1895, Hamberg first set out to study them. Over decades working as glaciologist, Per has revisited many of them and deepened our understanding – of Mikka Glacier in particular.

Its ice, he explained, is currently retreating by roughly twenty metres each year. A stub near the accumulation zone has remained comparatively stable. Yet all across the glacier, signs of rapid ageing are evident.

Elsewhere in Sarek – and across Sweden – these changes are even more dramatic.3

“Do you think people would miss the glaciers?,” I asked.

“The truth is that most of them are simply out of sight,” Per replied after a moment.

“It’s simply too far away for people to realise what is happening up there."

The Glacial Dimension of Time

With his photographs, Axel Hamberg deepened our vision of the North by more than a century.

For decades, he returned to Sarek with a team of researchers and Sámi assistants. Applying photogrammetry – a technique Hamberg had honed on earlier expeditions to Svalbard – he created maps from photographs of the glaciers and valleys.

In the previous century, when the theory of the Ice Age first emerged, scientists had begun to read the landscapes of the north as the work of ice. Glaciers were seen as last remains of a massive ice sheet that once had covered the north, and along whose receding edge life had spread.

Hamberg combined meteorological measurements with surveys of glaciers to gain insight into their “metabolism”. Across the region and even on top of 2000m peaks, his team constructed five observation huts.4 Shielded by layers of cotton pressed between sheet metal, a coming generation of professors began their careers. As Arctic hermits, they plotted weather curves as the rest of Europe sank into war.

With contraptions made from bamboo, the researchers walked out on glaciers to measure the snow accumulation. With rows of painted stones on the ice, they assessed the speed of the ice.5

The sketches resulting from their observations show the rims of glacier tongues as they changed across the year. What the eye alone can’t hold they made visible – the glacial dimension of time.

Finding Allies

The second author who replied that summer I met already on the way towards Sarek.

I met Tyrone Martinsson in a harbourside café, after a conference in Gothenburg. The conversation rambled around the North – his expeditions to Svalbard, climbing on the Lofoten, his work on Andrée’s ill-fated balloon expedition to the North Pole.

Also, we touched on working beyond the established landscape of academia. One thing Tyrone always stressed was the importance of finding your allies, regardless of disciplines – in the present as well as in the past.

For long, our talk revolved around the 19th-century polymath Alexander von Humboldt – about the diagrams in his Kosmos and his way of bringing together science and the humanities.

Much of this I found again in articles Tyrone sent me after our talk. In one of them, he formulates the challenge against which art and the humanities will have to measure themselves in the twenty-first century:

Climate change is a challenge that requires the mindset of Humboldt in seeing that everything is connected and it needs a visual language to tell stories of the impact and solutions of those challenges, as well as to provide a tool for a narrative of a world worth saving.6

Reading Ice

My first encounter with the glaciers of Sarek was aural, not visual.

In the light of my headlamp, I had pitched camp near the mountain pass in Lulijvágge, some 1400m high. The next morning, I woke up to cracking sounds.

On the ridge along the pass, sunlight had begun to touch the ice nestling in a mountain shoulder. Approaching the glacier, I saw the layers etched against the cliff.

Their sight elicited a diagram from a glaciological volume I had studied in the Uppsala library, the bands of ice laid bare like dissected tissue.

The thought brought to mind The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.

In Rembrandt’s painting, a body is laid out on an anatomy table, the muscles and sinews of a forearm dissected. Scientists surround the body, yet their gaze moves away from it, in favour of an opened anatomical atlas.

In this, as W.G. Sebald wrote in The Rings of Saturn, “the appalling physical facts are reduced to a diagram, a schematic plan of the human being”.7

There are sides to glaciers which reach us beyond their schematic reduction. Stories travel with them, a living archive written by the ashes of forest fires and eruptions that eclipsed the skies, by remains of plants and animals and the pollen of each new spring. The fallout from nuclear bombs and reactor catastrophes moves with the ice, too.

Indigenous peoples who live in the vicinity of glaciers intuitively resorted to biological metaphors as they realised their dynamics – that glaciers shrink and grow; that they react to their environment.8

Early glaciologists resorted to similar ways of describing glaciers. Like the nail or claw of a body, Hamberg wrote after one of his early journeys into Sarek, their ice moves and grows. Near their brim, they give birth – they “calve”.

Under the right conditions, a colleague argued, even new ones can be born from snow patches on mountain shoulders that turn to glacier ‘embryos’.9

Contour Lines

I had woken to the sound of ice that morning on the mountain pass.

At the end of the day, my view wandered back where I had spent the night, from the high plateau of Dielma where I pitched tent for the next.

Clouds began to veil the Lulijvágge from where I had made my way down; had seen the first green return after two days of wandering fields of rocks.

Through a mottled forest of birches I had descended into the Sarvesvágge. On my retina, the palette of colours enlivening the ‘valley of the reindeer bulls’ was still fresh. Tufts of cotton grass that swayed over starburst mounds of green. Sage-coloured willows, their soothing hues broken by the lime of Angelica archangelica and its lurid pompom balls.10

Through their undergrowth I had waded towards the Sarvesjåhkå I had to cross. On my skin I still felt the cold touch as willow leaves brushed off droplets from the last rain; recalled their cling lifting again as I emerged from the shadow line that the peak of Noajjde drew across the valley.

On the other side of the zipper I had placed my boots that night, their leather still soaked from the milky waters of Sarvesjåhkå.

They wouldn’t dry again this journey.

On the canvas I heard the rain come in. As night fell, I drifted back into Sarvesvágge, and from there into a week of wandering through Sarek; days unfolding into glacial rivers pressing against my thighs, the sound of cracking ice, carpets of green, and the shifting light above.

When I close my eyes, I can still return.

Many who visited the farther valleys of Sarek left with a sense of embeddedness. One whose lines I had followed years before I set out is Dag Hammarskjöld.

In his posthumous journal Vägmärken (“Waymarks”), the Secretary General of the UN traced glimpses from experiences where windows opened into the connected nature of things.11 Many of these experiences trace back to Sarek.

One of his four tours Hammarskjöld described in an illustrated article, published in the journal of the Swedish Tourist Association. It led him through the Sarvesvágge, in the shadow of Noajdde.

What registered strongest with him on this crossing of Sarek was the light: its inexhaustible changes, the colours it played on the glaciers and in their vaults, into which he and his companions entered along streams that shaped the caverns, their flow nourished by crystal water that dripped from the green-blue ice above, gathering into the foaming rivers that are the milky veins of Sarek.12

The photographs by Axel Hamberg open a window of a different kind. His black-and-white glass plates convey a sense of vastness that embraces visitors to Sarek. Human presence – if visible at all – is dwarfed by the landscape in his photographs.

One of them depicts the mountain of Noajdde, seen from the northern bank in the valley. Sámi porters lead reindeer through the glacier-nourished waters of Sarvesjåhkå as the north face of the peak rears before them, like a wave of rock on the verge of breaking.

In 1922, Hamberg would reuse panoramic views his negatives created of Sarek to illustrate a guide for the Swedish Tourism Association.13 Before he set out on his first journey and long before the hikers followed, Sámi herders have driven reindeer through its valleys.

Before Sarek first appeared on early maps, they gave names to the rivers and to the mountains of the region, and with them inscribed layers of meaning in the land.

Noajdde designates the ritual specialist in Lule Sámi language.

One of them lived in this area, an elder Sámi I met at the southernmost of Hamberg’s huts had told me, the last in the region. For his sessions, this noajdde retreated deep into the valleys Sarek – into the silence of the Sarvesvágge, at the foot of the mountain named after his profession.

Rain played on the canvas throughout the night. By morning, the clouds over the valleys around Dielma began to scatter.

Squeezing into a pair of frozen boots, I slipped the cold gas cartridge in my down jacket. A rim of old ice still lined the southern shore of Lake Dielma. On its tongue I kneeled out to fetch water.

On the opposite shore, I saw the sun rise over Sarek’s main ridge, pouring first light over the last remains of snowfields that hugged the slopes around me. A few weeks from now, the new snow would come in.

The rays warmed my face as I gazed to where my journey was headed – Sarektjåhkkå, beneath whose peak the valley of Mikka Glacier ebbed out.

As I turned my back towards the sun, I saw a figure on the ground, delicate as a work by Giacometti.

The early rays stretched my silhouette across the plateau, across creases that the low light had begun to fill with shadow. In undulating course, their furrows followed the terrain, as if retracing the contour lines on which the reindeer had, by intuition, wandered.

For a moment, it seemed as if the ground revealed traces running through it – ones I had been following all along.

The Velvet Echo

One of these lines had led me to Mikka Glacier.

The coming day, I balanced over the eastern slope of its valley. Overlooking the rocks, I searched for a stone of which I had read in Uppsala, marked with the monogram AH.

Snow-covered mountain shoulders emerged and disappeared again in the mist. Over Sarek’s central ridge, glimpses of the panorama materialised that I had seen in the map room before my journey.

The peak of Sarektjåhkkå pierced Mikka Glacier, as if riveting the sheet of ice. From its brim, meltwater wound down the valley, as if unravelling the stub of ice. Further down, the coal-coloured face of Jållok swelled, driving a wedge into branching valleys.

Three glass plates form the panorama Axel Hamberg shot in 1907. Since then, two kilometres of ice have melted away.

Like a silver thread on black velvet, the glacier stream flows across a shadow Mikka left behind.

A century later, the tones of the glass negative have pressed into reality.

Waymarks

The past that has entered our vision cannot be unseen.

Many of the lines I had followed through Sarek would carry into later work. One evening in spring, a few years later, I received a mail.

The subject line read “Tyrone Martinsson”.

My resistance to click was physical.

Several summers ago, Tyrone had taken the time to reply to the lengthy email of a stranger – someone who was passing through Gothenburg on his way to Sarek.

I took the news of his passing on a walk.

The resonance of our conversations had stayed with me, on a path I had only just begun to follow.

Near the village where I grew up, I stood in vineyards that ebbed out from the foothills of the Black Forest. From atop, my view wandered across the River Rhine, to the Vosges Mountains on the other side.

Tyrone was one of the people who inspired the way I read landscapes. Meeting him was, as some translations of the Bible put it, a waymark (Jer 31:21).

Overlooking the panorama of my childhood, I sensed the contours of the imprint he had left – lines he had made me notice beneath our feet.

Further Reading and References

All translations and photographs are my own unless noted otherwise.

For geographical names in Sámi language I follow their rendering on the latest maps published by Lantmäteriet. The spelling used by this Swedish authority follows the local dialect in which the sites are located; see their guidelines described on lantmateriet.se.

The winter migrations began after ten.

The streams of commuters in Stockholm Central had calmed hours ago. Clad in hard shells and puffer jackets, a new species of travellers now appeared, dragging ski cases across the hall, their heels clicking over the creases in the station floor.

Eyes fixed on the wall displays, the flights moved towards the middle of the hall. Gathering beneath the vault, passengers observed the screens that would soon announce the platform from where the night train north would leave.

In their back, a row of paintings overlooked their movements through Centralen – depicting destinations they might reach by morning.

Centralen, 1927

As if projecting towards the back of their eyes, the cycle of paintings tells a story of how the image of the North is shaped – a vision that, returning in variations across decades, informs how it is perceived until today.

Eight niches on the eastern wall unfold an atlas of national imagination. Commissioning the paintings, the institutions behind them shaped a vision that not only depicted the North, but is part of its story of transformation.

On 17 June 1927, Stockholm Central re-opened after three years of reconstructions,. Light flooded through the windows of the central hall, resplendent like a temple of modern transport dreamed up in the classicist ideal. Two artists were commissioned to fill eight niches left in the white structure.

As stage painters in the theatre, John Ericsson and Natan Johansson had experience with monumental formats. Yet when the shops, snack bars, and kiosks in Centralen first opened that summer, the walls above shone in white.

The painters had run late.

Editing the North

Only half a year later, on 14 December 1927, the artworks were installed: eight distemper paintings on canvas, each signed by both artists, first varnished and then glued right on plaster – four to the left of the main entrance and four to the right.1

In 1927, the eight paintings commissioned for Centralen unfolded a variety of culture and landscapes that the country had to offer – and that all lay conveniently in reach from Sweden’s central railway hub.2

The ones in northern direction (left) depict scenes from Norrland. Promoting the landscapes of Sweden and creating access were key missions of the Swedish Tourist Association (STF). For this purpose, the association closely collaborated with the Swedish National Railway.

The motifs these institutions chose for Centralen revolved around fortresses, churches, and untouched landscapes, following the aesthetics of National Romanticism. Instead of working from sketches produced on site, the artists took photographs as their point of departure.

The photographs had appeared in the STF’s journal before: in this medium, the association annually published a collection of articles on destinations across the country, preceded by a number of plates with photographs.3

In the 1920s, Ericsson and Johansson translated eight of them into vistas from the North. They include a view over the Vedasjöarna lakes at Nordingrå, a view over Stora Sjöfället in Lapland, and a winter view of snowy Åreskutan (1420m), whose foot the night train would reach the next morning.

What happened between photograph and painting was not a direct translation into a different medium, but rather the deliberate shaping of an artistic vision.

The photograph underlying the view of Åreskutan shows a winter landscape in the foreground as seen from Brattland, including details such as fences, a snow-covered roof, and a well-travelled road, on which a horse-drawn sled moves towards the viewer.

The painting moves the mountain further to the back, giving more space to the landscape in its foreground instead. Ericsson and Johansson enhanced the natural features as seen in the original photograph – the trees, the snow blanket – and eclipsed most signs of human presence and the road itself that facilitated access in the first place.

What the artists created that way was winter landscape suggesting to embrace the traveller in silence and solitude. Yet this projection that travellers followed north had been edited already before they arrived.

Erasing Access

This stylising of landscape and concealing of traces of human infrastructure was systematic rather than incidental.

In their display of Åreskutan, Johansson and Ericsson pushed the margins of accessibility. Their paintings promised explorations on skis in landscapes as untouched as the snow blanket above.

This spin the artists added to their rendering of the STF photographs was programmatic. The northernmost among them was a picture by the photographer Borg Mesch. Published in the 1920 issue of the STF journal, it shows Saltoluokta at the lake of Stora Sjöfallet.

By the time the photograph appeared, STF had been operating a tourist cabin at Saltoluokta for a few decades. An article printed in the same volume describes the surrounding landscape – including the waterfall that, at the time, was celebrated as the ‘Niagara of the North’.

Access precedes the illusion of a landscape untouched by modern infrastructure that Johansson and Ericsson created from Mesch’s picture.

As the caption suggests, he took his photograph from the cabin (a building can be seen behind the leaves in the foreground). For their work, the artists removed all buildings and painted a clearing instead. On its expanse, a single kåta stands pitched, suggesting the lakeside as seasonal gathering place of the Sámi.

From Vision to Resource

What was removed from the paintings did not remain absent from the landscape.

The finished work depicts Stora Sjöfallet as a place unaffected by the transforming forces of the Swedish nation. In 1927, such a presentation was already a construct – politically, environmentally, and legally.

With the railway, the infrastructure came to Sápmi that allowed its touristic and material exploitation. In 1909, the wider area around the nearby waterfall had been included among the national parks that Sweden declared as the first in Europe.

By the time the paintings were placed in Centralen in 1927, the sight that had made Saltoluokta famous was already starving.

Only a decade after the first national parks were declared, Swedish administration created a first exception from the rule. The government decided to sacrifice Stora Sjöfallet for the first in a series of hydropower projects along the Lule River; redrawing the borders of sanctuaries in lines with industrial interests.

The impact on Sámi culture and communities was immense. Water levels rose, fragmenting reindeer herding routes that had been used over centuries. Ice on the lake formed in less predictable patterns in winter. Sacred sites and traditional paths of the Sámi disappeared under rivers that became regulated bodies of water.

Over decades, the roar of a waterfall that was once defined, depicted, and protected as a landscape of national significance faded as the Lule River was turned into an artery of energy supply.

What happened here became the model for further hydropower projects all across Norrland. Justified by narratives of national interest, the electricity they created powered railways and mining operations across the north.

With the railways, the tourists followed.4

The Image Behind

The year the paintings were placed in Stockholm Central, the landscapes they depicted were already echoes of a disappearing world.

Did it ever exist at all?

The artworks were first and foremost instruments of longing – shaping a vision of pristine landscapes that seemed to lie just within reach, a night train’s journey away.

At Åre, traces of human presence once erased from the paintings are now inscribed on the mountain itself. Half a century after Ericsson and Johansson completed their work, lifts and ski pistes began to carve their paths into the slopes and forests of Åreskutan.

At Stockholm Central, a commotion spread through the waiting crowd. The platform number had appeared.

Leaving the station hall behind, the travellers embarked for their destination north – its image still pressing against their backs.

Further reading and references

The white expanse around the massif lay piebald, earth already rising through the snow.

We arrived at Helags on the verge of spring, and each time the crust broke under my skis, the same routine followed: calling back the drone, hauling the pulka uphill again.

By evening, we pitched our tent in sight of the massif where we had come to film, now digging anchors into the soft snow.

On the ground, Martin set up the tripod and prepared the camera for the time-lapse sequences. What we aimed at that evening was not the mountain, but the sky above.

In the Blue Hour, two first stars appeared over the massif that the Sámi of the South call Maajåelkie.

Around me, I felt the open sky draw the last warmth into the void. In the morning, there would be a few hours of firm snow.

As darkness sank down over Helags, more stars soon followed Vega and Arcturus. By the time the Milky Way had poured its arc over the mountain, the sky was filled with points of light.

Intuitively, my eyes began to draw lines between them, connecting dots to figures from classical mythology.

There have been different ways of seeing this sky, I remembered, before these stories arrived from further south.

Where do their traces reach?

“They Are All Moose Hunters”

I followed this question to the Nordic Museum in Stockholm.

In its basement, this institution holds manuscripts and drawings by a person in whom the trail of Sámi constellations seems to end.

Around 1900, the first authors emerged from a culture that had passed on stories, skills, and rituals orally for many centuries. The person to whom we owe most of what is known about the Sámi ways of seeing constellations was a hunter and trapper from Northern Sweden.1

Johan Turi (1854–1936) spent most of his life in the area around Kiruna. In 1910, he published his Muitalus sámiid birra (‘Account of the Sámi’). In the book, he described their lives and migrations with the cycle of seasons.2

Turi was not only one of the first writers in Sámi language, but an artist as well. Muitalus appeared together with fourteen plates. Two of them depict the night sky as seen by the Sámi of the North.

Most of them feature the moose (sarva), with the W of Cassiopeia forming its antlers, its front reaching into Perseus, its rear into Auriga.

Single stars and smaller constellations follow the animal across the northern sky: the skiers (cuoigahœgjek, Castor and Pollux), and the hunter Favtna (Arcturus) who tends his bow (Fauna daugge, Ursa Maior).

In his celestial maps, Turi declared all of them participants in a cosmic hunt:

“They all are moose hunters” (oja datlatvisat sarvabivdit).3

Written into the Sky

Across the largest of Turi’s sketches spreads the haze of stars we call the Milky Way.

Like lines of iron filings, Turi sketched the bands across a sheet, appearing in the months when dark returns. Along its segments, he noted seasons from the Sámi calendar – instructions written into the sky.

Next to the Belt of Orion, Turi wrote giđđa-dalvve – the spring winter in the weeks before Walpurgis (1st of May). At that time, he explains in his Muitalus, the Sámi begin their annual migration, when the reindeer are close to calving.

The shift of seasons marks a vulnerable time, Turi continues: the snow can thaw and soften and freeze over again, forming a crust (cuoŋu) that keeps the herds from grazing for lichen. In the weeks before migration, the Sámi observe the sky and elements closely: if cuoŋu is imminent, they rush their herds through days and nights to reach the mountains, where the snow is thinner and lichen within reach.4

What Was Still Remembered

Beneath the sky at Helags, the wind brushed around the ski tips we had fixed in the compacted snow. The clicking of the camera lent rhythm to the passing of time and the rotation of the stars, invisible to the naked eye.

What Turi had drawn on paper, we tried to capture in moving images. Yet the sky we recorded a century later would be a different one.

When Johan Turi wrote Muitalus more than a century ago, he did so to make Sámi life visible at a time when Swedish legislation was reshaping it. At the beginning of his book stands a chance encounter.

In August 1904, Turi met an art student from Copenhagen on a train to Kiruna. For Emilie Demant Hatt, the encounter with Turi marked the beginning of her life-long engagement for Sámi culture.

For one summer, Emilie Demant Hatt stayed with the family of Johan’s brother and began to learn their language. She helped bring the book into existence, encouraging Turi to write as he envisioned, in his own language and style, and facilitating its printing.

In 1910, Muitalus sáamid birra appeared. The book included a translation into Danish by Demant Hatt. Among its plates were two of Turi’s constellation drawings.

In her commentary, Demant Hatt already pointed to the fading nature of the stories he had drawn from the northern sky:

“Turi has drawn a part of the constellations that are best known among the Sámi. Their names point to old stories that today are partly forgotten.”5

Pencils of Light

A century later, what has connected human beings to the night sky is facing challenges beyond oblivion. A week after our return from Helags, I saw what the camera had gathered.

The computer stitched stills from the night into a few seconds of motion. On the screen, constellations began to turn in the celestial dome, around that hinge the Sámi described near Fatvna’s Bow.

Yet there was more the time-lapse sequences revealed.

Light from the next settlements reflected in the dark clouds over Helags. Above, satellites drew their lines across the vault, innumerable streaks that whizzed across the sky like traffic on a celestial overpass, inaudibly.

Their multitude brought to mind a letter I had seen some years before. Written seven decades ago, it evokes a night sky at the brink of change.

In August 1958, the painter Bo Beskow wrote to Dag Hammarskjöld, then Secretary-General to the United Nations. Hammarskjöld had recently acquired the estate of Backåkra, close to Beskow’s own place on the southern coast of Sweden. From there, the artist sent an illustrated letter to his friend in New York:

Silently and endlessly the starry sky vaults over Rytterskulle and Backåkra. A little time ago we saw a Sputnik hull. It rose from Ernst Jon’s cow pasture and sank down in Tage Yngve’s beets. So even we had an idea of the big event.6

A new era led its pencil across the sky that summer.

The Big Event opening Beskow’s letter was the news of the Soviets launching a one-ton object into orbit. The year before, in October 1957, they had sent Sputnik into space. For months, the first manmade object floated across the night, together with the top stage of its R-7 rocket that the Swedes dubbed ‘hull’ (hylsa).

On 15 May 1958, Sputnik 3 kindled the cosmic ballet anew.

The flying laboratory and its top stage outshone the stars as they passed through the Earth’s shadow. As they carried out their orbits, citizens in Sweden gazed where the next window of visibility was calculated to open.7

Among them was Bo Beskow.

Rewriting the Sky

Watching the two points of light draw their lines across the vault, Beskow shared the wonder with his friend across the Atlantic, setting it against a new reality Hammarskjöld was already negotiating in New York.

A shadow lay over the awe this display of technological power inspired at the time. Soviet satellites turned the celestial dome over the US into a place of menace.8

Yet there were others concerns such objects in the sky did raise.

On Christmas Eve 1957, the Swedish newspaper Arbetet published a caricature on its title page. It showed the Three Kings on their voyage through the desert. In the sky above, satellites drew their trajectories with comet-like streaks, leaving the kings disputing which of the new stars would guide their way to the newborn king.9

The time-lapses I watched from Helags showed a sky changed for good. At night, ‘mega-constellations’ of satellites and space junk trawling the sky become visible. All around the globe, light reflected from these objects and light spill from the ground are eroding the night.

As light intrudes the dark, all creatures suffer. No animal’s body – including ours – has evolved for shifting skies and the loss of night. Insects and migrating species lose their bearings.10

Our own orientation, too, is at stake.

Stars are fading from constellations seen for millennia. As their visible number falls below a certain threshold, the sky itself begins to lose its depth – and with it, the sense of infinity it inspired across millennia.

The very texture from which people wove their stories is unravelling. Lodde-raiddaras – ‘The Bird Path’ – Turi still had noted next to the Milky Way in his maps. The idea that the routes guiding migrating birds were written into the sky arches over Finno-Ugric languages.

Stories further east make it appear as ski tracks that the mighty Tungk-Pok left as he chased a six-footed stag across the sky, and in the dark spots of the galaxy cultures in South America read the outlines of snakes and llamas.11

For more than a third of the world’s population, the Milky Way has already become invisible. Above our heads, one last arena of awe is fading.

As the associative landscapes of the past erode, new objects draw a different vision of the universe in the sky, overwriting what we once shared as repository of dreams, beliefs, and wonder with a story of private control.

32.000 objects are tracked in orbit around the Earth by 2026, a growing cloud disconnecting the Earth from open space.

By the end of this century, this number is estimated to double.12

The Last to See

Over Helags, satellites now drew their lines across the sky.

With his pencil, Turi fixed on paper what was already on the verge of becoming past: ways his community saw the night sky – stories his book carried into the future.

Much of what he did not map has already slipped beyond recall.

There will be a time – the thought sank in, a century later – when the sky itself from which Turi drew his stories will have no witnesses left.

That we may be the last to have seen it.

Further reading and references

All photographs and translations are my own unless noted otherwise.

In 2025, the Swedish Parliament integrated Turi’s Muitalus into the Swedish Cultural Canon. See “En kulturkanon för Sverige”, Statens Offentliga Utredningar 2025:92, p. 125 (online at regeringen.se).

Projects such as The World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness published maps of light pollution; see Fabio Falchi et al., “The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness”, Science Advances 2 (2016), DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1600377.

An explorable version with updated satellite data has been published by David Lorenz, see his Light Pollution Atlas.

Please note the general bibliography available here.

The characters on the sheet in the Swedish National Archives seemed like a kind of code. Crosses and dots, staffs and triangles, suns and stars and crescent moons scattered in between.

I had seen this before – not in an archive, but in a book printed more than three centuries ago.

Years earlier I had come across this pattern while building Reaching for Atlantis, the database for illustrations printed in Olof Rudbeck’s Atlantica. In the third volume of the work (1698), I had seen a disk-like object covered in these signs. One of the woodcuts Rudbeck printed but never discussed in the text.

Among the hundreds of illustrations in the Atlantica, there are dozens of this kind, woodcuts that remained unexplained, haunting the book detached from their material past.

I call them “the phantoms” – yet even phantoms sometimes leave traces.

When Rudbeck finished the third volume in 1698, he dedicated it to Charles XII, presenting the Swedish king with the sequel in person.

The young king opened the book at random. It showed a disk-like object, inscribed with curious signs.

What do these letters mean? the king asked Rudbeck.

The nation’s leading antiquarian had to admit that their meaning was unknown.1

The Box in the Archive

The disk remained a phantom ever since – until I had opened the box in the archive.2

The embarrassing confession in front of the king left a mark on Rudbeck. The incident spurred him to focus on antiquities to further illustrate the early history of languages and signs.3

The bundle that had arrived at my desk in Stockholm reflected this interest. It came with a sender’s note – a handwritten slip left on top of the bundle some 250 years ago. It identified the material as notes Rudbeck had collected for the fourth volume of his Atlantica.

The Great Fire of Uppsala left the volume unfinished. When disaster struck in 1702, only a few sheets had been printed, covering some 200 pages. What remained from Rudbeck’s notes, the paper slip revealed, attracted the interest of Johan Ihre (1707–1780), ending up in the library of Sweden’s foremost linguist.

The papers, now in the archive at Stockholm, are the scaffolding to a work cut short. Across their pages, Rudbeck had collected evidence for arguments he never came to unfold.

Copies of runic inscriptions. Indices for passages in classical and contemporary authors. Sheet after sheet collecting words in densely written columns.

Column by column, I browsed through the word lists Rudbeck had prepared – testimony to the rigour behind a work later decried as far-fetched speculation.

Among these pages, there were objects, too.

A spoon. A knife.

And the disk.

Paper Echoes

All three were drawings that Rudbeck printed in the third volume. Each was marked with similar patterns of crosses and staffs, triangles and hooks, crescents and suns – signs reminding of grimoires and magical alphabets, of the talismans and amulets circulating in the Early Modern Period.

Yet the drawings on the paper were larger than the woodcuts printed in the Atlantica.

At first I assumed these were preparatory sketches. But something about the paper felt unusual.

The ink highlighted contours pressed into the page. The lines did not sit on the surface of the paper – they followed shallow grooves.

Through the gloves, I traced where pressure had been applied. Whoever created these images had pressed the paper onto solid objects and rubbed their surface onto the page.

The artefacts behind these images seemed to once have existed.

Collecting Lunatics

The presence of these objects in the Atlantica points to a larger ambition Rudbeck pursued.

In the years after its third volume had appeared, he and his son increasingly turned to the antiquities of language. This was, as Rudbeck the Younger later noted, related to the incident that had occurred at the audience with Charles XII.4

For scholars of the seventeenth century, language promised access to the origins of humanity. Many believed that traces of the language in which God spoke to Adam in the Garden of Eden might still survive – the language in which each part of creation had first been named in divine harmony.5

The search for the Adamitic language took many forms. One of them was the Alphabeti veri naturalis Hebraici brevissima delineatio (‘Concise Outline of the True Natural Hebrew Alphabet’) by Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont.

In this treatise, the Flemish alchemist claimed the Hebrew alphabet mirrored the logic that the creator inscribed into nature herself. Each letter represented a position of the human voice apparatus required to pronounce it. The result was a treatise by which Helmont claimed to have even made mute persons speak.6

While many 17th-century scholars focussed on Hebrew as the likely candidate, already Swedes such as Georg Stiernhielm (1598–1672) began to look elsewhere.7

According to Stiernhielm, the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel (Gen 11) had produced several ancestral languages, of which Hebrew only was one. Another one – the language he called “Scythian” – had spread across Europe with Japhet. From Scythian, he believed, languages such as Swedish, Greek and Latin had descended.8

Rudbeck later adopted this view in his Atlantica. Objects such as the rune stones or the manuscript of the Silver Bible – brought to Sweden during the Thirty Years’ War and edited by Stiernhielm – he interpreted as witnesses to the oldest layer of Scythian, synonymous with ancient Gothic or Old Swedish.

The search for the first language fascinated early modern scholars. It has fascinated historians ever since. For the Italian scholar Umberto Eco, they became a life-long passion.

Accepting an honorary doctorate in Uppsala, he once admitted to a peculiar hobby: he collected lunatics. Not stamps, nor butterflies – no, Eco collected lunatics: scholars who had gone astray building vast cathedrals of knowledge that later generations regarded as dead ends.

Among his favourite specimens, Eco claimed, Olof Rudbeck’s Atlantica stood unrivalled.

Only in one detail, he joked, did he disagree with the greatest of Uppsala’s scholars: the primordial language had not been Swedish, but Italian.9

Heureka!

The objects impressed on the sheets were witness to the process in which Rudbeck sought to illuminate the beginnings of languages. From collections as well as the margins of the kingdom, he brought together material evidence whose history still had to be deciphered – pieces of a puzzle he continued assembling across the volumes of his Atlantica.

Yet the sheets at Stockholm carried more than the impressions of artefacts today lost without a trace. Next to the drawing of the knife, Rudbeck had left a note in Latin, framed by three emphatic marks: NB, NB, NB.

Nota bene – the strange signs engraved along the blade – similar to the ones that appeared on the spoon and the disk – had reminded him of something. Next to them, Rudbeck placed a reference to a book by the English scholar Thomas Hyde.

“Most of the characters on this knife [appear] in the natural alphabet in Thomas Hyde in his ‘On the religion of the Persians’, page 517” 10

Hyde and Seek

On the Religion of the Persians and their Mages appeared in 1700. Possibly, the book travelled from England to Uppsala by Rudbeck the Younger after a stay in 1701 in Oxford.

On his father’s desk, it appears On the Religion nudged his thinking into a new direction. As part of his work, Hyde assembled alphabets from across the known world: scripts gathered from travellers’ reports, antiquarian collections, and the study of oriental manuscripts.

On the page Rudbeck indicated, Hyde had arranged them in a comparative table.

One column bears the title Alphabetum Naturale.

The signs listed there consisted of simple forms: staffs, dots, angles, and hooks: geometric figures that resembled the marks engraved on the objects Rudbeck had copied.

To him, the resemblance must have seemed striking.

Could it be that the artefacts might preserve traces of a pristine alphabet whose origins led back deeply into time, close to the moment in time when language, letters, and nature lost the divine harmony they once possessed?

The Persisting Riddle

The note next to the knife may be a waymark the later Olof Rudbeck left along the a path. It ties back to earlier explorations in which he suggested the crystalline structure of ice to have informed the runes, which he considered the first of alphabets.

The beginning of writing and languages lay at the core of Rudbeck’s Atlantica. The bundle preserved at Stockholm suggests that in its coming volumes, Rudbeck planned to open new tangents to the topic. This overlaps with linguistic approaches that his son pursued as he prepared a major work of his own – a ‘history of everything there is in the north’.

Yet the thoughts Rudbeck the Elder had laid out in the printer’s copy for the fourth volume never reached publication. In May 1702 the Great Fire of Uppsala swept through the university town.

Coping with the loss of the family’s collections and – a few months after – his father, Rudbeck the Younger carried the linguistic strand of their enterprise forward, embarking on a decade-long journey into speculations untethered from objects.

If the antiquities with the strange marks were still in Rudbeck the Elder’s possession in 1702, they likely vanished in the flames. Only their impressions remained – pressed into paper, surviving in the depths of the archive.

More than three centuries later, the question the king asked when he opened the Atlantica still lingers over the page:

What do these letters mean?

Further reading and references

All translations and photographs are my own unless stated otherwise.

For exchange on the signs I have to thank Charles Burnett.

When quoting from Latin sources, abbreviations were silently expanded and orthography lightly adapted to current standards.

Please note the general bibliography available here.

A Golden Bough

The watercolour drawing was one of hundreds.

The pages in the folio manuscript depicted trees, plants, and animals that Olof Rudbeck the Younger and his draughtsmen had painted on their expedition into Sápmi.

I sought them out at Uppsala on my return from crossing Sarek, exploring what remained from the first expedition sent to its border in 1695.

Little survived the Great Fire that struck seven years later. A manuscript with watercolours, the stub of the Laponia Illustrata, a handwritten travel journal.1

Rudbeck’s notes from Sápmi remained fragmentary. Yet their pages preserve glimpses of the mountains he beheld in Elysian light as he travelled up the Lule River.

On the lower of their barren slopes, Rudbeck found a humble plant, rising to a few centimetres in the fjäll. In the dwarf willow, the paradisiac vision found hold that he projected onto these lands under the Midnight Sun, recalling an ancient author “who wrote that on the Elysian Fields nothing else but salix should grow, i.e. willow”.2

In golden light, Rudbeck described the heart of Sápmi, and it seemed as if some of that shimmer still lingered on the twig drawn more than three centuries ago.

In some of the leathery leaves, the tissue had already vanished. Where it had, a lignin grid still remained, laying bare a network of veins bound to one root – the structure that sustained the living plant.

The Labyrinth

The Great Fire destroyed most of the material from the 1695 expedition. Yet the seed of the vision it inspired persisted.

With the watercolours came twelve leather-bound volumes.

Systema Philologicum (‘Philological System’) was the working title Rudbeck the Younger gave the project on which he embarked after the inferno. Across more than ten thousand pages, he explored the structure which, he believed, connected all languages of the world and the creation they described.

Lifetime, coagulated on paper.

The pages of the Systema form the walls of a labyrinth overgrown with notes, connected through side passages and trapdoors, elusive to the gaze of the linear reader.

Rudbeckian terrain is riddled with rabbit holes. The closer one leans over works like these, the more one moves into a thicket of connections and digressions, of brackets opened and never closed – and the greater the risk that in mere describing, one mimics the very structure that informs their pages.

I am no stranger to these lands, and writing about the grand works of the Rudbecks, father and son, is incomplete without acknowledging the pitfalls of wandering on such ground.

In deeper folders on my hard drive lurk unfinished documents covering hundreds of pages – the results of early foraging, in search of a structure to tell the story.

Lifetime, coagulated in bytes.

Stumbling is inevitable on Rudbeckian terrain. And yet I would not have wished to venture elsewhere.

On some days, I do return to Uppsala to take a stroll in the labyrinth.

The Vision Collapses

The Systema became Rudbeck the Younger’s second attempt at a grand work of his own – an overarching master narrative evolving from his father’s Atlantica.

The journey to Sápmi in 1695 laid the groundwork for such a project. Under the title Laponia Illustrata, he announced a work in twelve volumes that would unfold a ‘history of everything there is in the north’.

In the flames of 1702 perished the materials for all forthcoming volumes, together with his collections from Sápmi.

Before the fire, only one volume of the Laponia had appeared in print.

Already in that book, Rudbeck had made use of linguistic speculations as a signature mode of reasoning. They featured in the lengthy digressions he wove around names and beings, such as ‘Charon’ (whom he associated with the ferryman over the Dalälven) or the birds he saw and shot on the further journey north.3

Hebrew as well as Sámi formed central points of reference in these speculations.

There was a kinship he believed to be manifesting before his eyes, between the people Rudbeck encountered in the north and the Bible, in whose language he was educated through Johannes Kemper.

In a linguistic work that he announced as his Lapo Hebraeus (‘Hebraic Sámi’), he wanted to explore this kinship further.4

Slash and Burn

The loss of collections from 1702 was traumatic. And yet, the year after, Rudbeck the Younger was able to see a silver lining.

At least, this is the tone he strikes in a letter written in 1703.

After he had returned from a sojourn in England, Rudbeck wrote to Oxford professor John Wallis. In its lines, he framed the inferno of Uppsala within the Scandinavian tradition of svedjebruk (‘slash-and-burn’). This practice, he explained, was so deeply ingrained into Swedish agriculture that his father had even related the name of Sweden itself to it.5

“There is that old principle about Swedish soil (Svidland) that it is fertilised through fire, and that it yields a harvest which by far exceeds the seeds entrusted to it when the surface of this land, covered with trees, bushes, and grass, has been turned to embers and ashes. The same principle, so I realise, now comes to my use, because after raging Vulcan has destroyed many things that I had gathered on this subject in previous years, my ‘Sámi’ and my ‘Swede’ have now arisen much fresher and eager when I approached this work after my return.”

Rudbeck the Younger, Letter to John Wallis (23 June 1703) 6

With the letter, Wallis received a taster of ‘The Hebraic-sounding Sámi in the North’. It included a list of words that suggested parallels between Hebrew and Sámi language.

Going Radical

With his collections gone up in flames, tracing linguistic connections became Rudbeck’s key method of reasoning.7

A guiding principle was borrowed from the three root letters that form a semantic nucleus in Semitic languages. In Hebrew or Arabic, the same sequence of radical letters – for example k-t-b – appears in verbs related to writing, or in nouns such as “writing”, “book”, “letter”.

In these languages, Rudbeck argued, the radicals and their pronunciation had changed over time and due to external factors.8 Yet beneath, there still was an underlying kinship – a harmony, as he dreamed, that was not limited to the languages of the East.

As Rudbeck the Younger ventured, comparative studies opened up a way back to a ground that once was common to all languages – before the traumatic event unfolded that the Bible describes as the Confusion of Tongues at Babel (Gen 11:1–9).

It was an accepted fact that languages had ramified and shifted ever since the Fall of the Tower of Babel. However, as Rudbeck the Younger argued, there remained echoes of a stable grid beneath their surface.

That original harmony between words and nature, he reasoned, still was operating beneath the languages of the East – but also those of the West and even the North: on the outer margin of the Swedish kingdom, Rudbeck believed he found the Sámi speaking in Hebraic forms.

Sweet Speculations

A key idea guiding Rudbeck’s efforts had been that ancient traditions – the Bible and the myths of Elysium alike – pointed to a reality still preserved in the High North of Sweden. After the material basis of his Laponia had collapsed, linguistic reasoning now advanced to the crown witness in the same case.

The epiphany of a kinship he saw between Sámi and Hebrew, as communicated to Wallis, left Rudbeck the Younger in high spirits and launched his new projects forward.

However, not everybody joined in his enthusiasm. Contemporaries expressed concerns that Rudbeck began to lose himself in lofty speculation.9

His father’s Atlantica had not been void of bold etymologies, too. Yet Rudbeck the Elder still had made an effort to anchor his elaborations on classical myth, on Sweden’s early history, and on promised landscapes in the north in tangible realities – in its mountains and rivers, its plants and animals, its earliest ruins and in antiquities.

His son, however, more and more detached from this ground: instead of teaching his assigned subjects, the naturalist entangled himself in linguistic speculations.

More than a decade later, Rudbeck announced the fruits that had grown from his flights of philological imagination. In his 1716 Thesaurus linguarum Asiae et Europae harmonicus (‘Harmonic Thesaurus of the Languages of Asia and Europe’) he presented the first outline of a monumental work.

With the brief treatise, Rudbeck advertised nothing less than an archaeology of the world’s languages. Digging down into their soil, he arranged words in closeness to a divine harmony between nature and languages that he still saw inscribed into them. The motivation for this enterprise, the author writes, was not political but spiritual:

In this matter, my considerations will not pertain to the dignity of nations and peoples; for I devote all my strength solely to this purpose: that I may spread the glory of God everywhere and that I restore the truth, as if dug out from its hiding places, to its former brightness. 10

With his Thesaurus, Rudbeck the Younger exemplified an architecture he believed capable of carrying such a work. In folio format, he planned to unfold the harmony connecting languages and nature.

The structure to support this load was a system of root letters. Underneath such radicals, he would present related words from several dozen languages. Wherever the necessity arose to draw on details of Natural History, antiquities, and so on, such realia, too, would be woven in into the work.

Preparations for the work, Rudbeck explains in the Thesaurus, had already grown to a collection of working notes that spanned beyond 11.000 pages. The final work would be complemented by treatises in quarto format, covering dedicated topics such as fish, birds, plants, animals, or minerals illuminating passages from the Bible whose nature so far had eluded scholars – a topic he had explored in works already printed or claimed forthcoming.11

Reality Strikes Again

From the ashes of the ill-fated Laponia, a linguistic project thus had flourished, realising his original ambition in new form. A series of publications was forthcoming, worthy to mark his memory and living up to the original idea of a ‘History of Everything’.

At least, so was the plan.

No part of the Systema ever appeared in print.

The sample that Rudbeck presented in his 1716 Thesaurus did not make it beyond the first few radical letters. Once again, a Rudbeck project stumbled after the first steps.

Already in his Thesaurus, the author hinted at the challenges he was facing.

Since the catastrophe at Uppsala and his father’s death, the political landscape in Sweden had changed. War was raging in the Nordic regions, and King Charles XII absent on battlefields in the east. At home, the kind of patronage that had sustained Rudbeck the Elder’s works was dwindling.

As a father of a family, Rudbeck the Younger writes in the Thesaurus, he can’t muster the means to privately finance the printing. For that reason, he resorted to recent practice in European publishing, asking printers to contact him if they were interested in moving the publication of his Systema plus the complementary treatises forward.12

Rudbeck’s Thesaurus came as a call for support to the learned world, advertising what he had in the pipeline.

His appeal, it seems, fell flat.

What remains are thousands of crammed manuscript pages – decades of a lifetime spent shoring up against the ruins of Babel.

At the End of the River

The trees around the Carolina Rediviva carried a hue of autumn when I returned to Rudbeck’s labyrinth. From Sarek I had brought my Ariadne’s thread: the humble willow that Rudbeck, drawing on an ancient authority, made shimmer in Elysian light.

Who was that writer?

I followed the question into the manuscripts.

Aravá (עֲרָבָה) is the Hebrew word for the tree, and as if holding tight to this branch, I stepped onto Rudbeck’s riddled ground.

On the inside of the leather covers I found small paper slips. On them, the names of readers who once signed for consultation. A few of them were still blank.

Page by page, I wandered across the etymological field – salix – sälg – selig – heilig – that the author wove around the willow in his 1695 journal, following references to trees with similar “roots”, such as those mentioned in works on the botany of Brazil and Ethiopia, or in the pilgrims’ journeys from the Holy Land; read notes from Rabbinic works on the use of willow twigs in the celebration of Sukkot.

Yet among all the volumes, I found no trace of the ancient authority Rudbeck may have had in mind. Two decades after he had riffed on the Elysian willow, so it seemed, the mythical shimmer in which he once saw this plant shine near the headwaters of the Lule River had faded.

Did the Fire of Uppsala leave the undergrowth of his vision charred – the dream of finding the promised lands of the Bible in the north?

The threads Rudbeck later spun around the willow did not lead back to promised lands. They led to exile instead – to the memory of a harmony that once was real, yet that, despite all efforts, could not be struck again:

“By the rivers of Babylon
we sat down and cried
as we remembered Zion.

Upon the willows there
we hung our harps.”

Psalm 137: 1–2 13

Further Reading and References

All photographs and translations are my own unless noted otherwise.

Instead of the historical Lapo / Laponia in Latin and Lapp / Lappland in Swedish, I use Sámi and Sápmi in my text.

When quoting from Latin sources, abbreviations were silently expanded and orthography lightly adapted to current standards.

Please note the general bibliography available here.

13

The biblical schoalrship of the 17th and 18th centuries contain rich discussions sparked by the opening of this Psalm and the respective trees (עֲרָבִים). From these see the following selection:

• Olav Celsius, Hierobotanicon, Uppsala 1743, vol. 1. pp. 304–8 (digitized by Österreichische Nationalbibliothek).

• Johann Heinrich Ursin, Arboretum Biblicum, Nuremberg 1663, cap. 12 (online at Google Books).

• Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, Physica Sacra, vol. 2, Augsburg–Ulm 1732, ad Psalm 137: 1-2 (online at archive.org).

In the librarian’s eyes I caught a note of pity.

At the counter I had taken hold of the book trolley: a wooden frame carrying twelve manuscripts, their leather covers lifted to almost cubic proportions by thousands of pages. Like baleen, they held the trawl of a scholar’s dive through worlds both material and immaterial.

Pushing the shelf-meters across the Special Reading Room, their weight felt more than physical. The remains of the Systema Philologicum radiate the gravity of an idea that drew an author in – or should I rather say, down?

A wanderer in the intellectual thickets of Rudbeck father and son, I am no stranger to that sensation. There is a sympathy I feel for these authors – something that lures me onto their paper trails, closer to the core that kept them going in their quest to unfold ways of seeing that made visible the kinship connecting the tangible and the intangible worlds – and the code that might still shimmer through their fabric.

A contagious aura surrounds works like these that I have made companions in travel and writing. Over decades, they were accumulated by scholars meticulous in observation and boundless in association – convinced that every detail deserves its meaningful place within a system they felt called to create.

The Systema of Olof Rudbeck the Younger is the utmost extension of such an ambition – one that arcs across a scholar’s life. Its force still speaks from the remains in which it found expression, and the traces of its pursuit still pose a question:

What idea drove men to exhaust their lives in works like these?

Curling Parents

The answer leads far from Uppsala – on a journey to the north of Sweden. At the beginning stands an expedition into the heart of Sápmi – the land of Indigenous peoples in northern Scandinavia.

“Now my son Olof Rudbeck has a great desire to travel [to these most distant regions], to have drawings made of all those places that are not found here below, or in other places – as well as of various kinds of birds that come there in summer from the south and are not found here, but in winter depart again on their course – and also of other animals, both those on land and in the water, so that one might obtain a proper history of everything that exists here in Sweden and in the northern regions.”

Olof Rudbeck the Elder, Letter to Bengt Oxenstierna 1

With these words, Olof Rudbeck the Elder wrote to the Swedish chancellor in April 1695. The day before, he had learned about a scientific expedition the king planned to send towards the Arctic Circle. Its purpose was to measure the phenomenon Charles XI himself had personally observed the year before from the bell tower at Torneå – the sun that does not set for an entire day.

As soon as Rudbeck had heard about the astronomers’ mission, he suggested a natural historical corollary. Sending out a second expedition, he argued, the king would lay the foundation for a “History of Everything” of Sweden and its North.

Such a project was of national interest, he pointed out, placing the kingdom on par with natural histories written in other European countries at the time.2

The proposal found favour with the king. A royal bursary for his son was forthcoming.

It wasn’t the first time Rudbeck the Elder paved the way for his son’s career.3 After formative years in Holland, Rudbeck the Younger was already designated to follow his father as professor of medicine at Uppsala. As an aspiring botanist, he contributed substantially to the family’s Campus Elysii project.

In 1695, Rudbeck the Elder placed his naturalist son on a trajectory north, on which the 35-year-old would soon emerge with a major work – a ‘history of everything that exists in the northern regions’.

At least, so was the plan.

Towards a History of Everything

On 22 May 1695, a second expedition left from Uppsala, a day after the astronomers Johan Bilberg and Anders Spole had left. The travel party led by Rudbeck the Younger included the two painters Andreas Holtzbohm and Olof Thelott, the noblemen Jacob and Carl Gyllenborg, sons of the governor of Uppsala, and an unknown number of servants and assistants.

Bilberg and Spole made haste to reach Torneå in good time before the summer solstice. Rudbeck and his team travelled at a slower pace instead. All along the way towards the north, they filled notebooks with observations and sketchbooks with drawings of plants and birds.4

Their experience of the landscapes to the north (or more precisely: their later presentation) was informed by the mythical vision that Rudbeck the Elder had laid out in his Atlantica.

Traditionally, the Dalälven River is considered the border to Norrland – the ‘Land of the North’. Along its rivers, Rudbeck the Elder argued, opened the landscapes that ancient poets remembered as Elysium.

His son describes the first encounter with this river in his later travel account. White water foamed on the raging Dalälven. Along its banks, an elderly man waited to ferry them over. As Rudbeck the Younger writes, his ramshackle float and his features, furrowed by age, prompted associations with Charon from classical myth. Right after, he quoted verses in which Vergil described the ferryman to the underworld.

What follows from Charon illustrates a style of reasoning prevalent in Rudbeck’s works. Over dozens of pages, the author dissects the ferryman’s name, riffing on its syllables and the connections he saw extending from it across various languages (including Sámi, where kaarid according to his presentation meant to be held in a spot against one’s will).

Embedded in this semantic cloud, ‘Charon’ becomes a hinge of meaning prefiguring his role as gatekeeper to paradise and hell in myth – a trail which the author even follows into God’s perspective. The features Vergil describes for the ferryman Rudbeck ultimately finds in the outline of the Baltic Coast, the body of water to be crossed on the way towards Elysium in Sweden – and all along whose shore even the names of places resonated with features of the Baltic Charon.5

Elysium Beneath the Midnight Sun

A few days before midsummer, the Rudbeck party reached Torneå. Near the mouth of the Torne River, it united with the other expedition from Uppsala.

From the northernmost tip of the Baltic Sea, they observed the sun that does not set over the Torne Valley – the astronomers from the bell tower, and Rudbeck the Younger climbing the sails of a windmill further upstream.6

In the days that followed, the two parties continued up the river. Its rapids inspired awe in Rudbeck the Younger, as did the skills of the men who steered his party in long boats up the river. Then there were the hills along its banks, which had already attracted his father’s interest.

Already in 1687, he had an expedition sent up the Torne Valley. Through his men, Rudbeck the Elder learned of the elevations along the river, later fashioning them as early observatories of the Atlantean astronomer kings.

The stories the boatmen shared about the hills along the Torne Valley sparked the son’s interests as well. Around Luppiovaara and Aavasaksa, the Sámi told him, the sole survivors of a great flooding once had stranded. And there was more: remains of the keel, they said, could still be seen.

As Rudbeck the Younger suggested in his later account, there was a meaningful connection on a linguistic level between ‘Lupovara’ (his spelling) and ‘slup’, a type of boat. However, the stories of physical traces he discarded as being of little worth.7

Eventually, the expeditions reached the headwaters of the Torne River. From this northernmost point of their journey, Rudbeck the Younger and his men returned to Torneå. From there, the astronomers headed back to Uppsala to publish their results.

Rudbeck’s team embarked for Luleå instead. From the mouth of the Lule River, they continued upstream into Lule Sápmi.

Adding a second leg to their expedition, the men ventured up to the region around Kvikkjokk. All along the Lule River, Rudbeck the Younger cast out the net for his ‘History of Everything’. In the heart of Sápmi, he collected notes on animals and herbs, on shells and pearls, on the course of the water. Near the border to Sarek – the most alpine region of Sweden – he noted observations on the Sámi and their way of living.

The mountains – their form, the age of snow, their vegetation – attracted his deep attention. Everywhere along the river, Rudbeck the Younger writes, the fjäll lies in sight with patches of white. The shape of the mountains rose gradually and gently, striking him as different from the sharply pointed panoramas that he had seen in travel journals from the Alps.8

The fjäll were barren mountains, he writes. Yet on their lower slopes he still found a tree growing – the net-leaved dwarf willow. This humble tree Rudbeck fashioned into an anchor for the vision of a promised land unfolding before him under the midnight sun, along the banks of the Lule River – lands he believed were prefigured in the writings of the ancients and the Holy Scripture alike:

This strongly supports the opinion of those who locate Elysium here in the North, especially because an ancient author wrote that on the Elysian Fields nothing else but salix should grow, i.e. willow. The Latin word salix is considered to be either taken from our sälg (‘willow’) or salig (‘blessed’), or perhaps contracted from the word sol (‘sun’) and helig (‘holy’), because among the Sámi the willow still is consecrated to the sun. Thus here the dwellings of the blessed have been and, God be praised, still are, according to the words of the Prophet: “The spirit of God shall rest in the North.”

Olof Rudbeck the Younger, Travel Journal 9

Entanglements

With bulging nets, the expedition returned from its haul along the headwaters of the Lule River. Their papers filled with notes and drawings, Rudbeck the Younger’s expedition travelled downstream. In September 1695, the men arrived at Uppsala.

At that time, Bilberg and Spole had almost finished the treatise in which they presented the results from their astronomical observations.

Rudbeck digested the material from his five-month journey at a different pace. It would take another six years until first results surfaced in print.

In 1701, the first volume of the Laponia Illustrata (‘Lapland Illustrated’) appeared. The book was part of a series of twelve that Rudbeck the Younger envisioned.

The first volume takes readers on a stretch covering roughly a hundred kilometres out of Uppsala. Too tempting were the threads Rudbeck the Younger encountered along the way to Norrland.

Occasions for digression appeared all around him. The ferryman at the Dalälven crossing. The wryneck he shot right after crossing the border river. The cuckoo whose call they heard thereafter. A flight of crossbills flitting over the spruces. If the Laponia had a meme, it would be “Oh look – a bird!”.

The wryneck motivated a fully-fledged ornithological excursus on the bird also depicted on a woodcut, together with its remarkable tongue. Rudbeck’s elaborations on the cuckoo ended in no lesser a promise than a work describing all birds of the north and depicting them life-size.

In his elaborations on the crossbill, the author ends on a mythical note. He made it seem no coincidence that the Greek had used the name loxia: this was suspiciously close to an epithet of Apollo (Loxias), the God of the Sun – for with its beautiful song, this bird heralded the return of light after winter solstice in Norrland.10

A Portal Opened

Within the first volume, Rudbeck the Younger had hardly tipped into the southern border of Norrland. Already in 1701, such density of digressions may have left his readers alarmed:

How many books will it take if we continue at this pace?

And yet, already the first volume of the Laponia graphically lays out the vision Rudbeck projected on Sápmi.

The book opens with a frontispiece – an engraving that, in allegorical forms, conveys the themes as well as the spiritual vector of his ‘History of Everything’.

An arched rock opens up glimpses of a landscape of pristine beauty, populated by Sámi reindeer herders, their rituals illuminated by the midnight sun.11

To the right of this rock portal, a river descends in cataracts. Stranded on a hill along its course, an ark overlooks the raging rapids. Smoke rises from a group of people on the banks below.

Beneath the scene, a medallion depicts a censer, quoting the biblical verse in which God acknowledged the burnt sacrifice that Noah’s family brought after the flood receded (Gen 8:20–21).

In such imagery, the frontispiece outlined a work in which biblical and classical traditions converge; refracted in the culture of the Sámi and the nature of the North. The Laponia was a portal to this world, and besides the gate opening in the frontispiece rests an elderly man. His features resemble those of the description Vergil gives of Charon, as if waiting at the threshold towards the true Elysium.

To his left, a putto holds a further medallion depicting a dove, the symbol of God’s spirit. The text beneath echoes the biblical verse that Rudbeck had quoted in sight of Sarek – words that let the lands he glimpsed in the summer of 1695 appear as divinely blessed:

“The spirit of God shall rest in the North” (Zech 6:8).

Vulcan’s Toll

With his Laponia, Rudbeck the Younger fashioned Sápmi as a promised land. In the High North, the parallel lines of spiritual and mythological traditions of past millennia seemed to vanish.

Studying its nature as well as Sámi culture and language provided the author with keys to illuminate passages from the Bible whose meaning had remained obscure. In the sacred text, Rudbeck the Younger strived to reveal the presence of the North: in these regions, he argued, one of the lost tribes of Israel had stranded.

In his time, he claimed, direct links to Hebrew traditions still existed. This kinship, as Rudbeck the Younger announced in the Laponia, he strived to further elaborate in a study comparing their languages.

However, it all came differently. The grand vision his Laponia promised to unfold never widened beyond the crack that its first volume had opened.

A year later, the Great Fire of Uppsala put an end to the monumental project. The flames destroyed what the Rudbeck family had prepared in forthcoming works – the father’s Atlantica, the family’s Campus Elysii botanical atlas, the son’s Laponia.

The ashes had hardly cooled when Rudbeck the Younger had to mourn the loss of his collections. What remains are the first volume of the stunted Laponia, the fragmentary pages of the handwritten travel journal he kept, a selection of manuscripts with drawings of plants and birds.

Seeing his attempt at a ‘History of Everything’ physically collapse was traumatic. And yet, beneath the cinders of 1702 still lay the seeds of Rudbeck’s original ambition.

In the decades that followed, they would grow into a new form. Eventually, they filled twelve leather-bound manuscripts – the very volumes that arrived neatly stacked on a wooden trolley in the Special Reading Room at Uppsala.

Further Reading and References

All photographs and translations are my own unless noted otherwise.

Instead of the historical Lapo / Laponia in Latin and Lapp / Lappland in Swedish, I use Sámi and Sápmi in my text.

When quoting from Latin sources, abbreviations were silently expanded and orthography lightly adapted to current standards.

Please note the general bibliography available here.

The view from there would end in the treetops.

At the bell tower of Torneå, my gaze wandered over the hatches beneath the gables tiled in wooden shingles. It was the day before Midsummer’s Eve, and even if I managed to gain access to the stairs, the view from the top would snag in crowns of pine and larch that grew from the churchyard.

Four centuries ago, a church had risen on one of the shifting islands in the Torne River. From the building clad in white wooden boards, I continued across the churchyard towards the northern tip of the island – until I stepped into the shadow of the water tower, a gilled concrete mushroom rising above the highest of trees.

Vesitornikahvila on avoinna koko kesän, I read – the water tower café is open all summer.

“No problem,” the young guy upstairs said when I explained my plan: to set up a 360-degree camera at the highest point overlooking the island to the north.

“The idea is to keep the camera running for twenty-four hours over Midsummer,” I added, “I’d pick it up the next day.”

“Oh, I see.” He paused.

“The thing is, we’re all on holiday for the next few days.”

I felt my enthusiasm sink.

“But let me check.”

Two phone calls and several hours later, the sound of a boxer engine announced the vintage VW Käfer that pulled up by the tower. A handshake, and I had the key for Midsummer.

On top of the café, I fixed the camera with cable ties and improvised an external power connection. I checked the memory card one last time, pressed ‘record’, and took the leap of faith:

It was now Phoebus Apollo who held the reins.

The Decisive Minutes

More than three hundred summers before, a group of Swedish aristocrats climbed the stairs of the bell tower at Torneå towards a similar view.1 In 1694, Governor Douglas, State Secretary Piper, and Counsellor of War Hoghusen had come together in the young town on the Baltic Sea to welcome their guest of honour: from Stockholm, Charles XI had travelled to the margins of his reign.

Just beneath the Arctic Circle, the Swedish king planned to witness what rumours claimed unfolded in the sky over the Torne River:

On the days around Midsummer, the sun was said not to set for an entire day.2

Mathematicians and astronomers had deemed the reports credible, yet none of the scholars at Stockholm or Uppsala had ever witnessed this wonder.

That summer, the Swedish regent led the way.

A warm light already poured over the wooden shingles when the party climbed the bell tower. At the end of the 17th century, most of the island of Torneå still was level ground, its northern tip splitting the river into two arms. Beyond its northern horizon, they expected the sun soon to near the forests and soft hills – scraping its line, yet its centre never sinking beneath.

After a ten-day trip covering many hundred miles, the point of the king’s expedition condensed to a few decisive minutes before and after midnight.

Conditions that day, however, were not ideal.

Charles XI had hastened north, yet when he arrived the astronomical solstice had already passed by several days. The sun had begun to lower its course again. Also, the men found the forests and hill lines covered more of the far horizon than expected.

To make matters worse, they saw rags of clouds gathering above the Torne River.

The Cradle of Astronomy

Only clear skies would allow the king to test, with his own eyes, what his mathematicians and astronomers had so far only discussed. Yet his journey ventured beyond mere curiosity.

In climbing the tower, Charles XI enacted a lineage. At least, this was the historical framework that Olof Rudbeck had prepared.

Five years earlier, in the second volume of this Atlantica (1689), the professor at Uppsala had inscribed the Valley of the Torne River with a story that linked the origins of astronomy to the early kings of Sweden.

As he argued, it had been around the Arctic Circle, in the landscape that widened around the Torne River, that they first observed the cycles of the celestial bodies four thousand years ago and ordered the year.

At the beginning of this tradition Rudbeck saw King Atlas.3

The dialogues of Plato had mentioned him as the first ruler over Atlantis, the island that carried his name – and that Rudbeck identified as the Scandinavian Peninsula. His name also echoed in the Atlas Mountains, a ridge that he identified as the one dividing Norway and Sweden.

This Swedish king, Rudbeck argued, had been the first to observe the celestial bodies throughout the year. With the help of runes and by devising the early calendars, he pointed out, Atlas had spread the knowledge of the sky.4

The cradle of astronomy had stood in Sweden, Rudbeck was certain. In theory, he argued, the true Atlas Mountains could provide ideal vantage points to observe the sky. Their remoteness, however, and above all the winter conditions made them impractical as all-year observatories.

Yet there was a region in the High North that lured with better outlooks:
A river that reached far beyond the Arctic Circle. A landscape that was easily accessible throughout the year. A sky that domed over the river valley, its horizon almost unobstructed by the land.5

It must have been around the 1680s when Olof Rudbeck began to zero in on the Torne Valley. The map he printed with the first volume of the Atlantica (1679) had still placed the river in a valley without names and contours, its side arms branching randomly as if copied from the map in Johannes Scheffer’s Lapponia from 1673.

At the time, reliable reports about the geography of the High North were rare and contacts scarce.

This would change in 1687.

That year, an expedition from the south travelled up the river, shifting the valley of the Torne River and the sky above further into Rudbeck’s reach.

Northern Crowns

On top of the water tower, I had left the camera running for Midsummer. Along the river highway I was driving into an endless day, balmy air streaming in through the half-open window.

With the summer air came rags of laughter from teenagers I passed on the road, riding on the back of bikes, swaying on the asphalt. From white plastic bags dangling from the handlebars, the clinking of bottles

The sun had begun to close in on the horizon, a contour of low hills and forest drawn into the cloudless sky.

Some hundred kilometres upstream, the expanse of these woods holds a stone with cryptic marks. Three centuries ago, their lure had sparked the first expedition that Sweden sent beyond the Arctic Circle.

In the 1680s, reports from the remote areas of the kingdom reached south. They mentioned a stone said to feature an inscription in an unknown script as well as carvings of three crowns. Antiquarians pricked their ears. If true, this would make the stone the northernmost testimony for the emblem of the Swedish kings.

In the summer of 1687, Rudbeck used such reports to persuade Charles XI to fund an expedition north. A mission up the Torne Valley, he argued, could illuminate the reach of early royal power in the North, as well as the movement of the sun over this part of the kingdom: if a decision was made quickly enough, Rudbeck reasoned, the expedition could still arrive north around summer solstice.

That way, the mission could yield observations of the Midnight Sun from the very region “where our oldest fathers first observed the course of the sun and the moon”.6

Rudbeck’s pitch found favour with Charles XI. A few days later, the antiquarians Johan Peringer (later Peringskjöld) and Johan Hadorph junior left for Torneå.

The signs they found on a stone hidden in the forests above the Arctic Circle proved underwhelming – and never made it into the Atlantica. Yet for the theories Rudbeck maintained on the cradle of astronomy, their expedition was a success.

The two antiquarians provided him with names and location of hills along the Torne River, as well as observations of the sun they had made on their tops. With their information, Rudbeck updated his map of northern Sweden.

Beneath his pen, a network of vantage points materialised – elevations where, as he believed, kings like Atlas had made observations that brought forth the first calendars.

Never Falling Together

Kengisvaara. Luppiovaara. Aavasaksa.

Some of the names flashed by in white font on blue – road signs on the way towards the Arctic Circle.

Of these hills, Rudbeck wrote, Peringer and Hadorph climbed the northernmost – Kengisvaara on the eastern bank of the river – on 3 July 1687. In the Atlantica, he translated the name as ‘King’s Hill’. For Rudbeck, it was a relic of the rulers of Atlantis, who once kept observatories along the river.

Two weeks after midsummer, he wrote, the two antiquarians still saw the sun scrape the tree line half an hour before and after midnight, “creeping like a worm”.

The Torne River marks a border not only between countries, but between time zones. I had lost track of how close I was to solar midnight. The digital clocks around me showed numbers whose reference points eluded me.

What guided the journey was the sun’s path. Its centre, so they said in the 1680s, would never touch the horizon.

The sun approached the horizon like an asymptote – never falling together. From the deserted main road, I pulled off onto a farm track that ended at a cattle ferry landing. Across the water, an island split the river in two.

I was not the only waking.

Cowbells carried across from the meadows on the island. Above, the birds did not seek rest that night, feasting without pause. Their wings cut the air, and brief cries stitched the silence over the waters.

Treetops rose from the shore of the island, and through their veil I watched the midnight sun creep across the tree line. Not once did the charioteer yield the reins, nor release the horses to the pastures classical myth imagined beneath the horizon.

Soon Mount Aavasaksa edged its silhouette into the sun’s course. The ridge cast a shadow over the eastern bank, and where the shore still lay dimmed, mist hung low – the water beyond already aglow in apricot light.

The New Astronomer King

In 1694, observing the course of the midnight sun was a tighter call.

Eight minutes before twelve, the disk passed under a thinning veil of cloud at Torneå. A gust drove a darker band across the sun, its edge dissolving behind vapour and forest.

Shortly after midnight, the sun emerged again.

In his almanac, Charles XI noted the times and what he had just witnessed in the sky. Beyond any doubt, he wrote, the sun had not sunk below the horizon.7

The Swedish king descended from the bell tower cast as a new Atlas.

At Torneå, he had reconnected with the tradition of Sweden’s astronomer-kings whose lineage Olof Rudbeck had traced from Gustav Vasa back to that first of Swedish kings.8 Hadn’t already classical myths still intimated the truth about Atlas, their accounts and iconography honouring him as inventor of the science of the skies?

For Atlas had worked out the science of astrology to a degree surpassing others and had ingeniously discovered the spherical nature of the stars, and for that reason was generally believed to be bearing the entire firmament upon his shoulders.

Diodorus of Sicily, Library of History, 4.27.5 (tr. C. H. Oldfather)

Across Sweden, Charles XI was celebrated as a regent who had taken great hardship on his shoulders to study the wonders his kingdom holds. The governor of Norrland, who had joined the regent on the tower at Torneå, later had the observations his king jotted down that night inscribed in golden letters in the church at Torneå.9

In praising the king for this feat, Count Douglas was not alone. The artist Arvid Karlsteen struck a medal that commemorated Charles XI’s journey north.

Its reverse shows a sun hovering above the northern tip of the Baltic Sea, commemorating the king’s journey in an imagery and a Latin motto that recalled tropes of absolutist courts: “The sun that doesn’t set is encountered by another sun”.10

At Uppsala, the Neo-Latin poet Peter Lagerlöf chose poetry as his means to honour the astronomer-king. Addressing the blessed town of Torneå, the scholar praised Charles XI for the selfless efforts he undertook for the sake of science:

In you he has seen the sun waking at nightly hours,
Himself waking for the sake of his home;
Has seen its face resplendent with never-setting light
And his kingdom relishing a never-ending day.

Peter Lagerlöf, On Charles XI Observing the Midnight Sun at Torneå 11

Rudbeck, too, joined the ranks of those congratulating the king.

Right after his return, Rudbeck wrote in the third volume of his Atlantica (1698), Charles XI had shared with him his handwritten notes – the very observations Count Douglas had displayed in golden letters in the church at Torneå. Four millennia after Atlas, Rudbeck praised, the king had witnessed a day of never-ending sun shining over his kingdom.12

And there was more.

Charles XI himself had not only pioneered in the astronomy of the North.

Its scientific exploration was a goal he had furthered ever since.

Sending out the Scientists

Already the year after, Charles XI ordered a scientific expedition to follow up his observation from the bell tower.

On 21 May 1695, astronomer Anders Spole and mathematician Johannes Bilberg left from Uppsala. On 6 June, they arrived at Torneå in good time for the summer solstic, and prepared their instruments on the bell tower.

The coming days, the sun disappeared behind rain and fog. All the men could do was wait.13

In the decisive night, the weather remained stable.

Between the 10th and 11th of June, they measured the midnight sun sinking over Torneå. What they observed with instruments confirmed what the king had written in his notebook:

We saw the body of the sun reaching out from above the horizon by almost three quarters of its body, while the fourth quarter sank under the horizon to a degree that the centre of the sun indeed remained above the horizon.

Bilberg, The Refraction of the Sun that Never Sets 14

That night, Bilberg and Spole were not the only visitors from the south observing the sun over Torneå.

A little upstream, an expedition team around Rudbeck the Younger was holding watch (he later claimed he even found a vantage point superior to Bilberg’s and Spole’s, hoisting himself up on the sail of a windmill).15

When his father had gotten wind that spring of the king’s plan to send a mission north, he had been quick to react. In a letter to the chancellor, he explained that his son Olof – an aspiring naturalist – had long harboured ideas of an expedition into Sápmi, the land of the Sámi people.

By adding a natural-historical appendix to Bilberg’s and Spole’s astronomical mission, Rudbeck advertised, the king could lay the foundation for a project of national interest: to write a complete history of Sweden’s North.16

Once again, Rudbeck’s intercession yielded success. The day after Bilberg and Spole had left Uppsala, a further expedition set out north.

Having observed the midnight sun at Torneå, Rudbeck and his team continued upstream the Torne River. Having concluded measurements further up in the Torne Valley, Bilberg and Spole embarked on their way south.

The time to publish their findings had come.

The Refraction Reaction

Already by late October 1695, the two scholars finished drafting a treatise. Barely a year after the king’s ascent, it translated the phenomenon he witnessed at Torneå into numbers, calculations, and diagrams.

With their work dedicated to the king, Bilberg and Spole explained how it had been possible for him to see a heavenly body from Torneå that, astronomically speaking, had already sunk under the horizon.

The name of the phenomenon was refraction.

On latitudes near the Arctic Circle, Bilberg and Spole explained, the light of the sun passes through a thicker layer of atmosphere near the horizon. This layer acts like a lens, bending the rays downward towards the observer.

As a result, the sun still appears not to set around the date of the astronomical solstice – even at locations situated just below the Arctic Circle. A glowing ball skimming the horizon, its glare softened, its rays diffused by the thickened air.

Driving back south on the river highway, I felt its warmth on my neck again.

In the morning mist, I saw the sun rise across the built-over horizon of Torneå. To the south of the island emerged the steeple and the old bell tower next to it, the mark where this city had begun four centuries earlier.

In its middle: the towering concrete mushroom to which I had returned.

12:11:15. The timer read when I connected to the camera.

The seconds kept ticking. It had recorded through the night.

I let the camera run as the sun continued towards noon.

When I later reviewed the recording, I saw it:

Through a clear sky, the glaring disk approached the horizon, flattening into a seam of orange light as if igniting the line of forests and hills, then rose again.

A sine curve, drawn here century after century – long before human eyes turned towards these skies.

Further Reading and References

The events described in the opening took place before access to the Torneå water tower was discontinued due to a changed world situation. The site is no longer open for visits. It is being discussed to demolish the tower in coming years; see the article by Raisa Huttunen, “Tornion ve­si­tor­ni pysyy sul­jet­tu­na”, published on lapinkansa.fi, 18.08.2025.

All translations, photographs, and videos are my own unless noticed otherwise.

When quoting from Latin sources, abbreviations were silently expanded and orthography lightly adapted to current standards.

Please note the general bibliography available here.

The first aurora of the year washed across the sky like poured-out milk. Opening a flap of the roof tent, I watched the stars shimmer through a faint haze.

Andromeda had begun her rise, and so had Perseus, her rescuer in the myth.

The last hours of the night felt like a final exhale of summer, the air rising from the ground carrying the musk of soil.

Somewhere out in this forest verging on the next season lay a stone. Before climbing down, I jotted its coordinates into my notebook – a monument whose lure had drawn expeditions north three centuries before.

In the light of my headlamp, droplets shimmered in spiderwebs between the spruce trees. I wandered among them for a few kilometres when the sun rose between the stems, its edges softened to a warm blur by the air above the Arctic Circle.

In its light, I checked the coordinates again. The first rays of sun warmed my face, while my boots sank slowly into the moss beneath.

The numbers guided me further up a hill. Near its crest, a few solitary boulders lay lodged in the forest floor, as if hurled by a Titan’s hand. Most of their sides had yielded to shrubs and moss.

Condensed water trickled down the faces turned away from the sun. Creases in the stone caught reflections of its light, lending a golden shimmer to the lines for which I had come.

Drawing closer to the furrows, a first doubt began to rise.

Was this really what they had seen?

Northern Crowns

Rumours of this stone once called antiquarians – and even kings – into action. What if the emblem of the Swedish king could be found up north, beyond the Arctic Circle?

Centuries ago, such word had travelled south. At Stockholm and Uppsala, reports of a stone marked with three crowns sparked an expedition to find evidence that the power of Sweden’s kings had reached to the outer edge of the kingdom.

All this began with a desire to illuminate the deeper history of the Swedish Empire. In the decades after 1660, the Board of Antiquities launched official inquiries to collect information on ancient monuments.

Around the middle of the 1680s, reports came in about an ominous stone located near the village of Käymäjärvi.1 Upstream the valley of the Torne River, they claimed, lay a monument whose face not only featured a rune-like inscription, but also three crowns.

Until then, the only archaeological evidence known of this emblem of the Swedish kings had been the Mora Stenar (‘Stones of Mora’) near Uppsala. At this site, Swedish kings were elected and sworn in in earlier times, before setting out on their Eriksgata through the provinces of the realm.2

Rudbeck Organises an Expedition

To antiquarians, the outlook was tantalising: could there be evidence for royal iconography on the northern margins of the kingdom – hundreds of miles further north than any known rune stone?

The Uppsala professor Olof Rudbeck was among the first to take action.

On 10 June 1687, he drew up a letter to persuade his patron Bengt Oxenstierna that an expedition was necessary.3 As chancellor, Oxenstierna had the king’s ear.

If pitched from the right angle, Charles XI might finance such a mission. Its main objective naturally lay on the stone, in a venture that promised to shed new light on the history of the royal emblem and its reach.

Yet Rudbeck entertained secondary objectives, as well – goals that, to him, were at least as tempting.

The stone lay in the region he advertised as the one where “our oldest fathers first observed the course of the sun and the moon”.4 This phrasing tied back to a core idea he unfolded in his Atlantica: that the cradle of astronomy had stood in the Torne Valley.

It was here, he claimed, beneath the wide skies of the High North, that the first kings of Sweden had observed the sun and the moon. Applying the early art of letters, they devised the first calendars, handing down the movement of the celestial bodies to later generations.

If the decision to send out an expedition was made quickly enough, Rudbeck pressed on in his letter, the antiquarians could reach the Arctic Circle in time to gather astronomic observations during the days of the legendary Midnight Sun – in the very region where, in his vision, Swedish kings had launched astronomy and devised the first calendars.

The Antiquarians Head North

With his letter to Oxenstierna, Rudbeck had made a compelling case. Johan Hadorph, secretary at the Board of Antiquities, followed up with a further letter in its support.5 Already the next day, the matter was settled.

By royal decree, two antiquarians and a servant were granted a travel bursary to carry out the mission Rudbeck had proposed. The men who set out north were Johan Peringer – later ennobled as Peringskjöld – and Johan Hadorph junior, the secretary’s son. After 11 June 1687, the party departed.

It was the first expedition Sweden ever sent beyond the Arctic Circle – and already the third Rudbeck had launched into Norrland to gather evidence for his ideas.6

Little is known of how Peringer and Hadorph travelled. But they reached the North at remarkable speed. By early July, they had crossed more than a thousand kilometres and passed the Arctic Circle.

Beyond this line, the sun does not set for at least one night in summer. All along the way, the men took notes on its course at midnight.7

By 3 July, they reached the mining estate at Kengis on the Torne River. From there, they continued upstream before turning northwards. Heading for a hill called Vinsa, they entered the mosquito-infested forests – towards the stone whose rumours had launched them north.

The Northernmost Runes

There is no account of the moment when Hadorph and Peringer first encountered the Vinsa Stone.

We can only imagine how they cleared its weathered surface of moss, searching for signs that might live up to the wondrous reports that had launched their journey.

What survives is a sketch Peringer drew that day. It shows what appears to be three fragments, lined with a band of signs.

Closer to the centre, two bell-shaped figures appear besides the fragment of a third. Above them, an inscription indicates where these markings were found – on a tipped-over stone near Käymäjärvi, some forty kilometres north of Kengis.

Of all of this, nothing I had seen in the National Library could be identified on site.

After filing the drawing, Peringer and Hadorph began their return. Freed from the astronomic constraints that had hastened their journey north, they now travelled at a slower pace.

As time pressure eased, they could attend to antiquarian stopovers further south that Hadorph senior had already suggested in his letter to the king. These included a journey up the Åredalen in Jämtland, to the rune stone at Frösön and the ‘Stone in the Green Valley’ near Storlien, and to the elusive rune stones of Hälsingland.8

From Crowns to Constellations

Across Norrland, Hadorph and Peringer collected evidence of the northernmost rune stones known in Sweden. With a folder full of drawings, they returned to Uppsala.

The moment the two antiquarians placed the sketch from Vinsa on Rudbeck’s table must have been underwhelming. After thousands of kilometres and months in the field, they produced a drawing whose signs hardly resembled three crowns.

Peringer and Hadorph could make little of the creases that reports had presented as runes and the royal emblem. In the later volumes of his Atlantica, Rudbeck did not write a single word about the Vinsa Stone or its alleged inscriptions – rumours he had originally used to secure the expedition from the king.9

The expedition to the stone had failed as proof of crowns and runes above the Arctic Circle. Yet it returned with something else that would prove invaluable to the Atlantica project: numbers and names.

Hadorph and Peringer had brought back notes on places and the sun’s course around Midsummer. With their annotations, Rudbeck returned to his personal copy of the first volume. Dipping his pen, he updated the map of Sweden he had printed in 1679.

Two years later, he presented the ideas developed on the basis of these notes in the second volume of the Atlantica (1689).

In Rudbeck’s view, elevations in the Torne Valley bearing names such as Kengisvaara –translated by Rudbeck as ‘King’s Hill’ – still bore witness to the first rulers of Sweden. All along the river, he argued, the early kings had maintained a network of observation points. From these, they first grasped the movements of the celestial bodies.

The notes from beyond the Arctic Circle allowed Rudbeck to substantiate this vision of the North. Millennia ago, he imagined, Swedish kings had held watch across the northern sky. Raising his gaze over the Torne Valley, King Atlas himself – the namesake of Atlantis – had begun the noble art of astronomy.

Hadn’t the classical authors still caught a glimpse of this truth when they later remembered the god as its inventor?10

The Stone Resurfaces

Again, Rudbeck assembled the pieces into an intriguing story.

What he wrote in the second volume of the Atlantica about the cradle of astronomy in the Torne Valley motivated a new wave of expeditions north.

In 1694, King Charles XI himself travelled to Torneå. From the bell tower near the river mouth, he watched the Midnight Sun skim the northern horizon. The following year, an expedition of scientists set out from Uppsala along the same route to analyse the phenomenon their king had witnessed.11

Once more, Rudbeck seized on the opportunity to graft an additional mission onto the astronomical one. Drawing on his king’s renewed interest in the North, he succeeded in adding a natural historical expedition into Sápmi, led by his own son, Olof Rudbeck the Younger.12

All this had begun with rumours of the ominous stone at Vinsa. Once Hadorph junior and Peringer had inspected the monument beyond the Arctic Circle, it faded from academic debate almost as quickly as it had entered it.

Half a century later, Rudbeck’s speculations had passed their zenith. Among antiquarians, however, memory of the stone and its lure persisted, resurfacing in new contexts.

In 1736, a young priest returned to the Torne Valley.

Five years earlier, Eric Brunnius had defended his dissertation at the University of Uppsala. In the work, he treated the town of Torneå and the surrounding parishes. As part of this, Brunnius mentioned the Vinsa Stone and the “crowns it once showed”, as Hadorph had related:

The venerable secretary Peringskjöld and his companion Hadorph junior also visited this site on the mission they undertook into our lands by order of Charles XI, where they found a sort of runic writing on the stone, however very obscure, so that they were unable to make sense of it.

Brunnius (resp.), De urbe Tornea13

After the Great Fire of Uppsala (1702), the grand narratives the Rudbecks had woven about Sweden’s early imperial prime had lost much of their force. Any renewed interest in the Vinsa Stone required a different framework of urgency.

Brunnius may have left much of his antiquarian interests behind in Uppsala when he moved into the parish house beneath the Arctic Circle. Yet it was here, on the western bank of the Torne River, that the knowledge he carried about the stone found receptive ears – at a time when the North was no longer sought as the cradle of ancient wisdom, but as a testing ground for universal laws.

In 1736, a team of scientists led by the Frenchman Pierre Louis Maupertuis and the Swede Anders Celsius sailed up the Baltic Sea. Their aim was to resolve one of the great scientific questions of the age – the shape of the Earth towards the poles.

It seems as if a phantom of Rudbeck’s vision guided them to the Torne Valley – the region they identified as the ideal arena for their geo-astronomical observations.

That winter, the parish house at Övertorneå became their basis of operations. During the longest nights of the year, the men ventured onto the frozen river. Moving wooden rods across the ice, they measured a baseline for a trigonometric grid spanning the Torne Valley, their efforts illuminated by the shimmer of the Northern Lights.

Perhaps it was after one of such days that they returned to the stove in Brunnius’s house. As sensation returned to their limbs, they may have listened to the stories their host shared in Latin – of a mysterious stone farther north, whose signs had eluded scholars for generations.

It was the kind of report powerful enough to lure the scientists off the tracks of their measuring mission, out into the forests in deep Arctic winter, and to melt the stone free from metres of snow – but let this be another story.

Further Reading and References

All translations and photographs are my own unless noticed otherwise.

When quoting from Latin sources, abbreviations were silently expanded and orthography lightly adapted to current standards.

Please note the general bibliography available here.

At the Gates

The lay of the land had changed when we returned to Ljusnan after Midsummer.

From the bridge over the river, we watched the rain of the past weeks pour into a riverbed that had been dry rock when we scouted it the month before.

The gates of Laforsen Dam had opened. Feeling its rumble, I watched the wind drive mist across the white water.

Class III rapids, Lars said.

We carried the boats to a protected pool beneath Laforsen Fall.

With a beating heart, I slid into my boat, wobbling until my thighs locked against the braces inside. It had been some years since I crossed the wake of container ships on the Outer Elbe. River rapids in a touring kayak were a different matter.

“This is a chance to paddle the full upper section”, Lars had said. “It’s really rare.” Our original plan – to start further downstream – had shifted.

Shouting against the water’s roar, we set our line and pushed out into the river. The current took hold, and as the white crests closed in, I realised: the moment to turn back had passed.

Paddling steady, I approached the first threshold. The bow pierced into the water, and the river struck the hull from the side. My paddle caught air as the boat bobbed up again. The surge pushed against the stern.

I missed a stroke.

Cold closed around my head. My vision turned yellow-brown, all sound collapsing into a rushing pressure. Bubbles traced the hull ahead of me, rocks passed close to my helmet.

I folded forward, felt the latch of the spray skirt, pulled, and slipped free.

When I surfaced, the water had eased.

I was floating feet first, carried downstream by the river. In fast succession, the trees on the river bank drew past. Further on, I spotted Lars securing my boat and the paddle.

In short, forceful bursts I swam for the shore.

Only there did my breath begin to return.

Pockets of Elysium

It took some time before the tension eased after the initial rapids. Lars and I regrouped on the banks and decided to continue.

This time, Ljusnan took over more gently.

Effortlessly, almost without sound, the water carried us forward through the river landscape. In canyons cut into the land over millennia, the kayaks glided downstream. Spruce lined the banks, as if shielding this band of water from all that lay beyond.

It was in the light of one of the longest days of the year that we reached Knutnäsudden, a small island gently dividing the river. Near its shores we had planned to meet Thomas von Wachenfeldt.

Thomas is a composer as well as a historian of music. In the dusk of the midsummer light, we listened to him play of his violin. At the campfire, we heard stories about the music that had grown in resonance with the river. Of the composers who met to celebrate Laforsen, where people gathered once a year in music and dance.

Photographs and descriptions remain of the yearly celebrations at Laforsen. The waterfall had drawn people into shared movement and ritual. Looking at what this site seems to have stirred in human beings reminded me of the work of Jane Goodall. Studying chimpanzees, she observed such places eliciting responses such as swaying or rhythmic motions:

I can’t help feeling that this waterfall display, or dance, is perhaps triggered by feelings of awe, wonder, that we feel. … So why wouldn’t they also have feelings of some kind of spirituality, which is really being amazed at things outside yourself? 1

There was something about these ways of being with the landscapes along Ljusnan – in resonance, in creating from it– that made an aspect of Elysium tangible. They struck a chord with the ways in which Vergil had envisioned the dwelling place of the souls: On its banks, the souls engaged in song and dance, and Orpheus himself – the foremost musician of all – accompanied them on his lyre.

There were sportive competitions in Elysium, too.

Echoes of this returned later that evening, at the campfire, when Lars spoke about his relationship with the river. On Ljusnan he grew up. Along its waters he learned to paddle as kid, and won his first championships as kayaker. From here, he embarked on a trajectory as explorer of white water and mountains.

It was to this place, Lars confided, that he wanted his life’s path to circle back for his final journey – with his ashes being spread at Laforsen Fall.

Darkness and Light

Yet along the ‘River of Light’ there are shadows, too.

The Elysian Fields border on more somber realms. This Vergil already describes in the myth. The road that takes Aeneas towards Elysium passes through the shadow of Tartaros, cast by the girding walls too massive to be destroyed.

Behind an imposing gate, with columns forged of iron, the hero knows the realm of dark, hearing the metal chains and the cries of the souls condemned to eternal punishments.

Rudbeck reconciled the glaring contrasts of Elysium and Tartaros with creative bravado. Up north, he explained, the endless days of summer yield to weeks of darkness in wintertime, a time when all life seems to recede. For him, the extremes of Nordic seasons could explain two opposing spiritual landscapes brought forth by the same place – contrasts that to a Roman must have seemed irreconcilable.

Rudbeck built his work on the one thing he considered stable and unchanging – the rivers, mountains, seasons of the North. He did not live to see how they gradually entered into the domain of human manipulation.

It was a different catastrophe that pulled the ground out from under his Elysian projects. In 1702, the Great Fire of Uppsala destroyed his life’s work, the grand visions he planned to lay out in the coming volumes of the Atlantica and the Campus Elysii.

What remains are fragments – traces of a cosmos Rudbeck once mapped in connected meaning, albeit incompletly. The world has become unreadable through these texts alone, and as such they have sunk beneath a story of human interruption that superseded it along the rivers of the North. 2

These interruptions were not abstract. They took material form along the river.

I had seen places like that before along Ljusnan, long before the idea was born to paddle its middle section: lifeless shores on which I had wandered further upstream, near the mountains, and the ruins I had passed along Lake Lossen: abandoned homes that late spring reveals at the reservoir lake, during the few weeks before the meltwater fills the lake and drowns their walls anew.

Electricity had not been the only good extracted from the river landscapes of the North. As we glided down Ljusnan in the kayaks, the cover of spruces lifted, and sawmills pressed into the view. From fortified banks, quays reached into the water, masoned arms that once regulated streams of timber floating down the river.

A century of log driving ended when the hydropower projects were carried out along Ljusnan. In 1953, the waterfall at Laforsen was sacrificed, once the largest in the southern part of Norrland. A place that had inspired artists and musicians, and where people gathered in early summer to celebrate and dance, yielded to a concrete dam.

Most of the eighteen power stations that exploit Ljusnan were built within two decades after Laforsen. The remaining rapids downstream were also brought into the crosshair.

However, the narrative of progress motivating their construction met with more resistance in the Sweden of the 1970s. Across the North, Sámi communities and environmentalists joined forces to avert the damming of free-flowing rivers.

On Ljusnan, citizen protests eventually saved a final section where Ljusnan still flows freely – fifty out of 436 kilometres where the rapids are not sacrificed. 3 In the rest of Sweden, only four major rivers have remained where the further development of hydropower today is legally banned.

Diminishing Wonder

Hydropower projects left the river landscapes of Sweden irreversibly altered. Living rivers were divided into regulated segments, their flow recalibrated to lucratively meet fluctuating demands on the electricity market.

Life on and in the water changed accordingly. The shifting flow regimes meant that banks along barrier lakes fell sterile. Building projects fragmented reindeer grazing areas and severed migratory routes across the North.

Beneath the impounded waters lie former homes, archaeological sites, and places central to Sámi life and memory – removed or surveyed, then submerged. The concrete dams blocked the path of salmonid fish, and with them disappeared dependent species such as the freshwater pearl mussel.

With the dams, phenomena that had shaped the experience of the seasons along the river vanished. Slush retained behind the turbines replaced the ice floes that broke in spring and travelled towards the sea. Waterfalls that had drawn people together and inspired music and dance fell silent.

The altered lands along the river afford different experiences to those who pass through them today. This movement also unfolds across layers of time: what a place once was and what it once meant to people – riverbanks of mythical resonance, a waterfall that sparked shared experiences of community and awe – takes on a vertical dimension, pressing against the present from beneath.

What becomes apparent is not the fading of awe itself. It is a change in the conditions that once allowed it to take hold. The ground that has sustained this feeling has shifted. 4

What arises today is often accompanied by a sense of disorientation, without a clear way of carrying such experiences forward. Awareness of what a place once inspired alters how we move through landscapes. And yet, encounters with their present realities lead us to let go of the expectation that the same places will still open into similar states.

What remains is movement – not as a passage towards a transcendental, ‘Elysian’ goal, but as its continuation under worldly conditions, without certainty that what was once promised can still be reached, or where along the way glimpses of it may still arise.

Pilgrimage of Awe

When we set out to film on Ljusnan, I did not expect to encounter Elysium in the sense Olof Rudbeck had imagined. What drew me instead was a more direct, more open form of engagement that was both physical and spiritual: a way of moving through these landscapes attuned to resonances they once held, still hold, or have lost.

Such a journey promised no arrival.

Filming translated this sensibility into movement. What had once been articulated in myths of promised places – and what Rudbeck later had anchored in geography and names – we did not pursue as a destination. Instead, we approached it as a sustained effort to move receptively through a world in which the conditions for such encounters had shifted tremendously.

In the form of the Golden Bough, the Aeneid introduced a device associated with the possibility of embarking on such a journey – an offering brought in the hope of transitioning between life and afterlife, between the mortal and the divine, between the known world and the concealed.

Directing Frozen Atlantis, I seized on the same device – in Olof Rudbeck’s reading as the alder twig – not as a symbol that secures passage towards a fixed destination. Rather, we fixed it to the bows of the kayaks and carried it down the river as a gesture, inviting ways of seeing in which the world, as encountered in the present, might still appear as porous.

Glimpses

When we edited Frozen Atlantis, we constructed a journey in which the boundaries between our modern world and myth shift fluidly.

The opening of the chapter The River of Light outlines Vergil’s myth with the help of woodcuts from its first illustrated print. Presenting the initial quest for the bough, it merges with visuals near the area from where we eventually embarked on Ljusnan.

For the approach to the ‘Sibyl’s Cave’, we had scouted the Dead Fall near Laforsen. Before the waterfall was dammed in the 1950s, its waters split around a nearby river island. When the dam was finished, the northern branch was cut off, leaving behind a detached canyon.

The dark, stagnant waters that filled the canyon resonated with Vergil’s description of Lake Avernus – the home of the Sibyl whom Aeneas must consult to reach Elysium. Lars later noted that our descent by kayak was likely the first undertaken in the canyon.

Along the steep walls of the Dead Fall lies the Rövergrottan (‘Robbers’ Cave’), a site associated with tales of brigands who hid on the river island. As we enter, fragments of Latin echo in the cave, snippets of the words the Sibyl speaks in Vergil’s epic.

In the myth, the Sibyl instructs Aeneas how to find and pluck the Golden Bough. In Frozen Atlantis, a stream of images echoes her paraphrase of the quest – visuals filmed all along the course of Ljusnan.

Some of these correspondences between the Swedish landscape and Vergil’s myth are immediate and envisioned after the scouting trip. Others emerged contingently, during filming.

Among the most serendipitous moments was the graffito of a bird, sprayed onto a concrete wall near the outlet of the Laforsen power station.

In the film, a drone swipe reveals it on the bank as the seeress’s voice recounts Aeneas’s quest in the endless forest. As he despairs, Venus sends out birds to guide her son to the shimmering branch.

In a brief moment, ancient myth here touched the present landscape; a brief glimpse registering on the river’s concrete lining.

Moments like these remain among the most informing of the journey that led towards Frozen Atlantis: unexpected instances in which the present landscape stirred resonance with layers of myth that had first set the movement in motion.

Exit Through the Ivory Gate

In the Aeneid, the journey to Elysium comes to a natural end.

Aeneas must not stay in Elysium. Having reached the dwelling place of the blessed and encountered his father, he must return to the surface.

His path back to the world of the living leads the hero to the Gates of Sleep – one of horn, through which true visions rise, and one of ivory, through which the spirits send false dreams.

In the myth, Vergil has Aeneas depart through the ivory gate. For two millennia, the reason for his choice of path has remained an unsolved riddle. 5

In Frozen Atlantis, the river chapter ends at Edänge, the southernmost of the rapids on Ljusnan left undammed. Two abandoned railway bridges here arch above the river, across a whitewater threshold.

Beyond, Ljusnan transitions into a more regulated section.

Paddling the stretch from Laforsen to Edänge, we encountered different sides of a modern river – stretches where Ljusnan appeared less altered, less constrained, still resonating with a capacity for meaning and connection.

I left Ljusnan with a deepened gaze on Swedish landscapes – still open for pockets of resonance that, serendipitously or by design, may widen between modern places and the forms of meaning that still shimmer at their depth; a gaze that also integrates the interventions that have diminished the river landscapes’ capacity for awe.

Such experiences on the river left a mark and led me further on the creative journey towards Frozen Atlantis – to explore how this double vision could be held in film, oscillating between the world as it appears and as it once may have been readable to human beings.

Have the mythical destinations the Atlantica put on the map of Sweden ever lain in reach, at all?

Vergil described the journey towards Elysium as proceeding on a middle ground between consciousness and dream, between vision and reality. In the form of the two gates, he hinted at a form of poetic truth that ultimately keeps this tension suspended.

Regardless of the exit taken from a state we may call Elysium – whether memory of it is affirmed as verisimilar experience, or exposed as delusive vision – what remains, and what continues to connect us as humans, is the imprint of something we once left and to which we long to return, and the movement itself resulting from this longing:

The continuation of seeking, even under conditions that no longer guarantee arrival.

Further Reading and References

All photographs and translations are my own unless stated otherwise.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to all who supported the voyage on Ljusnan – Darren Hamlin, Lars Larsson and the Larsson family at Kallmyr, Marin Olson, Theo Rosén, James Venison.

Please note the general bibliography available here.

Sometimes, a scribble contains the seed of a story.

One such scribble exists in a notebook from the first year of a global pandemic. Whenever my eyes pass it, a blur of birches dressed in yellow leaves appears before the eye of my mind.

For a few kilometres, our car followed the forested shoreline along a barrier lake. That autumn, I had hitched rides in the deep province of Sweden, following the traces of a historical expedition. A chain of coincidences had washed me up in the village of the Kalendargubbarna and made me friends with Åsa and Olle.

“You know, there’s a village below the lake”, Olle said, lifting his index finger from the steering wheel towards the forest that rolled by.

From the dog barrier behind me, I heard the panting of Semla. During days at their lakeside cottage, the Rottweiler had kept me company. That morning, I had joined Olle and the dog on the way to the vet in Hede. From the small town in Härjedalen, I planned to hitch the next ride north, towards Jämtland.

I turned my head to Olle with what must have looked like a puzzled expression.

“They drowned the village when they built the Lossen dam”.

In short intervals, views opened up through the trees. Down at the lake shore, my eyes traced a drift line, running high above the water level. Parched flotsam, marking how far the snowmelt had risen this year.

Soon, a concrete intake tower rose from the middle of the lake. Further on, the dam wall came into sight.

“There are a few days in spring when you can see the remains,“ Olle added once we had passed the barrier.

“What was the name of the village?” I asked, removing the cap from my pen.

At the River of Light

Two years later, I returned to Lossen.

One of the early friends I had made in Jämtland had lent me his 4x4 to explore the gravel roads along the lake.

Lossen receives the waters of the Ljusnan River, springing some fifty kilometres upstream in the mountains on the Swedish-Norwegian border. This river had been on my map long before I first stood at its banks.

Ljusnan features among the mythical landscapes that Olof Rudbeck projected on his home country. As he unfolded in the Atlantica, Ljusnan was the ‘River of Light’ (from sw. ljus = light), one of the rivers of Norrland along whose course he imagined the promised lands the poet Vergil described as Elysium – the place where the souls of the blessed reside along lush river banks, illuminated by the eternal light of the midsummer sun.

Filling levels at Lossen were still near their lowest when I returned to the lake in May. The month before, the ice had begun melting.

It is during these days in spring that the remains of the drowned village of Valmåsen are visible on its shore – before the snowmelt from the mountains reaches full force, and the waters of the river dammed at Lossen rise again over the ruins of the village that had once been home to many.

i recall the river was an artist
who painted dancing webs on keels
glittering like the trout on our hooks
and who played us songs on April nights
as the floes took leave

a scalpel cuts across our childhood lands
sharp as in Galileo’s lens
dissecting darkness from light

glaring sands drank in the river’s lustre
round the rubble of our houses
stairs leading into void

the stones cast breathless shadows
on banks whose grass once tickled
our feet around the midsummer pole

in stygian waters sometimes a shimmer
the naked piers of bridges
once leading to our home

Underlands

The sun was close to the horizon when I emerged from the forest towards the lake shore. Somewhere across the water, on the opposite bank, lay the ruins of Valmåsen.

I followed the creeks from the forest down to the lake. The evening breeze drove dust over the rubble on the shore. Half of the year, this was lake floor.

Where its undulating contours cast shadows, snow fields still hugged the ground. Weeks without rain had drawn cracks into the mud where the streams fanned out into the lake.

I knelt down next to one of the stumps sticking out from the arid ground, feeling the water-polished remains of trees stripped bare by sixty floods.

Six decades ago, the ground beneath my knees had been forest.

Sand trickled in the cracks between the stones as the evening wind drove the river against the shore. From the field of rubble, concrete shafts stood out like triangular ears, cocked for the silence that shrouded the opposite bank.

On steps coated in mud, I slid down, slipping on the ice that covered the ground beneath – a few inches of the lake that had flooded the bunker system.

In its mirror shimmered rust and turquoise – the patina of metal doors that sealed the shelter. Here in the ground – submerged for most of the year – soldiers would have held the Ljusnan bridge in case of war.1

Back on the surface, I felt the cloudless sky suck away the warmth from the stones. With shadow fingers they groped for the lake floor.

For a while, my view rested on Ljusnan, its waves smoothing as the widening expanse of the lake received them. Somewhere beneath these waters must lie the piers of the bridge on which travellers once crossed the river towards Valmåsen.

That was until 1962, when the waters began to rise.

the forests fell before the flood
from the trees they built no ark
they moved our homes instead

the kiln of barren banks
has chapped the mud
sand drifting into cracks

stumps hold on to sterile land
stiffened fingers of a severed hand
still clutching at the earth

with each wave passing
the river gnaws away
last crumbs from bony roots

27 Metres

When the snowmelt arrived in 1962, the water level rose by 27 metres. That year, it did not recede.

Four years earlier, the court decision authorised the construction of a dam wall at Lake Lossen. Roads were rerouted to accommodate the future shoreline.

Trees below the projected waterline were marked for cutting. Submerged for most of the year, the rotting forests filled the air with a pungent stench. Dislodged stems posed a threat to boats and to the dam’s infrastructure.

Around Lake Lossen, more than a dozen houses were flagged for removal. At Valmåsen, citizens such as Emil Salomonsson (1902–1983) began to document what they knew would be lost.2

What was about to happen at this village was repeated across the North.

In the 20th century, the Swedish state green-lighted hydropower projects along the rivers of Norrland. A dominant narrative justified such projects by framing sparsely populated regions as acceptable sites of sacrifice, in exchange for benefits to the rest of the country.3

Damages on the margins of the country were politically accepted. They were treated as calculable.

In the 1950s, the National Board of Antiquities (RAA) set up a department (sjöregleringsärenden) to document the cultural losses caused by damming projects. Its work was financed by the very companies carrying them out.4

Soon, researchers were sent to Lossen. Around the lake, they catalogued traces of human presence, from the Stone Age to the present. In their documentation, they passed on the heritage that seemed worth preserving from an ethnographical perspective. It was the largest investigation of its kind ever carried out by RAA.5

Some five years later, the dam wall began operating.

A Heap of Broken Images

I arrived at the other shore the next morning, on the banks I had beheld the night before.

The path from the gravel road led across a scorched expanse, towards foundation walls that rose humbly against the waterline. A glaring sun etched them onto the lifeless ground; sharp shadows that brought to mind lines from a century past:

Son of man, […] you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.

T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland (ll. 19–24)

At this time of the year, the lake climbed the shores of Lossen again. Squinting against the sands, I discerned the silhouettes of two children, whipping a fishing rod over the water.

The ruins recall the lives of those who once called Valmåsen home. Black-and-white photographs show faces flayed by the seasons. Loggers left with their axes for nearby forests. Rafters moved downstream, dancing fearlessly over carpets of timber. Families stayed behind, keeping a few cows and living off the land around the village.

Fishing around Lossen, most agreed, was the best in the region. When the ice melted in spring, fishermen paddled out again with their seines; when the lake froze in late autumn, they bored through the ice with coiled drills.

During the darker seasons, kerosene lamps shimmered in the snow around wooden houses. Behind square window panes, women stitched and men repaired boots. And so the nights passed, until the weeks when the light returned – before the floes started their journey downstream, before the cracking ice woke them from sleep, echoing from the woods.

24,540 Crowns

Lossen was the most upstream in a series of dams which blocked the free flow of the Ljusnan River. Its construction broke a rule valid in Scandinavia since Viking times: that the ways of fish have to be kept open.6

After the damming, fish species that needed to travel upstream to spawn died out in the Ljusnan. With them disappeared the freshwater pearl mussel, whose larvae depend on salmonids.

The islossning – the awe-inspiring spring break-up when ice would travel downstream in floes – became a phenomenon of the past.

In the first summers after the damming, the water rose on overgrown shores, washing excessive nutrients into the lake. After a first and unsustainable spike, the fish population in Lossen plummeted. Shores that alternated between snow, ice, water, and sun turned barren. Perch and pike that spawn in ground cover at certain depths disappeared.

The damage to the ecosystem was reduced to a number. Swedish law required compensation for those affected by changes in fish population. 24,540 crowns was calculated as the amount of damages – corresponding to the estimated market value of the fish meat in the lake.

To those deemed eligible, their share arrived as a cheque.7

One Grievous Night

I stopped a little farther down the lakeshore, where my steps sent blinding sands skidding into the lake. The black water gnawed into the shore, and I kept a few steps above its line that neared the ruins.

Next to foundation walls rose a flight of stairs, like a concrete victory podium split in half, leading nowhere. From their top, I saw the children playing with a rubber boot the lake floor had released.

On the ground next to the stairs, rusty lines trickled towards the waterline. The rivulets traced further up the shore, to the remains of a bicycle pressed into the sand, its spoke rings curling inward like an ammonite.

The shore lay speckled with fossils from a fading past, a sterile expanse evoking that passage in which Plato described the fate of Atlantis:

In one grievous day and night the island was swallowed up by the sea and vanished, wherefore also the ocean at that spot has now become impassable and unsearchable, being blocked up by the shoal of mud which the island created as it settled down.

After Plato, Timaeus8

The Last Link

At the end of the barrier lake, I scanned the horizon, searching for signs of the dam wall. Even from the top of the stairs, the curvature of the earth hid its crown.

In the sky above, clouds moved in from the north-east. Some hundred kilometres in this direction lies Frösön Airbase near Östersund.

On 25 April 1963, a squadron of J29F fighter planes took off from their runway on Lake Storsjön. After about a quarter of an hour, they turned left, following the course the Ljusnan traced across the snowy ground.

Where the river widened into Lake Lossen, a concrete bridge spanned over Ljusnan, its arches still encrusted with ice after a first season underwater.

Three kilometres south of it, a radio bus had been stationed that morning. Through binoculars, air force officers watched as the planes descended in pairs.

When the flooding of Lossen was carried out in 1962, the military had requested permission to practise target shooting on the Ljusnan bridge. With the old road on the northern shore and the village of Valmåsen abandoned, the structure had lost its purpose. For the military, it offered an opportunity to study the effects of 14.5cm armour piercing rockets on a concrete structure.

At 10:30 on 25 April, the first wave of planes came in. In total, eighty rockets were fired. From the radio bus, officers recorded the angle and effect of each shot.

After the roar of the planes faded in the early afternoon, the officers went out onto the ice to assess the damage. Others headed into the forests to examine whether any reindeer had been hit by shrapnel.

The bridge still arched over the riverbed when the last jets thundered back to Frösön Airbase. The following day, they returned.

The first rocket – no. 29 in the protocol – struck its bow. Three seconds later, half the roadway collapsed into the riverbed. Through the rest of the morning, and again after the lunch break, successive waves fired into the debris.

“The salvos lay well yet didn’t pulverise the remains“, the officers concluded in their report.9

Remembrances

It was after my return to Östersund that I read up on the bombardment in a local newspaper archive.

One article reported that a crowd of several hundred people had gathered on the shore of Lake Lossen to watch the spectacle.10 When the last explosion rang out, the squadron leaders flew an extra round over the masses, the roar of their planes mixing with the cheers of the crowd.

The newspaper printed a photograph from that moment. Among the heads of spectators were silhouettes of children’s beanies. The school in the nearby town of Tännäs had given the students the day off for the impending spectacle, the article noted.

“I think Olle was one of them,” Åsa said when I called her from outside the archive – “I’ll ask”.

“Yes, he was there”, she confirmed later that afternoon.

“He was too little to remember.”

Further reading and references

All photographs, poetry, and translations are my own unless stated otherwise.

Acknowledgments

For conversations, material, and support I thank Åsa Evertsdotter, Felix Dobslaw, Olle Larsson, Kerstin Myrtennäs, Jan Salomonsson, and the staff of RAA.

My account of the history of Lake Lossen and the effects of the damming relies on Emil Salomonsson, Valmåsen. Lossens reglering och överdämningen av Valmåsen, redigerad och uppdaterad av barnbarnen Jan Salomonsson, Anders Svensson och Kerstin Myrtennäs, Hållnäs 2014.

Parts of the destroyed Lossen Bridge have been turned into a veterans’ monument at Sveg, Härjedalen. It was inaugurated 29 May 2022.

Appendix: The Fish Reset in the Lossen System

Around Lossen, the local fish populations were affected beyond the actual damming.

The electricity from the waters dammed at Lake Lossen was produced several kilometres further downstream. Through a tunnel, the lake-turned-reservoir fed into an underground power station at Långå. Two other lakes, Övre Särvsjön and Grundsjön, fed into the same turbine.

After the demise of the original fish population in Lossen as a consequence of the damming, authorities decided to make this lake home to a population of charr (röding), a species appreciated by sports fishers. In Övre Särvsjön, whitefish (sik) was endemic.

Once the tunnel system was finished, Swedish authorities anticipated that whitefish would eventually wander into the other lakes. With whitefish being a more effective plankton absorber, this would have meant the end of the charr population in connected waters.

In consequence, they decided to ‘reset’ these lakes containing undesired species of so-called skräpfisk (‘trash fish’) and to make them home to game fish.

Between 26 and 28 August 1974, 25,000 litres of Rotenone solution were released into Övre Särvsjön. This nerve poison paralyses the breathing of fish.

A silver belt of dead fish, hundreds of metres broad, soon floated against the dam walls. Leaking out, the toxin later wreaked havoc on other lakes and in contributories to Ljusnan.11

It was the largest application of the toxin ever seen in Europe.

Please note the general bibliography available here.

There is a scene in Frozen Atlantis that traces the first outing I undertook with Lars in Jämtland. Ascending a vantage point through an autumn forest, the dialogue gives shape to the vision in which Rudbeck rendered both the largest and the smallest features of Sweden’s landscapes as carriers of meaning:

“He has all these magnificent stories to tell, from something as large as a mountain down to the tiny needles of a tree – it’s all charged with a deeper meaning, and that changes the sense of connectedness you have to this world.”

For Olof Rudbeck, this way of seeing made mythical places named by classical writers shimmer through the nature of his home country. Their works featured names such as the Hyperborean Mountains or the Atlas Mountains.

In Rudbeck’s interpretation, these all pointed to the mountain chain rising between Norway and Sweden. In his view, the ancients had used a host of synonyms to refer to the same imposing mountain range.

Identifying them correctly was tantamount to a geographical claim. In the maps accompanying the first volume of his Atlantica (1679), he distributed their names all across the northern mountains. With the help of an expedition he sent to these mountains four years before, Rudbeck had gathered evidence to substantiate the claims his work laid upon mythical geography.

Among these, the Atlas Mountains took a key role.

In Rudbeck’s narrative, Atlas was the first of Sweden’s kings – the namesake of the true Atlantis. From their journey to the North, his students brought back mountain panoramas as evidence. In their features, Rudbeck sought resonance with myths ancient authors related about Atlas.

Among them was the Roman poet Ovid. In the Metamorphoses, Atlas features in the story of Perseus, who turned the petrifying head of Medusa against the defiant king. In the transformation that followed, Atlas’s bald head turned into a mountain peak, and his rugged beard became the forest around.

For Rudbeck, this story created a link between myth and the Swedish landscape. Pointing to a mountain panorama from Idre, he proudly claimed that features described as those of a transformed god could be found in Northern Dalarna: There, the treeless top of Mount Städjan towered over outliers of what Rudbeck considered the true Atlas Mountains – with rich forests girding the slopes beneath.

The Needle in the Woodstack

Botany allowed Rudbeck to buttress this claim from a further angle.

In his Natural History, the Roman encyclopedist Pliny had touched on the Atlas Mountains and their flora. As he related 1,700 years before Rudbeck, this range is

“filled with dense and lofty forests of trees of an unknown kind, ... with very tall trunks remarkable for their glossy timber free from knots, and foliage like that of the cypress …”

Pliny, Natural History, V.14 (tr. H. Rackham)

For Rudbeck, this was not a descriptive aside: it was a point of departure to strengthen his claim even further. Identifying the cypress-like tree unknown to the Roman author became tantamount to claiming the true Atlas Mountains.

Rudbeck unfolded the full line of reasoning in the third volume of the Atlantica.1 Here he printed about a dozen woodcuts depicting needle trees. With the help of the illustrations, he zeroed in on what he saw as the only legitimate candidate for Pliny’s tree.

His argument begins from an actual cypress twig (I in the illustration below). A key feature of this tree, Rudbeck elaborated, were its comparatively small needles, measuring half a finger in length. Drawing on comparative material, Rudbeck ruled out the contenders for Pliny’s conifer.

The needles of the alba picea found in Germany and Bohemia (G in the illustration above), Rudbeck argued, are twice as broad and long. Conifers printed on further pages made a similar point. For example, the needles of pinus ossiculis duris, foliis longis that grows in Italy, and Spain, Africa reach between 8 and 10 fingers. By contrast, the ones of the pinus sylvestris montana altera, occurring on the snowy mountains of Austria, are shorter, but still double as broad.

Tree after tree, Rudbeck sifted through conifers as depicted and described by the botanists of his time. All their needles were simply too long to qualify for Pliny’s pine, he reasoned. That was except for one.

It had to be this tree, Rudbeck argued, that Pliny had meant: The needles of “our spruce” (abies nostra), he pointed out, are of a size that can reasonably be compared to those of the cypress. As with that tree, its branches start shortly above the ground. Both trees grow in a narrow, cone-shaped form.

In fact, Rudbeck explained, this spruce did not fall short of its Mediterranean relative in elegance. For this reason, he proudly pointed out, he pioneered promoting its use for ornamental planting in the Botanical Garden he founded at Uppsala.

What is more, the species flourishes across the entire Swedish-Norwegian mountain ridge that he claimed as the Atlas Mountains. Well beyond 64° latitude, Rudbeck explained, the spruce forms “dense and lofty forests” of the kind that Pliny mentioned – capable of carrying the load of snow that the harsh winters deposit every year onto these mountains.

To any person familiar with the North, Rudbeck concluded, the answer to Pliny’s “trees of an unknown kind” was as simple as it was evident – it just had to be “our spruce”.

The Vision Collapses

In his Atlantica, Olof Rudbeck wove observations of the microcosm and the macrocosm together into an all-embracing story. Just as snowflakes, mountain peaks, or birds, he used plants as keys to unlock a ‘Nordic truth’ he saw still hidden beneath the classical texts.

In parallel with the Atlantica’s volumes, Rudbeck and his family had embarked on a botanical project of similar extent. In an atlas of plants, they aimed to depict every plant known to humankind.

Under the title Campus Elysii (‘The Elysian Fields’), its twelve volumes were bound to unfold the abundance of God’s creation. In its flora, Rudbeck the Elder and his son sought evidence of the primordial position of the North.

Yet their works that were to tell this story – the Atlantica and the Laponia Illustrata – remained fragments: In May 1702, all that had not left the printing press went up in flames in the Great Fire of Uppsala.

Fallen Needles

From thousands of woodblocks already carved for the Campus Elysii one shoebox remained. Yet the collapse was not just material – it was epistemic.

By the mid-eighteenth century, most of the blocks that survived the fire passed into the possession of Carl Linnaeus. After his death, Edward Smith acquired his collections in 1784. At this time, Linnaeus – still a student of Rudbeck the Younger – had long eclipsed his teachers as Sweden’s most famous botanist.

Smith made an effort to illuminate the obscurity into which earlier generations of Swedish botanists had already fallen. In 1789, he printed the remains of the Campus Elysii that he acquired eighty years after the inferno. They appeared under the title Reliquiae Rudbeckianae (‘Rudbeckian Remains’), next to contemporary botanical references.

To this work, Smith also added an appendix.

It showed four woodcuts of conifer twigs beneath a few lines of explanation.

“These four illustrations came into my possession together with those of Rudbeck. However, as they seem worn out from frequent printing, I suspect them to pertain to another work than Rudbeck’s.”

Smith, Reliquiae Rudbeckianae, p. 35.

Smith had suspected half the truth.

The four woodcuts did not feature in the volumes of the Campus Elysii printed before the fire. However, they did stem from a work by Rudbeck.

They were originally cut to illustrate the Atlantica.

In its third volume, Rudbeck used them to claim Pliny’s cedar-like trees for his homeland – and with them, the Atlas Mountains on which they allegedly grew.

The woodblocks from which they were drawn – today kept in London – are a tangible testimony from Rudbeck’s efforts to anchor ancient writings in Sweden’s nature.

A few generations later, the web of meaning his Atlantica spanned across the flora of the North had detached. The woodblocks had fallen out of context, speaking nothing beyond their material presence and botanical face value. At the end of the eighteenth century, they were seen as what they had become – a handful of conifer illustrations carved into pear wood.

The blocks still bore traces of the printing effort. Yet the scope and ambition of this effort had become invisible: a vision in which ancient myth and modern botany once converged in the North, now sunk to a footnote – needles beneath a tree past its prime.

Further reading and references

All photographs and translations are my own unless stated otherwise.

Minor parts of this article were published in an earlier version as an introductory text on our object database Reaching for Atlantis.

Please note the general bibliography available here.

In the last light we entered the woods, filigree stems rising to a uniform height.

Lars and I had passed the forest on our return from scouting at Laforsen Dam. The geometric pattern still hinted at the clearcut that preceded this stand: stems standing out against the twilight of the midsummer sky, their bark scarred by the flames that had swept through the plantation.

The view into the scorched forest recalled the hills we had passed on the way south.

On 14 July 2018, a lightning strike ignited one of the largest fires in Sweden’s history. The woods around Laforsen Dam marked the southeastern tip of a blaze that swept across the entire Ljusnan Valley.

The summer had been one of the driest on record.1 Lars told me in the car that his Fire and Rescue squad had been called in from as far as Jämtland. As summers grow hotter, fires like these have become more frequent in the North.

The charred forests were before my eyes again, carbonised trees spiking up like pitfall traps. Through the twilight in the Laforsen forest, traces of the same blaze still shimmered; scorched stems that seemed to conjure the smell of cold ashes.

Stumps reached from the ground like merlons of a burnt-down citadel, steel cables still winding around some of them, their cores spliced into rusted ends as if the siege had been abandoned.

It was a landscape that reached deeper, towards terrains the poet Vergil laid out in his Aeneid. At the threshold to the Otherworld, the Sibyl sends Aeneas out into the expanse of a gloomy forest, on a quest to find the Golden Bough – the elusive device that grants access to Elysium.

The visuals we later came to film in this forest still take me back to the time we first scouted it, in the blue hour.

White lichen shimmering on forest ground like piebald nests.

Burnt pine stems that opened into a clearing in the midsummer sky.

Magenta blossoms swaying in the evening breeze.

Blackened Pear Wood

Winter closed in during the months after summer work on Ljusnan. At Uppsala, the muffled sound of snow ploughs scraping asphalt pressed through the triple-glazed windows at the Museum of Evolution.

On my desk stood a shallow box.

During renovations at the Gustavianum, the museum’s holdings had been moved here. Lined with translucent paper, the box contained print blocks carved from pear wood more than three centuries ago.

Their blackened surfaces recalled soot and chat. The colour, however, stemmed from repeated print runs – rune stones, historic maps of Uppsala, ancient calendars, historical sites, archaeological finds pressed onto paper.

One block, however, showed a different subject.

Raised lines depicted grass stalks rising from a single root. The woodblock felt dense in my hands, its outer edges unevenly cut. I raised it to my nose.

It didn’t smell of smoke.

Elysian Outlook

Most of the blocks were familiar to me. They stemmed from Olof Rudbeck’s Atlantica. Its illustrations we published in our visual database, Reaching for Atlantis.

Yet the one in my hand came from a different project.

The inconspicuous grass was one of many thousands of illustrations Olof Rudbeck prepared. Together with his family, he pursued the goal of publishing a botanical atlas depicting every plant known to humankind.

Such a work promised unrivalled visual power and tremendous aid to botanists across the globe. In the 17th century, they often had to rely on written descriptions and convoluted Latin names to identify specimens.

At the same time, such a work was meant to unfold the abundance of God’s creation. By naming the atlas Campus Elysii – the ‘Elysian Fields’ – Rudbeck drew on a mythical register.2 The title evoked the abundant flora of the riverbanks where the ancients imagined the souls of the blessed to dwell – promised lands that his Atlantica had traced to Sweden’s rivers.

Once completed, Rudbeck envisioned the Campus Elysii as a work of twelve volumes. Each was to present material according to systematics devised by the Swiss botanist Caspar Bauhin in the 17th century.

For years, an ever-growing team of artists carved thousands of illustrations into pear wood blocks. As models, they drew on live specimens from botanical gardens and from travelling scholars, as well as from printed and drawn sources.

Patrons and the Swedish King himself carried the prohibitive costs of Rudbeck’s Elysian project. In 1701, its first volume appeared.

For the premiere of the Campus Elysii, however, Rudbeck had altered the order. The first volume printed did not contain grasses (no. I), but category no. II: bulbous plants – irises, hyacinths, orchids, and lilies.

The reason for the swap was commercial.

As Rudbeck argued in the preface, the visual beauty of bulbous plants made them ideal for promoting a service he offered to bibliophiles: for an additional fee, buyers could have each print coloured by hand, to match a master manuscript prepared by his artists.3 Over the years, a team that included his son and daughters filled several volumes with more than 6,000 hand-coloured paintings, based on live specimens as well as printed sources.4

Pieces of Paradise

In spring 1702, the second volume of the Campus Elysii lay under the press – this time covering grasses, category no. I in Bauhin’s order.

During these days the Great Fire struck Uppsala.

On 16 May 1702, the city burned to the ground. The flames that raged across the city destroyed the Rudbecks’ home, their collections of plants and books. According to the legend, Rudbeck the Elder shouted instructions from the roof of the Gustavianum to coordinate the firemen.

His efforts were in vain.

The fire consumed the forthcoming volumes of his Atlantica and the Campus Elysii: notes, printed sheets, woodblocks. What survived the blaze was little.

Most of the hand-coloured master manuscript.

A number of sheets of the fourth volume of the Atlantica, and some three or four copies of the second volume of the Campus Elysii, still printed before the fire.

A few dozen of woodblocks that the artists had carved in thousands for its volumes.

The one in the box was the only one I know of that survives at Uppsala.5

Withered Visions

Yet once there had been more.

In the 18th century, some 150 of the Campus Elysii woodblocks passed into the hands of Carl Linnaeus – the young botanist mentored by Rudbeck the Younger during his studies in Uppsala.

Over the course of his career, Linnaeus revolutionised the system of categorising and naming plants. When Sweden’s most famous botanist passed away in 1778, the law forced his widow to leave the house – and everything in it – to the son.

When Carl the Younger skimmed every nook and cranny for valuables, he came across a pile of carved woodblocks, heaped together in the corner of a cabinet.

The woodblocks – 130 in number – turned out to stem from Olof Rudbeck’s projects. Previously, they had been thought to have perished in the Great Fire.

According to Edward Smith, writing in 1789, Linnaeus’s son made an initial effort to have them printed. However, the project soon petered out.

Some 90 woodblocks were left when Smith acquired the collection of Linnaeus in 1784. Many of these were in deplorable condition, he writes. Of the remainder missing from the original 130, he speculated Linnaeus the Younger may have used them to kindle the stove. Today, what Smith was still able to acquire is kept at the Linnean Society in London, which he founded in 1788.6

One year later, Smith concluded the printing project Carl junior had failed to deliver. Under the title Reliquiae Rudbeckianae (‘Rudbeckian Remains’), he printed what he had been able to save, alongside updated references to botanical literature.7

In the Reliquiae Rudbeckianae, woodcuts were published from blocks marked by time and neglect. In brittle form, they rendered visible what remained of the shining vision Rudbeck the Elder and his son had pursued. For them, botany and mythology had been strands that ultimately illuminated one another, as their readings of the Golden Bough or the willow tree in Sápmi illustrate.

After the fire, the visual traces of this thinking became more elusive. For some years, Olof Rudbeck the Younger continued to update the two volumes that had appeared before the fire. In his own hand, he left annotations next to the printed entries. A few of them included pressed specimens he placed between the pages.8

Yet for Rudbeck the Younger, the fire of 1702 also meant the loss of a material basis. As such, it furthered a turn towards linguistic speculation as a means to illuminate the lofty connections he drew between botany, myth, and the Bible. Much of this grand vision never became visible, resting dormant among the volumes of an unprinted work.9

When Rudbeck the Younger died in 1740, the fame of his star pupil Linnaeus was already eclipsing the family’s botanical achievements. In Smith’s time, the bold connections that arched over the Rudbecks’ works had sunk to little more than a curious footnote, floating at the bottom of the history of science, remembered only by a few.

Natural history as practiced by the Rudbecks had fallen out of step with an approach to science perceived as rational, enlightened, systematic – attributes increasingly associated with the name of Carl Linnaeus. By the end of the 18th century, the web of meaning they had spun across botany and myth had become effaced, like the woodblocks remaining from the Campus Elysii.10

In 1702, the dream once shared – to render an Elysian thread visible in the fabric of the world – turned to ashes.

There it still lies, latent.

Further Reading and References

All photographs and translations are my own unless noted otherwise.

When quoting from Latin sources, abbreviations were silently expanded and orthography lightly adapted to current standards.

Please note the general bibliography available here.

A concrete wall held back the river on the horizon.

We arrived to Ljusnan during the long days before Midsummer, and from the bridge we crossed, the view rebounded from Laforsen Dam.

Beneath its barrier stretched an empty riverbed, of one of the rivers along whose banks Olof Rudbeck located the ‘Elysian Fields’ of the ancients – paradisiac landscapes that he claimed still existed in the North.

Ever since I had read of Rudbeck’s take on Elysium, I had felt the lure of experiencing lands he presented in a golden light. Through Lars – an experienced kayaker who grew up along Ljusnan – the idea of paddling the river’s last free-flowing stretch took shape.

In early summer, we travelled south for a pre-film scouting, crossing Ljusnan before sunset. Little did I know how experiencing the river later that summer would change how I thought about telling the journey in film.

The plan had been to return with a camera team, to capture encounters between ancient myth and a landscape that has changed within a few decades. Initially, I imagined a few short-form videos as a result.

Yet Ljusnan planted a different seed – one that would grow into a feature film.

Scouting around Laforsen Dam in the evening light, Lars and I approached the concrete wall; four gates of steel wedged into the river, its waters widening into a lake above. On the horizon arched the bridge that we had crossed over the dry river.

Power lines ran in parallel across the sky. From the nearby substation, a hum carried over. Where the empty bed ended, a silvery band of water caught shimmers of last daylight – the diverted river that re-emerged from the outlet.

Down there, any journey towards Elysium would have to begin ...

Poets of Paradise

Had Elysium been a place on earth?

For millennia, readers of classical poetry grappled with this question. From 1679 onward, the volumes of Rudbeck’s Atlantica came as a revelation – and as provocation to humanists on the continent.

The polymath from Uppsala claimed a host of mythical places as originating in Sweden. Among them, he included Elysium – the place where the ancients imagined the souls of the blessed residing after death.1

I had come to Ljusnan curious to experience riverbanks inscribed with layers of mythical meaning. From his desk at Uppsala, Rudbeck had read their nature and names, their geography and botany as resonating with the landscape the classical poets described.

In Elysium, Vergil imagined the souls to dwell on lush riverbanks; a place he described as filled with music and eternal light. On the grass of the Elysian river, the poet envisioned, persons of merit and honour lived a life of virtue and beauty, inspired to song and dance by the world around them.

Vergil describes the Elysian Fields in the sixth book of his Aeneid. The epic tells of Aeneas, an exile of Troy in search for a new home. With his family, he had fled the burning city, unaware that fate had destined him to lay the foundation for the city of Rome.

Unaware of his greater mission, Aeneas is tossed around on the sea. Reaching Italy, he is forced to bury his father on foreign shores.

Later, Anchises appears to his son in a dream. In Elysium, he shall meet him: There he shall learn the fate of his family and that of Rome itself, the city he is destined to found. Yet to reach the blessed fields, a Sicilian oracle later foretells, Aeneas must find the Sibyl – the seeress who lives near Lake Avernus in a cave.

Once found, the Sibyl becomes Aeneas’s guide to the Elysian Fields. To reach them, he first must win the favour of the queen who guards the threshold to the Otherworld. As an offering, she instructs, he must pluck the Golden Bough. This ominous twig, the seeress continues, grows hidden on a shimmering tree. Having located the Bough in the gloomy forest with divine support, Aeneas eventually embarks on his journey and passes the threshold to the Otherworld:

Their duty to the goddess done at last,
They came into a glad land: pleasant grounds
In forests of good fortune, blessèd home.
A richer, shimmering air arrays these fields,
Which have their own familiar sun and stars.

VERGIL, Aeneid, Book VI.638–41 (tr. Ruden)

Mapping Elysium in the North

What Vergil cast as poetry, Olof Rudbeck would later argue, had once been read from the North itself. For him, the poet’s lines were not inventions. The Aeneid preserved, in distorted form, memories of places that still existed in his home country.

Around Midsummer, Rudbeck explained, Sweden’s summer nights bathe the riverbanks in the North in a near-eternal light. In his view, this natural condition provided the experiential ground in which Vergil’s lines about the light-filled Elysian Fields were anchored.

Such truth he saw inscribed into names themselves. In Rudbeck’s interpretation, Ljusnan translated as ‘River of Light’, deriving from the Swedish word ljus (‘light’). In his view, this logic of sound and sense still echoed in the Latin name ‘Elysium’.

Classical myth contained such truth in distorted form. Its most original layer, Rudbeck argued, was to be found in Norse mythology. In his century, Swedish and Danish scholars had begun to edit and translate manuscripts that preserved the Nordic sagas.

In Rudbeck’s view, these texts preceded classical myth by far. They also contained pristine accounts of blessed landscapes in the North, speaking of a place called Glaesisvallur – the ‘Fields of Light’ in Rudbeck’s rendering.2

In the 1670s, the layers of myth that Rudbeck cast on Sweden’s North gained more contour. In 1675, he had sent an expedition up the Dalälven River to the mountains. Their mission was to gather measurements and observations that could further anchor his claims in empirical description.

From their data emerged a map of middle Sweden that accompanied the first volume of the Atlantica. In this document, Glysisvall and Elysii Campi appear as synonyms through which Rudbeck’s mythological argument found cartographic expression.

Both names designate the river landscapes that widen between the mountains of Sweden’s North and the Baltic coast. It was here that names and nature, in his reading, mirrored the spiritual dimension that humans had associated with these lands since the earliest of times.3

In this way, Elysium emerged not as an allegory detached from place, but as a reality still tangible, still legible in the names, vegetation, and light along the northern rivers – qualities inscribed into the landscape itself, to which his Atlantica claimed to provide the map.

Passport to Elysium

Yet only a few mortals were granted by the gods to reach Elysium. To make it to the Otherworld and back, the Sibyl warns Aeneas, “that is the work; that is the effort”.4 Before reaching the blessed fields, the traveller must cross boundaries that separate worlds – the river of the dead, guarded by Charon, which marks the passage from the living to the realm beyond.

Yet before that perilous journey can even begin, the gods have placed a further quest. Aeneas has to find and pluck the Golden Bough as an offering for the Goddess of the Underworld. This material sign, the Sibyl instructs, grants passage where force or pleading would fail and the twig yields itself only to the chosen. Eventually, the hero finds it in the vast forest, guided by the birds his mother sent in aid:

The[y] perched on what Aeneas sought, the contrast
Of flashing gold among the tree’s green branches;
Just as the mistletoe in dead of winter
Grows a fresh leaf, its own and not its host’s,
And rings the smooth trunk with its yellow shoot;
So the gold leaves stood out against the darkness
Of the oak. Their foil was jangling in the light wind.

VERGIL, Aeneid, Book VI.203–9 (tr. Ruden)

The power of the Golden Bough lies not in what it is, but in the transition it allows. For centuries, scholars have argued over the nature of the tree Vergil described. Leaving botanical speculations aside, many Christian humanists favoured symbolic readings.

Within the reception history of Vergil, later readers came to treat the poet as a figure of spiritual authority. In his Fourth Eclogue, he foretold the birth of a boy that would bring salvation. On such ground, many considered the Roman author as enlightened – as someone who had seen a truth even before the coming of the Lord.

As a prophetic poet, some Christian interpreters concluded, Vergil had formulated truths of this kind also in his Aeneid: With the Golden Bough, he had created an image for the shining power of virtue – the condition that safely guides through the underwood of vices, and ultimately permits safe passage into eternal life.5

For Rudbeck, these allegorical readings obscured rather than explained the actual nature of the elusive twig. In his Atlantica, he once again traced this myth back to the constant base he saw in the nature of the North: From this, as he argued, human beings had formed stories and meaning of a kind that Roman myth still narrated as if in a distant mirror.6

To reach down to this core of original meaning underlying the Golden Bough, Rudbeck combined strands of contemporary discourse: On the one side his expertise as one of the leading botanists of Europe, and on the other what scholars had begun to publish on the Sámi, the Indigenous peoples of the North.

In their works, non-Sámi scholars such as Johannes Scheffer presented Sámi culture to a learned audience. In the most authoritative of them – Scheffer’s Lapponia that was first printed in 1673 – Rudbeck read about practices of the Sámi noaidi: by beating their drums in certain patterns, Scheffer described, these ritual specialists could leave their bodies, travel to remote places, foresee the future, or converse with the dead.

In his Atlantica, Rudbeck appropriated details that Scheffer described for their ritual practice, and used them as a key to Vergil’s text: By chewing the bark of the alder tree, Scheffer related, the noaidi produced the dye to mark their drum skins with intricate carvings.

The alder’s bark has three layers, Rudbeck the botanist commented, its innermost turning golden-brown when a twig is freshly plucked. This tree stood at the heart of the ritual object believed to create a passage into the otherworld: On the drums, the sap of alder made the spiritual landscapes visible that the noaidi travelled on his journeys.

Of this tradition, Rudbeck argued, a residue was still found in the way the Aeneid instructed access to Elysium. Taking the alder as key, everything else began to fall into place for him: Long before the Roman texts, the Nordic sagas had held the tree in great esteem. In al, the Swedish name for the tree, he still heard echoes of Ale, Thor’s second name.7 When it came to the alder’s preferred habitat, leading authorities in the field had already pointed to the riverbanks of the North.8

Project ‘Elysium’

By the late seventeenth century, Rudbeck’s engagement with Elysium expanded far beyond the interpretation of individual myths. For the Rudbecks, asserting the primordial status of the North over the classical tradition became a central intellectual aim.

With the early volumes of his Atlantica, Rudbeck the Elder laid the groundwork for the expansive ways in which he and members of his family fused diverse strands of contemporary knowledge. After his 1695 journey into Lule and Torne Sápmi, his son joined this intellectual enterprise.

With his Laponia Illustrata (‘Lapland Illustrated’), he went at great length to push his father’s approach even further. In twelve volumes, he planned to publish on the High North of Sweden, its nature and its Indigenous peoples – all underlining Sweden’s premier place in God’s creation.

By the 1690s, the engine of Rudbeckian scholarship was humming at Uppsala. His son and daughters joined in finishing yet another monumental project that Olof Rudbeck the Elder had envisioned – an atlas of plants as the world had never seen before.

In the seventeenth century, botanical literature mainly relied on convoluted names describing plants in Latin. Even if some institutions could boast Herbaria of pressed plants or botanical gardens (as Rudbeck himself had founded one at Uppsala), visual references remained scarce.

Against this backdrop, Rudbeck embarked on a work that intended to depict each plant known to humankind. Such an atlas, heavily illustrated, would prove an invaluable aid to botanists.

The work was planned to appear in twelve volumes. Each corresponded to a category in the system the Swiss botanist Caspar Bauhin had devised in the 17th century. Once the atlas was completed, it would contain an unrivalled number of 10.000 to 11.000 woodcuts.9

Yet the mammoth work had a spiritual dimension, as well. By revealing the kingdom of plants with unprecedented visual richness, it was bound to unfold the beauty and richness with which God had invested Creation. With a book project of this extent, the possibility of making that abundance visible – a key facet in the concept of paradise – seemed palpable. Accordingly, Rudbeck chose the title for his monumental project: ‘The Elysian Field’ (Campus Elysii) – or Glysiswald in Swedish.10

The Elysian Gaze

By the end of the seventeenth century, Elysium was no longer a destination to be reached, but a total vision to be mapped and catalogued. Across his works, Rudbeck did more than bolster geographical claims from the past: He proposed ways of seeing in the present.

In this practice, landscapes and nature became readable and perceptible as archives of meaning; as the bedrock of myths that once had grown from sensual experience. It was a key claim of his Atlantica that these experiences could, in principle, be recovered.

In Rudbeck’s presentation, the Elysian Fields emerged neither as realm of allegory, detached from place as Christian humanists envisioned it, nor as the distant afterlife of religion. Elysium may rather stand for an archetypical quality of place – one that seems to emerge where a combination of vegetation, water, and light enter into resonance with human imagination.

To seek such places in our world also means to wander towards a threshold – a point where bodily experience, historical imagination, and the material conditions of landscape become porous.

Yet the promise Rudbeck made several centuries ago built on a central tenet: that landscapes of this kind remain legible, that rhythms of season and flow remain intact. That this ground itself might once become fragile – that nature might lose her function as ultimate guide to the truth behind myth – this thought still lay beyond Rudbeck’s imagination when he wrote the Atlantica.

Three centuries later, however, much of what sustained his ways of seeing has been altered, diverted, or erased. The journey on which we planned to embark towards Rudbeck’s Elysium was not about retracing a line on a map. Rather, it would allow to formulate a question more clearly: if the conditions to experience such resonance still exist, and how we might enter them in the present.

It was a question that could not be answered at the desk. If the idea of Elysium was, at its very core, once rooted in bodily experience – in light, movement, and sound – then it needed to be tested by entering the landscape itself.

With the hum of the substation in my ears, I gazed down at the thresholds blasted in the rock beneath Laforsen Dam.

Pools of water had gathered in the naked riverbed, occasionally rippled by a landing insect. The stagnant mirrors reflected back the tops of pine and spruce trees along the banks of Ljusnan. Below, a band of birch and alder ebbed out, lining the ghost of the river until it re-emerged from the outlet on the horizon.

Down there, any journey towards Elysium would have to begin ...

Further Reading and References

All photographs and translations are my own unless stated otherwise.

Please note the general bibliography available here.

No backseat in the car, I finally understood the gesture.

The teenagers in the front of the station wagon had smiled but shrugged their shoulders. Lowering my thumb, I watched the car creep by at throttled speed. The whole rear section had been converted into a stereo, I noted as the EPA-traktor passed.

Long after the warning triangle on its rear had disappeared behind the bend, the thumping from the loudspeakers still reverberated on the wind.

Pretty bassy for a castrato, I thought.

Yellow leaves tumbled over the tarmac with a dry rustle, past the pole where my backpack was propped, towards the signpost at a T-junction where the country road leading out of Härjedalen ended. Hede 12 km read the arrow pointing back.

Above my head, the wind danced through the birch trees.

Only a few cars had passed by since I was dropped off here, deep in the Swedish province. Waiting, I returned to the book that I had borrowed from Uppsala Library weeks before: New Print of Older Writings on Jämtland.1

And as I looked up from its pages to the empty road, the series of chance encounters of the past days drifted through my mind, connected by the trajectory I had taken through this part of northern Sweden.

Perhaps I’ve used up my hitchhiking luck for this year, the thought began to dawn on me as I felt the last remaining pages under my fingers.

“No One Rides for Free”

But let’s start at the beginning.

The scene a few days ago had been nearly identical. Autumn leaves. A country road branching off from the highway. A signpost that kept my backpack upright as I waited for a ride.

The previous three days I had spent exploring the mountains around the small town of Idre. Somewhere in its forests and along the course of the Dalälven River, an expedition from Uppsala had drawn a panorama 350 years ago, of mountains in which Olof Rudbeck would see antiquity’s Atlas Mountains.

I had left from Idre with more questions than answers, and still I felt in good spirits. Further illustrations had resulted from this expedition, and as I followed their historical trail north, new landscapes waited at the end of forest roads.2

Warning signs along their way announced the moose hunting season that had just begun. In a red jeep with gun cases tied to the roof, I hitched a ride out of Idre.

The brief journey lasted all of fifteen minutes. I spent them at the mercy of a driver glad of a captive audience for an impassioned soliloquy about guns and hunting cartridges, with particular emphasis on the merits of repurposed Wehrmacht rifles in bringing down the king of the forest – all delivered in a thick Småland dialect.

In rhythm with my forced nods of interest, the mantra ran through my mind.

No one rides for free.

“I Can Drop You Off There”

The hunter dropped me off at a junction in the forest.

From here, it was a day’s travel northwards to the next destination of my journey: a mysterious stone near the Norwegian border, inscribed with enigmatic characters – first sketched by the same expedition that had drawn the mountain panorama I had followed around Idre.

I had made it through some dozens of pages in my book before another vehicle stopped. Reflecting glimpses of sunlight, a heart-shaped balloon escaped into the hazy sky as the car door opened.

Inside, two couples from four different countries, on their way to a birthday party.

A Babylonian mix of languages filled the passenger cabin, sparkling like the rhinestone hearts on the jeans of my seat neighbour, the air suffused with a distinct note of hairspray. The conversation pinballed across several Eastern European languages – less fluent perhaps, yet cordial – but most of all less ballistic.

Half an hour later, I hefted my backpack out of the trunk again at a crossroads. “This hour, not much traffic,” the Estonian construction worker warned from the back seat, pointing to the road where I wanted to part.

I waved the birthday party goodbye, and had just taken out the book from the front pocket of my backpack again when a blue Volvo pulled over.

“I’m heading north”, I answered the driver in a lumberjack shirt wearing yellow ear protectors. “Towards the Norwegian border.”

Some years younger than me, I estimated from the rosy patches of skin not covered by his copper-coloured beard.

“I live about twenty kilometres up the road”, he answered. “I can drop you off there.”

I heaved my backpack next to a row of plastic storage boxes in the trunk. Between them, a rifle bag. Not again, I rolled my eyes, inwardly at least.

Entering the car, I swiped some Candy Cars off the front seat that had spilled from a plastic bag on the glove compartment. Empty soft drink cans clattered as I tried to find room for my legs. Riding shotgun, I thought of the irony as I buckled up.

His eyes glued to the road, my driver steered his vehicle home.

“So you’re back from moose hunting?”, I broke the hum of the engine, now already in sixth gear.

“Jau.” There was a shyness underneath his voice that sounded softer and gentler than his appearance had made me assume.

“I noticed the season has just started.”

“Jau”, he echoed.

With my thumb, I pointed back to the trunk, towards the empty plastic boxes.

“So no luck today?”

“Jau.”

The rubber antenna on his ear protector quivered with the vibrations of the road as the car ascended into the hilly parts of Härjedalen, towards the Norwegian border.

Is his radio still on? I began to wonder.

“Kalendergubbarnas By”

The villages through which we passed comprised little more than a few houses. The population density in this part of Sweden drops below one person per square kilometer.

The highest village in Sweden, a blue sign advertised on the way. Glacier-polished mountains soon added soft contours to the horizon. In silence we crossed through the sea of pine trees and yellow birches that filled the plains below, occasionally dotted with lakes and patches of marshland that were already verging towards earthen tones.

In a curve further on, another town sign flew by, more cryptic than the one before: Kalendergubbarnas By.

I was still pondering the meaning of the words when the car began to slow down. Village of the Old Calendar Men?

Switching off the engine, my driver headed straight for one of the houses along the road, leaving all his gear in the car. The ‘thank you’ I sent after him prompted a nod, followed by two syllables of goodbye.

I carried the backpack over to a trash can that lay tipped-over on the other side of the road. Taking a seat, I reached for the book in the front pocket once again.

From the pages, I occasionally lifted my eyes to the panorama of curiosa I saw displayed on the opposite side. Rusting machines and tractors, weeds growing on the truck beds. A flotsam of Euro-pallets, discarded propane tanks, and building materials lay scattered between them.

A rusting biathlon target rose from the scrap, with a few black disks stammering morse code on white ground. On top of a shed I spotted a vintage snow scooter parked, the lurid orange of its front panel blaring through the autumn colours.

There were not many pages left in the book before the next vehicle passed by. The logging truck set the weeds across the road wavering in its wake. The fragrance of fresh wood still lingered in the air when a station wagon followed after.

A friendly nod from the elderly couple inside.

The Estonian construction worker had been right.

A New Door Opens

Stretching my legs, I took a few steps towards the house in Falun-red that my monosyllabic driver had entered.

No lights were on, and no smoke rose from the chimney.

Through the glass I spotted him sitting in a corner of the living room – ear protectors still on. He didn’t turn his head when I walked by the front window.

After an hour or two, I picked up the backpack again. The time had come to give up and scout out a place to make camp.

“Are you waiting for Gustaf?”

As I was walking up the road from my silent driver’s home, the front door of the house next to it had opened. A middle-aged woman with gray hair and a Norwegian sweater had entered the porch, accompanied by two Rottweilers, gazing at me in a way that I felt I’d better answer correctly.

“Are you a friend of Gustaf’s?” she rephrased.

“You mean the guy living over there?” I concluded, pointing to the red house.

“Yes! I saw you through the kitchen window. We thought you are waiting for him.”

“He’s already at home. He gave me a ride here.”

“Oh right, I see his car over there!” Then: “So where are you going now?”

“Heading for the forest. Looking for a place for the night.”

“Oh, why don’t you come in first!”

“Stay As Long As You Need”

I lifted the latch on the fence. The black gate swung open, drawing a wide arc over the road. The two dogs dashed forward, sniffing my hiking tights without a bark.

“That’s Scooby, and that’s Semla,” she introduced her canine companions. “And I’m Åsa.”

“So you’ve travelled up here from Uppsala?” Åsa inquired over green tea in the kitchen. I nodded as I took a first sip. Outside the windows, it was already dark.

Indicating the book peeking out of my backpack pocket, she asked: “Doing library research down there?” From my notebook I pulled out the printouts of the mountain panorama near Idre and the stone I now wanted to visit up near the border. Åsa did not let go until I had fully done justice to the story about Rudbeck and the 1675 expedition that had brought me to this part of Sweden.

“I suppose you know the Carolina Rediviva then?” she picked up the thread of my library studies again.

“Indeed,” I replied. “I’ve been spending quite a lot of time in the special reading room.”

“You know Krister Östlund?”

“I do. We actually had a drink some weeks ago, together with a close friend of mine who also works in the library. The two of them edit a series together of Neo-Latin texts in translation.”

Åsa threw back her head, laughing.

“That’s too funny! Krister and I used to go to the cinema a lot when I studied in Uppsala, back in the 1980s.”

Over tea, I had already spotted a historical map of the Jämtland-Härjedalen region hanging on the kitchen wall. Together, we tried locating the ‘Stone in the Green Valley’ where I was heading.

“The next days aren’t looking too good”, she commented on my plans. “This really is the end of the season.” “There is a hut down on the lake”, she added. “Olle’s man cave. Has been his carpentry project for years. Stay as long as you need!”

In the meantime, Olle had come in from his workshop. Her husband worked jobs all across the globe, Åsa had explained before, welding anything from oil rigs in the North Sea to pressure tubes in nuclear power plants.

His family had lived in this village for more than a century, Åsa said. As she outlined his many building projects – welding a mast for the first wind mill in the area (he had replaced the nacelle with an illuminated star several years ago), his storybook flying machines, his impeccably carpentered ‘man cave’ – the archetype of a rural DIY hero materialised before my inner eye.

“Sometimes I think he has this plan hard-wired to populate Ränningsvallen,” Åsa confided in a quieter moment.

The Calendar Guys

“You’ll find fire wood in the shed over there,” Olle commented on the invitation his wife had extended. As I left, Åsa handed me a bundle. “And take some fresh eggs with you!”

On my way out to the cabin, I noticed a calendar lying on a table. Härjedalingar 2004 read the title page. It began to dawn on me.

The cover showed men in the second half of their lives, posing in typical Norrland activities: ice fishing, welding, riding snow scooters, or leaning against snowy stacks of wood – all bare-chested.

“Is this what the sign at entrance to the village is about?”

“Yes. We’re the proud village of the kalendergubbarna.

I raised an eyebrow.

“We were looking for a way to raise some money for a local association back in the 2000s”, she explained. “That was about the time when the movie ‘Calendar Girls’ came out. All the gubbar (old men) of the village jumped on board when we came up with the idea of trying something similar.”

“Was it successful?”

“Quite so!”, she said. Indicating that I should wait a moment, Åsa walked into the other room. She returned with a heavy folder under her arm.

“We produced the gubbkalender every year, for more than a decade,” she said. “This is the archive.”

“The calendar was a huge hit all across Sweden”, she continued as I began to browse randomly. “Some years we sold around 7000 copies. One year, a lady from German television even came up here,” Åsa added as I fished some copies from the folder.

Joining me at the table, Olle picked up one of calendars, flipping through the pages. He eventually tapped on a half-naked man on a snow glider, taking off from a frozen lake. “That’s me!” he announced with a proud smile.

Carrying the eggs with one hand, I peeped towards the archive folder on the way out.

“Can I take that with me, too?”, I asked.

Lakeside View

Two hours after I had taken a seat on the trash can at the side of the road, I found myself in a floating cabin. Some time ago, Olle had lifted it into dry dock at the shore of the nearby lake.

Placing my tired feet on a footrest, I leaned back in a comfy chair, a fire crackling in the iron stove behind.

Through a window in the panelled walls, I watched birch trees around the lake shiver in the wind, a tail of leaves blowing towards the water. On the wooden floor, another tail was beating.

One of the dogs had curled up next to the footrest. Placing her chin on my thigh, Semla beat her tail in anticipation. One hand patting her head, I began flipping through the calendars, their pages quivering with the contented sighs of the Rottweiler.

It was only later that I noticed that there were also photographs on the back. When I placed one of the calendars on the growing pile of copies studied, it suddenly struck me.

I know that face.

Three boys in swimming trunks, posing with upright oars as they floated out onto a lake on a self-made raft. He was the youngest in the picture. The man who had dropped me off here.

Most of his face had been hidden behind a red beard now. But the skin beneath had still retained some of the softness on the photograph in my hands.

I turned the calendar over and check the year. 2004.

He must have been close to his teenage years back then, I guessed.

From the raft photograph, my view wandered from the calendar out to the lake again. Like the birch leaves settling on the shore, it all seemed to fall into place.

This is the lake. This where they took the picture.

I picked up another calendar. Over all the years, the boys reappeared in the final picture on the back. Browsing through the calendars, I watched Gustaf and the village kids grow up.

Kids in rubber boots posing next to highland cattle. Boys tinkering with the orange snow scooter that I had spotted as the figurehead on the barn. Teenagers poring over the engine of an EPA-traktor.

No Country for Young Men, it ran through my mind.

Spinning the Wheel

After a few days in the cabin, I took leave of Kalendergubbarnas By again.

At the break of dawn, I left with Olle and the dog for the vet at Hede. One of the Rottweilers needed a check-up. From there, a Dutch couple in a camper van gave me the next lift.

Hede 12 km, the road sign at the junction read where the couple had dropped me. By the time they did, we hadn’t even made it through the story of how I ended up there in the first place.

Later that morning, I watched the thumping EPA-traktor creep by, listening to its stereo as it faded into the distance. Feeling the final pages of the book in my hands, I pondered about the past days and the unlikely trajectory they had taken.

This crossroads was one among many. Yet it felt as if a line had emerged among them, from a myriad of possible encounters and coincidences along the way, and that now connected them to a story.

For a short time or for longer, I had entered into the orbit of people who themselves moved according to their own volition and circumstances. Like a pinball, propelled around a mechanism where a fraction of a second or a millimetre influences the ultimate path through a labyrinth of interlocking wheels, plungers, bumpers, and flippers, I had landed here, at a signpost in the middle of the Swedish province on an autumn morning – waiting for the next ride to take me forward in my antiquarian quest.

Ancient poets had spoken of the universe in similar terms, describing it as the result of falling atoms that a swerve – an unforeseen deviation from their direct lines – had made collide.3

In such a world materialising from microscopic spin and chance encounter, fate or meaning were but words we use to name the storylines into which we, in hindsight, connect the dots. If all this was just a game of the mind, it was still a most curious one to play, I thought, watching the wind blow birch leaves across the country road.

My eyes wandered down the tarmac, towards the signpost that marked the junction. And as I watched the blue and white signs indicating different routes and destinations; possibilities that lay all fanned out like spokes on a wheel, I began to wonder:

Where would the next spin take me?

Further Reading and References

All translations and photographs are my own unless stated otherwise.

A previous version of this article was first published on Too Long, Didn’t Read, an online platform we launched to explore alternative forms of storytelling. It is reposted here together with minor modifications to content and layout.

Acknowledgments

My thanks go to Åsa Evertsdotter, two wonderful dogs, Amy Lee for her help with an earlier version of this text, Peter Sjökvist, and a dozen of drivers who bothered to slow down on those days in autumn.

Into the Panorama

Time and again, the Atlantica confronted readers across Europe with a central claim: After millennia, Sweden’s nature still held the keys to reach the core of ancient myth. In his home country, Olof Rudbeck claimed, the gates to this truth stood open for all to see, an epiphany to be experienced with all senses.

The mythical Mount Atlas was no exception to this claim. And so I left for the North, a printout of the Idre panorama in my pocket.

I first touched base with the Northern Atlas on asphalt.

“Welcome to Himmelfjäll”, the billboards passing by the bus windows read. “Snow guarantee from 21 December until 19 April.”

At the end of the aisle, red LEDs announced the next stop: Idre Fjäll.

With a hissing sound, the rear door opened. A crisp autumn breeze cut through the overheated air. From an empty bus, I stepped down onto a deserted parking lot.

At the end of the concrete expanse, snow cannons stood parked on stilts, the wind moving idle fans inside.

Vans of carpenters and plumbers parked in the driveways that I passed on my path to the first outlook. Along the cottages, plastic foil fluttered in window cutouts. Panorama maps on the way showed the skiing resort that had opened in the Idre mountains the year before.

A swathe in the forest led uphill, lined by lift pylons. Wrapped around their concrete bases, paddings flashed in factory-fresh red colour. To their side, a dugout for the snow lances, with excavator bites still along its rim.

At the top of the hill, a gravel-clad plateau widened, furrowed by the tracks of Caterpillars. Button seats dangling over my head, I sought orientation in the printout.

I was now inside the panorama, I assumed, standing somewhat left of the peak marked as (d).

Manufactured Winters

A few glaring dots drew my attention to a neighbouring hill.

White surfaces reflected rays of sun that made it through the overcast sky. Near the top of the ski pistes, tons of snow awaited the coming season under plastic foil.

From my readings before the journey, Vergil’s lines came to mind, on the snow on Atlas’s shoulders, and Rudbeck’s reports on the fields of snow that his men had still seen here in summer.

In Northern Dalarna, sights like that have become a thing of the past.

Even in winter, there are already entire months without snowfall. By mid-century, the average season in Sweden’s skiing resorts is projected to shrink by twenty days.1

The developers’ vision unfolds a landscape unaffected by such changes.

Unbroken blankets of white covered the mountain panoramas that I had passed on my way. In this projection, it seemed as if a few of Rudbeck’s gods still shimmered through the layers of a transformed environment: near the feet of ski pistes, the names Neptune and Mercury lent mythical lustre to clusters of freshly built chalets.

Trees Beyond our Sense of Time

Beyond the lifts, the Idre mountains changed register.

For the night, I hiked into the forests that spread around Städjan, into the ‘Beard of Atlas’ as Rudbeck interpreted the trees around the centre peak of the panorama (see ‘f’ above).

Städjan means ‘anvil’ in Swedish, its profile dominating the views of the range. With 1,131m above sea level, the peak has somewhat fallen from the Olympus of the worlds’ highest mountains among which Rudbeck had once counted it.

With the first sun, fragrances of earth and fungi rose from the sponge-like ground that absorbed my steps towards Städjan’s top. Silvery stumps and logs pierced the carpet of moss, lichen, needles, and blueberry shrubs.

From the branches, black streaks of tagellav-lichens wavered in the wind like wisps of a primeval creature caught in the conifer branches. In the distance, the hammering of a woodpecker.

Today, 24.500 hectares around Städjan are designated as a nature reserve. Trees are left to grow and die undisturbed. When they fall, their wood remains part of the forest, providing habitats and sustenance for trees, plants, lichen, mushrooms, microorganisms, mammals, birds, and insects.

Some two hundred meters below the top of Städjan, I found the trees thinning out. Further up, a few crooked still shrubs dot the treeless ground of the fjäll.

Under the climate conditions around 1900, the forest ended further below.

Already Carl Linnaeus described its vegetation in his Dalaresa (‘Voyage through Dalarna’). When he climbed Städjan in 1734, the young botanist noticed the low brushes that hugged the slopes above the tree-line, resembling roots grown into the earth.2

Many of these shrubs are stunted spruces.

Cowering near the ground, they have weathered the storms, snows, and forest fires assailing Northern Dalarna for centuries. Some of them have seen the last Ice Age recede.

With temperatures rising, many of these veteran trees now have started new offshoots.3 Among them ranks the so-called Linnégranen (‘Spruce of Linnaeus’), whose roots biologists in recent decades could date to 4420 years, or the oldest tree in the world in the neighbouring Fulufjället.4

In Rudbeck’s imagination, such ages led deep down into the chronological charts he printed in his Atlantica, to times when he believed the waters of the Deluge to have first receded from the world’s highest peaks, and when Japhet arrived to Sweden’s mountains to re-settle Europe – an event that in his view marked the outer margin of imagined time.

The Values We See

A stiff wind scraped the top of Städjan. Leaning into the gusts, my eyes followed the spotlights which fell through holes in the overcast sky, on the forests that followed the ice when it receded millennia ago.

The wandering shafts of light illuminated the expanse through which the Dalälven River flowed, shimmering like a band of mercury.

In steady rhythm, patches of brown lit up in the lustre cones.

A front line runs through the landscape. Clearcut areas and ski pistes adumbrate where the nature reserve that surround the peak ends. Not too long ago, there were debates on building lifts on Städjan itself.

When the reserve was declared around Städjan, biologists raised “nature types uninfluenced by man with a natural set of species and ecological function”.5

In habitats left undisturbed, life grows in interdependency. The lichen hanging from the trees feed the reindeer in wintertime. Over the past decades, the work of researchers as well as artists has widened our understanding of interconnectedness between trees, plants, mushrooms, microorganisms, mammals, birds, and insects, and deepened our sense of awe.6

After a clearcut, these ecosystems are lost. Some may take a century to form anew. Others of these interacting systems are, once destroyed, next to impossible to re-create.

Many of them may still lie beyond our grasp.

Administering Awe

Among the largest forest owners in Sweden are state-owned companies.

For many decades, clearcutting was carried out backed by a narrative that forests cut and replanted in the north helped build schools and light hospitals elsewhere in the country.

In 1993, the Swedish government liberalised forest laws. Responsibility has largely resided with landowners, bound primarily by principles such as ‘frihet under ansvar’ (‘freedom bound by responsibility’) and ‘allmän hänsyn’ (‘general consideration’).

Although Swedish law requires biodiversity checks before clearcutting, their vast majority is carried out without any prior examination.7 Over the past decades, most of the ancient forests in Sweden have been – and continue to be – replaced by wood plantations, in particular in the north, where ecosystems take even longer to form and to recover.

Yet cutting living ecosystems and replanting them is a gamble in the 21st century. Sapling planted today may never grow to full size again as soil and climate conditions change. The atmospheric carbon dioxide they once stored may never be bound again.

Scientists invoke so-called ‘services of forests’ of this kind in their defence. Yet beneath the tree lines lies an even deeper layer – the meanings we find in them.

The ancient myths that Rudbeck connected to the forests at Idre is just one layer in this palimpsestic process by which we inscribe and re-inscribe the world with stories. The ones we tell today define how we connect to the world around us, what value we grant it, how we care about it.

The forests around us store them, too, layer on layer – the stories of who we have been.

Descending through the forests ebbing from Städjan slopes, I passed one of the rare pockets in which giant trees still grow.

When Rudbeck’s expedition neared the mountain in 1675, some of them had still been saplings. Close to the veterans, the ground bulged with stumps overgrown with moss – the remains of trees that took centuries to grow and several men to embrace.

The tallest of them did not survive to the present day. In the decades of dimensionsavverkning around 1900, loggers hiked up and skimmed the forest.8

Floated down the Dalälven, their stems would serve as beams in railway bridges.

The Elusive Panorama

I remember the moment I had given up my search for the vantage point.

After a few days in the mountains, I had tried to move out of the panorama, crossing over the Dalälven River (l) that widens into a lake near Idre.

On gravel road, I wandered along the forest on the southern bank. Clearings opened along the path, offering glimpses back to the ski resorts of Idre and the bald peaks rising beyond. Rags of barrier tape flapped from a few toothpick trees, the names of lumber companies barely legible on the sun-bleached plastic.

I felt my feet sink into the ground as I headed uphill, towards a treeless elevation, across a carpet of white lichen and blueberry bushes that the seasons had left in fiery red.

Next to tracks that harvesters had ploughed, fir saplings rose in geometric patterns from the undergrowth.

This once had been a living forest.

The machines had left a thin line of trees standing.

Above its veil, I beheld the Idre range.

In front of me, the last rays of sun filled tyre marks on the ground with shadows. On my skin, I felt the air around me growing colder.

One last time, I reached for the worn-out paper in my breast pocket. From the hilltop, I tried to find my position in the panorama.

From beneath, I heard throaty calls carry up from the river valley – the swans I had crossed paths with earlier, their wedge floating downstream beneath the Dalälven bridge.

The silhouette still was far off from what the panorama showed.

This doesn’t make sense, I thought, and looked for even ground to spend the night.

The Second Journey

On a clearcut in Dalarna, I had given up the search to find the original vantage point of Rudbeck’s Idre panorama.

A few weeks later, I returned to it on the threshing floor of an artist’s barn.

On the Hallnäs Peninsula, some two hours north of Stockholm, a young couple had turned the family farm into a retreat for artists. A few houses, painted in Falun-red, nested in a forest flaring up with yellow birches.

Through a half-open window, the wind carried scraps of sound from waves in the distance. A few kilometres from here, the Dalälven reaches the Baltic Sea. The last sun poured over the notes from my journey, shafts of light sculpted by the window frame.

From my backpack, I heaved a leather-bound volume onto the desk that I had borrowed from the library at Uppsala. In the work by Karl-Erik Forsslund, I travelled upstream one more time.

More than a century ago, the Swedish Romanticist had embarked on journeys along the Dalälven River. In the years around World War One, he published the first parts of his ‘With the Dalälven from its Sources to the Sea’.9

In this work, Forsslund unfolded a vision of pristine lands upstream along the river, recounting days of travel and nights spent under summer skies, or as a guest of farmers whose homes and dresses he photographed and whose songs he printed like relics in need of conservation.

Forsslund described his journey up the Dalälven as a journey back in time, leading through all ages of human development: from the smoke-belching factory chimneys near the coast to the farms of Dalarna, a region that resonated with Forsslund and many others of his time as a contrast to the industrialising cities. Further upstream, where the Dalälven has its springs in the mountains, he believed to have encountered humankind’s first state as nomads, which he associated with the Sámi near Idre.

Leafing through Forsslund’s pages, I travelled along the Dalälven again, to the peaks that I had left behind around Idre.

At a photograph showing the church at Särna overlooking the river, I paused.

The silhouette beyond the steeple.

The proportions were more humble. Yet clear as iron sights, the peaks on the horizon aligned around Städjan, matching the view in Rudbeck’s panorama.

In a single moment, everything fell into place. I had been looking in the wrong place.

What Rudbeck described as ‘lake formed by the Dalälven’ in the Atlantica (‘l’ in the panorama) had never been the river that widened near Idre.

It was the same river that widened once more, some thirty kilometres further downstream.

In reality, the area between the water and the mountains covered by the ‘Beard of Atlas’ (‘m’ in the panorama) expanded across dozens of kilometres. I had been misled by the ways Rudbeck’s draughtsman had conveyed proportions and distance.

Leaning back into the chair, I folded my hands behind my head and stretched my shoulders. Dust mites danced in the light of the desk lamp.

I had searched too close to the mountains to see this view emerge, the insight settled.

Reaching for the light switch to call it a night, my view passed over the mountain silhouette on the photograph again and the grains of dust that had settled.

With the back of my hand, I wiped over the page.

The specks stayed. Only then did I notice the logs.

The photograph showed the harvest from the forests floating down the river, towards the sawmills in the south.

Upstream, the plucking of Atlas’s Beard had begun.

Further reading and references

All translations and photographs are my own unless stated otherwise.

Acknowledgments

I have to thank Lennart Bratt for his support in the field and the insights he shared with me. Further thanks go to Åsa Norling, Peter Sjökvist, Sven Widmalm, and Maria Ågren.

On Clear Cutting

For an overview and outlook of the situation in Sweden see this study as presented by Johan Joelsson, “Ny studie avslöjar omfattande kalhuggning av svenska naturliga skogar”, 9 November 2022 (online at Lund University).

In recent years, the topic of deforestation in Sweden has attracted coverage in international newspapers, see for example:

• Marcus Westberg, “‘Forests are not renewable’: the felling of Sweden’s ancient trees”, The Guardian, 14 April 2021 (online here).

• Richard Orange, “Sweden’s green dilemma: can cutting down ancient trees be good for the Earth?”, The Guardian, 25 September 2021 (online here).

• Greta Thunberg, Lina Burnelius, Sommer Ackerman, Sofia Jannok, Ida Korhonen, Janne Hirvasvuopio, Jan Saijets, Fenna Swart, Anne-Sofie Sadolin Henningsen, “Burning forests for energy isn’t ‘renewable’ – now the EU must admit it”, The Guardian, 5 September 2022 (online here).

• Alex Rühle, “Radikahlschlag”, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 14 June 2023 (online here).

• Alex Rühle, “Das Verschwinden der Wälder”, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 23 Juni 2025 (online here).

Director Peter Magnusson treated the topic in his 2021 film Om Skogen (96min).

Activist groups in Sweden such as Skydda Skogen (‘Protect the Forest’) and Skogsupproret (‘The Forest Rebellion’) fight against deforestation and the colonial approach that their own country practices in the North and on Sámi territories.

In Sweden, the voices against clearcutting have become louder and reached public institutions. In 2023, for example, Uppsala University declared to abstain from clearcutting at least in parts of the large forest areas (some of them nature reserves) that have historically been managed by the institution (see press release on uu.se from 20 February 2023).

Please note the general bibliography available here.

Unlike Anything Else

Lars leaned over the table, his finger moving slowly across the image.

I followed his gesture as he spoke of panoramas he had traced through the deserts of Central Asia and the Himalayas.

What I had brought to his desk was something different, closer to the mountains where he lived.

“To be honest,” Lars said, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

For a long time, we spoke about the 17th-century panoramas that had brought me to Åre – the first depicting the mountain chains of northern Sweden. The next day, we set out for the peaks of Jämtland, to find the point from which this view might open.

The opening minutes of Frozen Atlantis return to this encounter.

It marked a journey that had begun the year before, when I first followed one of these panoramas into the landscapes that it claimed.

Printing it from a digital copy of Olof Rudbeck’s Atlantica, I set out for the North.

Mythical Heights – Rudbeck Claims Mount Atlas

The volume of plates illustrating this 17th-century work a total of three views from the main ridge that separates Sweden from Norway.1 On many occasions, Rudbeck made use of these representations to link ancient myth to Swedish landscapes.

In the mountains and nature up north, in their shapes and names, he saw evidence that ancient geographers, naturalists, and mythographers had meant these peaks and their flora when they spoke in awe of the Hyperborean Mountains, the Mountains of Atlas, and the pines growing on them. In fact, Rudbeck went so far to boast that Sweden could boast no less than the highest mountains in Europe.

Among interpreters of ancient texts, such claims were far from uncontested.

“Erudite men such as Salmasius, Vossius and others,” Rudbeck complained in a letter to his protector Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie, “do not believe that our mountains are so high above sea level that they could be called the Hyperborean Mountains, of which the most ancient authors of the world have written so much.”2

One of the intellectuals in Rudbeck’s crosshair was Isaac Vossius. Since 1648, the Dutch bibliophile had served as court librarian to Queen Christina – one of the humanist heavyweights the Swedish monarch had attracted to her court in Stockholm.

Among his works, Vossius counted a commentary on Pomponius Mela. This Greek author ranked among the foremost writers on geography.

Mela, too, had touched on the mythical Hyperborean Mountains. However, as Vossius stated in his commentary, all attempts to locate the disputed range in the North must be considered fairy tales, as the local mountains merely rise to humble size:

The Norwegian mountains are considered to be the highest up north, but none of them rises to two stadia of altitude.

Isaac Vossius, Observations on Pomponius Mela 3

Judgements like this from armchair scholars such as Vossius, Rudbeck complained, had blurred the vision of the North. They had prevented learned men from acknowledging the role his country could deservedly claim: the one and only environment that had inspired our earliest myths and stories.

With his Atlantica, Rudbeck aimed to end this debate once and for all.

The 1675 Expedition

By the middle of the 1670s, Rudbeck had delved deeply into preparing the first volume of this work. Four years before its first volume appeared in 1679, he sent out an expedition up the Dalälven.

Up in the mountains where this river springs, the men procured material to correct the role Sweden had played in world history – a role that Rudbeck saw forgotten and distorted for millennia:

I am now sending out two students of mathematics at my own expense who shall travel from the Baltic Sea, where the Dalälven enters, and all the way upstream to measure the highest mountains, in order to see how high our mountains are ...

Olof Rudbeck, Letter to Chancellor De la Gardie (1674) 4

The Dalälven marks the border to Norrland, a name traditionally used for the northern part of Sweden. In the summer of 1675, Rudbeck’s men travelled upstream, towards lands the Crown had (re)gained with the 1645 peace treatise of Brömsebro.

From the Swedish-Norwegian border mountains, they returned with a rich harvest. In Uppsala, Rudbeck drew on their maps, mountain measurements, and panoramas to rewrite the history of Sweden.

At his desk, Rudbeck brought together the data. He connected the relative height measurements his students had taken of peaks near Idre and further north in Jämtland with calculations of their ground level. For this, traced the levels of the waterfalls in adjacent rivers down to sea level.

On this basis, Rudbeck concluded that the top peaks of the main ridge must at least be ten times higher than the maximum altitude Vossius had claimed (2 stadia, approx. 360m).5 His calculations thus elevated Sweden’s peaks above those considered the highest in Europe at the time.

Yet the meaning of numerical claims was eclipsed by their historical implications.

As Sweden owned the highest mountain, Rudbeck argued, this put his country first when it came to tracing from where the earth was repopulated after the Biblical Flood. Where the mountains rose highest, he elaborated, land first emerged again in Europe. So it must have been here in the North, he concluded, that Noah’s son Japheth found first land as the waters began to recede.

Atlas Slabbed – The Myth According to Ovid

The implications of the expedition material extended far beyond the biblical narrative.

A signature claim of Rudbeck’s work was that the legendary island Atlantis identified as Scandinavia. In his Critias, the Greek philosopher Plato relates that the god of the sea had made his first-born son the first king of the island called Atlantis (Greek for ‘of Atlas’).6

As namesake of the island, Atlas came close to a patron of Rudbeck’s Atlantica itself. In the work, Rudbeck had a closer look at the myths about the god.

In his Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid tells how the mountains of Atlas came into being.

When Perseus, returning from his victory over Medusa, sought shelter at the realm of Atlas, the giant refused the castaway entry. Warned by an oracle that a son of Jupiter would one day claim his garden, Atlas drove the hero away.

Perseus did not insist. Turning his eyes aside, he raised the head of Medusa instead with her petrifying glance:

His hair and beard were changed to trees,
his shoulders and arms to spreading ridges;
What had been his head was now the mountain’s top,
and his bones were changed to stones.
Then he grew to monstrous size in all his parts
– for so, O gods, ye had willed it –
and the whole heaven with all its stars rested upon his head.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, 4.657-62 7

From that moment on, Ovid concludes, a sky-high mountain rose where the titan had stood – its forests the remnants of his beard, its mass the body of a petrified god.

For most readers, this mountain lay in Northern Africa.

For Rudbeck, it stood elsewhere. For him, Atlas was simply one among the many synonyms by which ancient writers had referred to the mountains dividing Sweden and Norway.8

When his expedition returned in 1675, their reports and drawings provided Rudbeck with new evidence. Up north, he argued, the treeless top of Mount Städjan – seen at the centre of his panorama (f) – perfectly corresponded to the bald head of Atlas of which Ovid had spoken. And so did the forest at his foot (m), in which the poet had, in Rudbeck’s interpretation, seen the transformed remnants of Atlas’s Beard.

An anthropomorphising view on the Swedish mountains lay behind the myth that Ovid still remembered, Rudbeck concluded. From his library at Uppsala, he presented further evidence to sustain this view. Manuscripts he consulted, Rudbeck relates, showed a wider image tradition connected to the theme of bearded-god-turned-forested-mountain.9

Taking Bearings with Vergil

Among the other authors on whom Rudbeck drew was Vergil.

In the Aeneid, the god Mercury, sent from Olympus, crosses the world in flight. As he approaches his destination, Vergil writes, he turns to Mount Atlas – a towering range whose pine-covered peak rises into the clouds and guides the migrating birds:

Soon in his flight he saw the steep flanks
and the summit of strong Atlas,
who props the heavens with his head;
Atlas, whose pine-covered crown is always wreathed
in dark clouds and lashed by the wind and rain:
Fallen snow covers his shoulders,
while rivers drop from the old man’s chin,
and his rough beard bristles with ice.

VERGIL, Aeneid, 4.346–51 10

For Rudbeck, everything in this passage pointed north.

The rivers described by Vergil, he argued, corresponded to the great waterways descending from the Scandinavian mountains.11 The snow, visible even in summer, his expedition had confirmed (and added to the panoramas, see (o)).

What remained was the forest.

Seeing the Pines of Atlas

Vergil pointed to the trees on Atlas as its ‘pine-covered crown’, whereas Ovid poetically spoke of his beard. Other ancient authors offered clues as for the nature of the forest.

Pliny described Mount Atlas as crowned with unfamiliar trees similar to the cypress, its heights covered in snow even in warmer seasons.12

Among the conifers illustrated in his Atlantica, Rudbeck identified a match: the Swedish spruce. Its narrow form, he argued, was perfectly adapted to heavy snowfall – the only tree that fulfilled the conditions described in the ancient texts.

In Rudbeck’s panorama, natural history and classical mythology converged into a single view.

What had seemed scattered across texts and landscapes appeared as part of the same order. Mount Atlas, Pliny’s forests, Ovid’s giant and his beard – they all found their place in the reality of the North.

It only required the right eye to see.

Follow to the mountains around Idre in the second half of this article

Further reading and references

All translations and photographs are my own unless stated otherwise.

Please note the general bibliography available here.

The net of lines caught my eye on a snowfield.

I had climbed the top of a ridge in the Southern Andes, to gaze at the spindle of vapour turning from El Chaltén – the banner cloud unfolding from the peak the Indigenous called ‘The Smoking One’.1

On the way down from the Loma de las Pizarras, I noticed the stone emerging upright from the snow, its face furrowed by crossing lines.

It felt as if the grooves spanning across its face kindled an instinct known from since childhood, the one that lets us discover patterns and shapes; as if these weathered cracks held something to be read – or at least, a trace to those who tried.

The stone left me with an association leading to a faint memory, blurred as the cloud I had watched that day billowing across Patagonian skies.

The loose thread led me back to notes I had taken a few years before, at a time when I was skimming through shelf meters of historical dissertations in the Special Reading Room at Uppsala.

One of these Latin booklets contained the illustration of a stone whose faint imprint still lingered in my mind. The foldout, however, was not included in the few reproductions online at the time.

The next day, a phone photograph arrived from my friend Peter, a rare book curator at the library. While passing the shelf of 18th-century dissertations that morning, he took the shot from the 1733 booklet – an illustration that would lead me from the Andes back to the archives, into a trail of antiquarian investigation across centuries.

Part II: The Antiquarian Trio

Renhorn’s Remembrances

In his 1733 dissertation, Johan Renhorn revisited a stone located on the border of his home province of Jämtland in the North of Sweden.

Its face, he writes, was marked with characters veiled in mystery. At length, Renhorn recounts the works of those who had made the characters (which he had printed as a fold-out illustration) speak: of a prophecy echoing in Swedish ears from ancient song.

Found in runic script on a ‘Stone in the Green Valley’, it spelled out warnings to humankind in plain daylight. They had neglected the writings of the ancients, the prophecy complained, and deviated on their path ever since. Eventually, this provoked an upheaval of social order and the collapse of the known world.

According to the legend, the stone stood between Norway and Jämtland. Still standing, it had witnessed the world fall apart as humankind turned away from its face inscribed with runic script.

That was until everything collapsed – and the stone tipped over.2

Rudbeck’s Patterns (1679)

Revisiting the illustration in Renhorn’s dissertation brought another image to mind.

A similar diagram featured in the volume of plates that accompanied Olof Rudbeck’s Atlantica. The work by the Swedish polymath (1630–1702) included hundreds of illustrations which I had begun to study more closely at the time.3

The diagram counted among the ones I had logged as ‘phantoms’ in my memory. In his volume of plates, Rudbeck placed the stone next to charts that compare the Phoenician, Greek, Gothic and runic alphabets.

Yet nowhere in his thousands of pages did Rudbeck explain what he saw in the lines.

My interest deepened when I learned that the diagram, left mute by Rudbeck’s text, related to an actual stone – the very stone Renhorn described half a century later. In fact, that stone was located in the region where Rudbeck had sent an expedition scouting material for his Atlantica.

In 1675, three of his students explored the ‘Atlas Mountains’ up near the Norwegian border in Jämtland, Dalarna, and Härjedalen – regions that had in parts become Swedish only three decades earlier.

Otto’s Original (1675)

From Sweden’s north, the expedition had returned with a rich harvest. It included drawings of mountain panoramas, maps, and measurements.

At Uppsala, their observations provided Rudbeck with new evidence in his quest to link ancient myth to the landscapes of his homeland. Though the stone remained a phantom in the Atlantica, the protagonists of its first emergence now came into view.

Among the students Rudbeck sent north in 1675 was Samuel Otto.

Three years earlier, Otto enrolled as a student of engineering at Uppsala. For the Atlantica, he acted as one of Rudbeck’s draftsmen, contributing a number of woodcuts to the work.

The enigmatic diagram of the stone was one of them, so I learned.

A sketch survives in the National Library in Stockholm of the printed illustration; a folded piece of paper considered an original by Samuel Otto.4 On the basis of this document, scholars assumed that Rudbeck’s 1675 expedition had visited the stone that Renhorn later described in his dissertation – a stone located some kilometres north of Storlien in western Jämtland.

Within sight of the Norwegian border, they concluded, Rudbeck’s student had allegedly produced the paper drawing of the stone. Later, this sketch served as model for the woodblock eventually printed in the Atlantica.

Peringskjöld’s Papers (1700s)

Today, the handwritten drawing attributed to Otto is preserved at Stockholm, among the papers collected by Johan Peringskjöld.

Until his death in 1720, this Swedish antiquarian had worked on a comprehensive catalogue on Swedish rune stones. Peringskjöld counts among the few scholars who in the 17th century had personally seen the stone near the Norwegian border.

He had done so as part of another expedition that had as well been initiated by Rudbeck – this time as a side quest of a mission whose purpose was to lead him beyond the Arctic Circle in 1687, to another stone reportedly inscribed with an unknown alphabet.5

Based on an illustration produced by Peringskjöld and his travel companion Hadorph, a woodblock of the stone was prepared. There seems to be a test print drawn from it surviving among Peringskjöld’s papers.

In these, he apparently collected material for the Jämtland-section of his work on the rune stones of Sweden (it is the same section in which also the mentioned drawing attributed to Samuel Otto survives).

The woodcut shows the initials (‘IP’ and ‘IH’) for Johan Peringsjöld and Johan Hadorph – the two antiquarians visiting the site in 1687. On the same page, handwritten modifications were added to the print. These may have been intended for a coming iteration of the woodblock (including, for example, a caption, cardinal points, and instructions to an artists to elaborate landscape features such as ‘snow’, ‘lake’).

This iteration, so it seems, was never carried out.

After Peringskjöld’s death in 1720, when Renhorn embarked on his dissertation on the stone, he managed to gain access to the original (non-revised) woodblock. It was this version he used it to illustrate his work on the ‘Stone in the Green Valley’ printed in 1733 – the foldout that had stood at the beginning of my paper trail.

Part III: Roots of a Legend

Worm’s Wormhole (1643)

Access to this rare visual material from Sweden’s North was not the only ace Renhorn pulled from his sleeve.

As he writes in his dissertation, the Royal Secretary Johan Helin still remembered opinions which the late Peringskjöld had formed on the stone, but had never come to comment: Rather than a prophetic object, Renhorn relates, Peringskjöld saw in it a border stone between Norway and Jämtland, its six main fields representing the six assessors of the border judge.6

In Peringskjöld’s interpretation, the old legend of a prophetic ‘Stone in the Green Valley’ was superseded by a far more prosaic reading. A more reverent comment on its mysterious lines appears in an 18th-century annotation beneath the woodcut:

May their meaning be known to the highest God and those who applied themselves to it.7

When Renhorn defended his dissertation in 1733, the legend attributed to a ‘Stone in the Green Valley’ seemed already faint. A century earlier, the search to connect its prophecy with a tangible object was in full swing.

In 1643, the Danish antiquarian Ole Worm published the massive Monumenta Danica on the rune stones of his homeland. At great length, Worm explored traditions that spoke of a ‘Stone in the Green Valley’ inscribed with fateful words.8

It was in Denmark that Worm mentions a saxum Grøndallense (‘Stone in the Green Valley’), printing an illustration thereof as part of his work. According to documents he mentions, that stone was inscribed with a prophecy foretelling violent upheavals that occurred in Jutland during the Reformation.

Echoes of this tradition, Worm relates, he found in a manuscript from 1503. It told of a cleric coming across a stone with brass letters in a forested valley called Grøndal (‘Green Valley’), denouncing decaying morals and predicting social upheaval at a time when churches were becoming prisons and priests peasants.

The same tradition also found its way into the Eclogues (1560) written by Michael Laetus, a Neo-Latin poet writing during Denmark’s Lutheran turn. In one of these pieces, a poet arrives in an idyllic ‘Green Valley’, and from the weathered lines of a stone deciphers a dire prophecy of a similar fate.9

Across various genres, the prophecy about the end of the known world resonated in Denmark with amid the upheavals of the Reformation.

The Compass Shifts North (1612)

As antiquarian, Worm was looking for was the actual stone in which this tradition rooted. This was where problems began.

The prophecy and the rune stone at hand, Worm concedes, didn’t match.

The four worn-out lines of runes he printed as part of his Monumenta (see above) had nothing to do with that story of social upheaval and the known world collapsing. And so, Worm began considering that the stone and its legendary ‘Green Valley’ could be located elsewhere.

His scouting led Worm to Johannes Messenius.

In his Specula Sueciae (‘Mirror of Sweden’) from 1612, this Swedish historian mentioned a stone inscribed with runic script and a familiar-sounding prophecy that foretold the end of the world, monasteries crumbling, priests becoming peasants, and the foreboding stone lying fallen on the ground.

This stone, Messenius wrote, was located near the Norwegian Alps in Jämtland (then part of the Danish Crown). There it had supposedly been placed during the reign of Erik Stenkil (c. 1060).10

Worm followed this trace further back, to Laurentius Petri (1499–1573), the archbishop of Uppsala. His bishopric included Jämtland in today’s Sweden.

Petri was another person said to have personally visited the stone. At least, the priest Jesper Marci claimed to have found this information in the bishop’s library after his death, together with a description of the stone and the prophecy.

Using the lore of a ‘Stone in the Green Valley’ in Jämtland and its warning prophecy, the Lutheran preacher composed a song that exhorted pagans and papists to reform. To the present day, Worm notes, the Swedes sang this song with deep admiration.

Part IV: Anchoring the Myth

Reaching for the Green Valley

On a stone there is a poem
that is written in runic script.
The poem was not put there yesterday.
Between Norway and Jämteland,
it has been read by many women and men.
It has stood for many years.
It has now fallen over,
because of us …

Song of the Stone of the Green Valley (stanza 7)

The prophetic tradition, now popularised in a Swedish song, had wandered through various media and ideological landscapes across centuries. Catholics and Lutherans alike refashioned it according to their own agendas.11

Messenius had already noted the prophecy’s pragmatic use – and concluded that the entire tradition was likely invented to begin with. All this, he caustically concluded, seemed more likely than that a real stone would ever turn up in Jämtland.12

Ole Worm, however, had not given up.

The Danish antiquarian left nothing unattempted to investigate the Jämtland trace, he asserts in his Monumenta. In following the lines of the song up north, he was not alone.

Already in 1601, the father of Swedish runology Johannes Bureus (1568–1652 ) had written to the governor of Jämtland about the ‘rune stone in the Green Valley’ up north – yet to no avail.13 Worm sent letters to the then-archbishop in Uppsala who was in charge of Jämtland. They brought him a little closer – yet again, not close enough:

They say that there is a valley of that name in that region, and there are also rumours of a stone – but no one has yet been found to show what remains of it.

Ole Worm, Monumenta Danica, p. 311

The Northern Face of the Prophecy

Half a century later, things started to move again.

In the 1670s, when Olof Rudbeck was working on his Atlantica, the Swedish polymath sent out an expedition to the region that had defied the inquiries of Worm and Buraeus (see Part II). His Atlantica became the first book to print the illustration of a stone still found today near the Norwegian border, leaving it uncommented.14

Interest revived around the same time as the Swedish Board of Antiquities began compiling lists of ancient monuments. From all across the kingdom, they requested reports on antiquities that were capable of shedding light on Sweden’s past.

In 1685, the local judge Plantin followed up on such requests. Nobody he consulted in western Jämtland, Plantin related to the south, had heard anything about a ‘Stone in the Green Valley’.

What the men from Undersåker parish did report though was a stone near Skurdalsporten into Norway, inscribed with runes on its northern side.15

It was this object Peringskjöld came to see and draw two years later (see Part II). Yet it was only in the early 18th century that this stone was explicitly linked to the prophecy connected to a ‘Stone in the Green Valley’.

Christening the Stone

The work to institute this union was the most monumental one to appear in Sweden at the time.

When Olof Rudbeck was producing the volumes of his Atlantica, the artist Erik Dahlberg engaged in a project of even greater visual ambition. In his Suecia Antiqua et Hodierna (‘Ancient and Modern Sweden’), Dahlberg set out to depict cities, palaces, and antiquities from across the kingdom in lavish copperplate engravings.

For this, Dahlberg enjoyed enormous funding from the Swedish crown. The Suecia Antiqua et Hodierna was meant to visually represent the entire kingdom in unmatched grandeur. However, from the northern provinces of the kingdom (and that of Jämtland in particular), Dahlberg had little to represent.

Around 1700, the artist therefore seized on the rumours of a ‘Stone in the Green Valley’ up north to fill this gap. It was his Suecia Antiqua et Hodierna that gave the prophesied stone a face.

Among the 353 engravings of this work, a stone similar to the one in the Atlantica appears, here embedded in a mountainous landscape. The title locates the stone near Skurdal, in the parish of Undersåker. Here the name ‘Stone in the Green Valley’ first was used for that stone in print.

Dahlberg’s Design

Like Rudbeck, Dahlberg had never travelled to Jämtland himself.

Instead, he had gone through the governor of Jämtland. With a letter sent in 1700, Matthias Busch – land surveyor in Norrland – had forwarded a sketch of a stone he found near the Norwegian border, labelled the ‘Stone in the Green Valley’.

However, none of the persons he consulted, Busch warned, connected the stone to the prophetic song (they considered it a border stone instead). Furthermore, the natural surrounding did not seem to fit the story of ‘the’ stone at all.

If this was truly the ‘Green Valley’ of the song, the surveyor wrote, then either nature had changed dramatically over a few centuries – or the songwriters had never seen the place they described.16

Dahlberg, however, decided to override the land surveyor’s concerns.

He forwarded the sketch to Stockholm. On this basis, Johannes Litheim – one of the artists Dahlberg employed – proposed a first sketch for the Suecia’s engravings. In this, Litheim invented a ‘Green Valley’ and placed Busch’s drawing of the stone within it, embellishing the dramatic mountain landscape with alpine theatrics such as spruces, bear hunters, reindeer, and lemmings.17

Above this scene, the name ‘Stone in the Green Valley’ was placed, as given in the ancient prophecy. This way, the ‘Green Valley’ visually materialised – not from observation, but from artistic invention.

Disenchantment

The Suecia’s launched the ‘Stone in the Green Valley’ in Jämtland into public view as a visually powerful image. However, the complex tradition behind it remained invisible.

The explanatory texts that Dahlberg envisioned to accompany the work never made it into print. The engravings of the stone thus appeared without any discussion of the stone. This left the meaning of its lines as elusive as ever.

In the decades after the Suecia’s publication, real-life encounters with the mythical ‘Stone in the Green Valley’ had a rather sobering effect on many travellers.

Border inspector Nils Marelius noted nothing green at all about that fjäll-region when he passed the stone around 1750: he and his men hardly found enough fodder for two of their three horses.18

And then, there was the problem with the lines themselves.

Surveyor Busch had already cast doubt on the idea that the stone’s lines represented letters of any kind. In fact, as he related in his letter, many stones around Skurdalsporten exhibit similar patterns.

Coming visitors concurred.

In 1742, Daniel Tilas arrived to the site. In a geological handbook this Swedish mineralogist published two decades later, he dedicated several pages to the stone.

Tilas found the stone lying flat and – tongue-in-cheek – propped it back up again, as if to stall the old prophecy from fulfilling itself.

By the time he visited, Tilas relates, Dahlberg’s identification of this stone near the border had caught on with local farmers. He mentions the pride with which the men now told him that this was the ‘Stone in the Green Valley’ known from the famous song (and that its original inscription had effaced in the meantime).

In his own assessment, Tilas painted a more sobering picture.

He told that both Rudbeck and Dahlberg had exaggerated the regularity of the lines when printing the stone. For him, there was nothing special about them at all. He was convinced they were nothing more than cracks – natural formations, a simple game of nature.

All around him, Tilas points out, there were stones of this kind:

“This region has enough ‘Stones in the Green Valley’ for all the world to claim one,” the mineralogist concluded.19

Part V: Tourism and Restoration

And Along Came Tourists

Since Dahlberg’s Suecia antiqua et hodierna, the name ‘Stone in the Green Valley’ stuck with the Jämtland stone. 18th-century antiquarians continued to administer legend and history, collecting and interpreting the ever-growing body of material about the stone.20

When Johan Törnsten and Pehr Abraham Örnskjöld published their map of Jämtland-Härjedalen in 1771, a ‘Stone in the Green Valley’ appeared next to the Norwegian border. For decades, it flickered in and out of maps of the region.21

Similarly, the stone’s mysterious aura continued to persist against more rational voices.

In 1882, the railway connecting Östersund and Trondheim was completed. At Storlien, the last town before the Norwegian border, a kind of Swedish Zauberberg began attracting ‘clean-air guests’ (luftgäster) from the south. Both the Swedish Tourist Association (STF) and the Skiing Association (Skidfrämjandet) turned the site into a new centre for year-round mountain tourism.22

The efforts of these institutions also shifted the stone to the centre of new attention.

In reports published in the STF-journal, visitors to Storlien mentioned it as an attraction in the nearby fjäll; an object layered with historic meaning which was allegedly first inscribed by Saint Staffan himself.23

The cultural imprint the stone left during this period can be traced through newspapers publishing updates on the local sight, artists who imagined scenes from its alleged history for guide books on the now-accessible region, and even cigarette brands, which featured the stone in collectible card series.24

Flanking these popularising strands, scholars offered public lectures and published discussions of the stone. In these, they tried to disentangle an expanding net of lore from a stone that, as one author concluded, across centuries had become “a coat hanger for the Swedish version of the prophecy of the Stone in the Green Valley”.25

Fixing the Prophecy

The growing number of visitors, however, literally left their mark on the stone.

Already in 1742, when Daniel Tilas inspected the stone, he noted that its sides were covered with the marks of those attracted by its newfound fame. To these, Tilas added his own coat of arms, as he proudly relates in his report.

The habit of visitors leaving their scribbles continued for centuries.

In the early decades of the 20th century, the numbers of those who escaped the ‘dust and stench of gasoline’ for the ‘clean, light, almost intoxicating air’ at Storlien rose considerably.26 In 1933, Skidfrämjandet and the National Railway began expanding the hotel facilities.27

As tourist capacities increased, the mythical attraction near the border became more endangered. It was at this time when Skidfrämjandet launched an initiative to restore the carving-damaged stone on its territory.

Concerns about preservation prompted Skidfrämjandet to contact the National Board of Antiquities (RAA) in 1933. Plans for a restoration in the following summer took shape.

On 31 July 1934, RAA Director Karl Alfred Gustawsson met with Railway Board Secretary Carl Nordensson and regional antiquarian Eric Festin at the site.28 Photographs that Gustawsson took on this scouting trip show the object in question in a neglected state, covered with lichen and provisionally propped up with rocks.

As for the lines on its face, Gustawsson describes them“ristningar” (‘carvings’ – his quotation marks), later suspecting them to be natural formations (“naturbildningar”) that were touched up by human hands with rune-like marks.

During the visit, the men also discussed and defined steps of conservation. The RAA director explains that he personally marked a hole where the stone should be placed, a little eastwards on drier ground.

In late August, an RAA conservator and a photographer arrived to Storlien. On site, they supervised and documented the restoration works as instructed after the director’s visit.

The stone was moved ca. 20 meters eastwards, cleaned, and photographed. Moulds of its surface were created.29 Holes and recent carvings in the stone were mended.

Then, the stone was raised again and secured with two iron rods onto a rock plate, resting on a bed of concrete and crushed stone filled into the ground.

After the stone had been repositioned, an RAA plaque was installed nearby, pointing out the stone’s status as an ancient monument protected by law.30

Politics of Preservation

As the sun set over the ‘Green Valley’ in late August 1934, lines whose meaning had eluded generations brightly shimmered through the twilight.

As part of the restorations, white paint had been applied to the stone’s front side.31 The representatives of a government institution had given the stone a new face and position in the ‘Green Valley’. As they had done with rune stones further south,32 RAA used paint to highlight the lines and applied concrete and iron bars to fix this stone – an object whose symbolic power had rested on its capacity to tip over.

The 1934 restoration created a new layer in the stone’s ever changing history.

At a time when popular culture and expanding tourism had physically left their mark on it, RAA officials decided which traces to highlight and which ones to efface.

The RAA plaque placed next to the stone elevated the status of the humble stone to a monument of national interest. The measure also added official lustre to its status as a tourist attraction (the operation was fully paid for by the manager of the Storlien hotel).33

Painting the stone’s face and fixing it in the landscape, the restorations materialised one interpretation of the stone from its multi-layered history.

Not all were happy about the outcome.

From early on, regional antiquarian Eric Festin had deplored the vandalism of the stone and proposed its restoration.34 In 1933, RAA director Gustawsson involved Festin in the planning phase of the necessary works.

Festin proposed measures according to best practice, and was at Storlien in summer 1934, when Gustawsson came north to discuss them on site.

Although Festin seemed integrated in the process, his later words on the restorations read bitter.

In an article published the subsequent year, he complained that the works were carried out poorly. Moreover, the stone had been moved to a different place – further away from the border.

Festin had strong opinions about the stone’s original position as well as its function).35 At their meeting at the stone in July 1934, he deplored, it had been agreed that the stone would not be moved from its then position.

The RAA Director-General overrode this agreement with the stroke of his spade.

Part VI: The Circle Closes

By 1934, the elusive object of prophecy had become fixed as a stabilised object – anchored by concrete, paint, and institutional authority.

Today, the ‘Stone in the Green Valley’ still stands at the site Gustawsson marked on the ground. Its current position and form are one layer among many, each invisibly inscribed into the stone’s long and shifting history – overlapping, contradicting, effacing each other in ways that from our vantage point may remain elusive.

Perhaps, it is from this quality that the lure of the stone ultimately springs.

Rather than bearing a single meaning, the stone stands as a tangible symbol of the ongoing, layered process by which humans connect dots and trace lines in their quest for resonance with the world around them – either individually or through institutions they build to hold meaning.

From the antiquarians’ search to physically anchor the prophecy may speak a deeper hope – that even in times of upheaval, a message may still be inscribed in the world, a form of guidance to be discovered and deciphered in that palimpsestic process by which our mind inscribes it with meaning.

This process goes in cycles and ultimately may never be complete.

In the years around 1940, when Axel Nelson – librarian at the National Library at the time – edited the Swedish text of the Atlantica, he also touched on the diagram of the stone that Rudbeck left unexplained.

In his commentary, he disputed the idea that his student Samuel Otto (see Part II) had drawn the paper sketch preserved in Stockholm from the actual stone in Jämtland.36

Otto had drawn the stone from this sketch, Nelson argued.

Encountering a stone at the border, he speculated, Otto had first sketched the lines of a naturally creased stone on a piece of paper. Then, he could have embellished these lines with patterns reminiscent of Sámi drums – ritual objects that Otto (himself coming from Norrland) had helped Rudbeck acquire.37

Otto may have carved his invented design into an actual stone, Nelson speculated. This way, he created a hybrid artefact at the Jämtland border.

After the return of the 1675 expedition, he left a paper sketch thereof with Rudbeck. Though he had it printed in the Atlantica’s volume of plates, he never came to unfold the ideas which this fabrication was supposed to buttress.38 In any case, it would not have been the first time in which Rudbeck had evidence created to tell a story according to his agenda.39

Whatever master narrative Rudbeck had in mind – whether and how he related it to the prophecy of the ‘Stone in the Green Valley’ – remains a mystery.

What remains are furrows on a stone, shaped by time and centuries of intervention; paper trails that lead into the history of its readings, and the lines that we continue to draw between them, in our ongoing quest to read meaning from this world.

Further Reading and References

All translations and photographs are my own unless stated otherwise.

Acknowledgments

For their support of my research for this article I would like to thank the staff of National Libary Stockholm, RAA Stockholm, Jamtli Östersund, and Järnvägsmuseum Gävle.

A Note on the Visby Stone

In Sweden, too, people continued to link the prophecy of the ‘Stone in the Green Valley’ to further local objects and contemporary events.

In Visby (Gotland), there is a sitting slab is preserved in a niche in the town wall. It is marked with years linked to events from the reign of Gustav III. Underneath, an inscription quotes the song’s line ‘Alltid står stenen i grönan dal’ – (‘Always stands the Stone in the Green Valley‘) – lines that may have resonated with wish for political stability associated with the regent’s period.

Please note the general bibliography available here.

Postscript (Autumn 2025)

Long before plans for Frozen Atlantis took shape, the lines by Dag Hammarskjöld quoted above had served as a kind of manifesto on the inner journey leading towards it – a journey the film would eventually come to chart.1

At the time that voyage began, the life and writings of this Swedish diplomat had served as ‘waymarks’ on my own path. The article below stems from a phase in the project of broad curiosity, in which I took first steps exploring alternative modes of storytelling.

There is a line running from that time of free exploration to the first test screenings of what would grow into film. In April 2025, we presented early versions to test audiences at Stockholm and Falun.

Back then, I envisioned the film to open on several ‘balconies’ – vantage points from which the audience would watch the ‘actual story’ unfold. The rough cut we screened began with the lines quoted above – words I had imagined as a frame, if not sum, of the film that followed.

The feedback from the April test screenings was encouraging. Yet as a result, we decided to simplify the film’s opening structure. The quote by Hammarskjöld was one of the darlings that did not survive into the final cut.

And yet, the words have stayed with me – outlining an inner landscape that the film came to explore in visual form.

The story I wrote under the title The Flowers bears witness to moments of resonance I felt with the landscapes that Dag Hammarskjöld explored in his literary work – a side-track I was fortunate to explore as part of the project, and that would ultimately shape its nature.

Before the Harvest

Så vilar himlen mot jorden played the song from the stereo. So rests the sky against the earth.

From the windows of my rental car, I saw the coastal wind caressing the yellow fields.

It was late summer, and the crops had already begun to bow toward the earth. Further along the horizon, light clouds drifted over the dunes that rose like a gentle bulwark against the Baltic Sea.

I was driving down to Österlen, a sunlit corner in the south-east of Sweden. Between the coastal road and the dunes, a few cottages dotted the landscape, hiding among pastures and patches of forest that breathed a resinous fragrance into the balmy morning air of late July.

It was the last stretch of my journey, and the stereo played a recent tribute to the poet whose summer house I was about to reach, almost six decades after his death.

In the rearview mirror of time, the journey had begun two decades earlier.

One of my elementary school teachers was married to a pastor. In his prayer book he carried a set of white preaching bands, and at a moment’s notice, so I imagined, he could transform from layman into priest, ready to perform spontaneous weddings on the spot.

He was a friend of my parents, and our paths crossed again many years later, when I sought his counsel during a family crisis.

“There are two books I read every year,” he mentioned to me on one of these occasions. “Marc Aurel’s Meditations and the Waymarks by Dag Hammarskjöld.”

At the time it was the Roman Emperor rather than the Swedish diplomat who impressed me. Now, on the front seat of my rental car, dog-eared pages of Waymarks fluttered in the winds, the margins full of notes.

The Fragrance of the Soil

My first glimpse of the summer house came from the parking lot: a black roof stretched over the whitewashed walls of a former barn.

Gravel crunched under my shoes as I walked down the narrow lane, the sound of my steps blending with the occasional moo from the fields.

Behind a wooden fence, a few cows grazed, unimpressed by an early-morning passerby. Spots of purple blossoms dotted the pasture dry from summer, in whose middle rose a maypole rose.

A few weeks ago, the country had celebrated the longest day of the year with a night of singing and dancing and the picking of seven flowers said to bring dreams of one’s future love.

Here too, a blue and yellow pennant draped over wilting garlands that bore witness to the the recent holiday. A breeze rustled the brittle wreaths, carrying the earthy scent toward the former farmhouse.

In 1957, Dag Hammarskjöld acquired the estate of Backåkra. It was the year he was appointed to his second term as Secretary-General of the United Nations.

For a while I lingered before the black door, listening to the leaves in the crown of a nearby oak. Steel cables clanged against the two flagpoles bearing the Swedish flag, resembling the sound of wind playing among the masts of moored ships.

The Baltic line here is a black line on the horizon. A short walk from the estate, across the pastures and a coastal forest, the sandy beaches of Sandhammaren line the shore. Here Hammarskjöld’s longing to retreat found an anchor during his time at the UN, a hope to experience nature with all senses: the whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the soil, the caresses of the wind, the embrace of water and light.2

'So That You May Climb to Even Greater Height'

In the 1960s, Hammarskjöld’s retreat was transformed into a museum dedicated to his memory. After substantial renovations, Backåkra had recently re-opened to the public again.

In the weeks before my visit, I had been corresponding with Karin, the museum’s curator. It preserves more than seven hundred objects from the possession of Hammarskjöld.

One of them in particular had brought me to this far-flung corner of Sweden: the ice axe in the first photograph ever taken atop Mount Everest. “So that you may climb to even greater heights”, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay had engraved on a silver hull protecting the shaft of the axe. A year after the ascent, he presented it to Hammarskjöld in Geneva.

Originally, I had come to Backåkra to research the story of the axe further. Yet there was more to be discovered.

Several of the rooms are reconstructions of Hammarskjöld’s Upper East Side apartment, where he lived for eight years during his tenure as UN Secretary-General. The furniture, and even the books, are arranged exactly as in the original apartment.3

As a reader and writer, Hammarskjöld was deeply interested in all sorts of literature, but poetry in particular. Thus, an extensive private library had followed him from Sweden to his diplomatic post in New York.

Today, Backåkra holds over 1500 books, with a similar number kept at the Royal Library in Stockholm. Upon my arrival, Karin showed me the index for the local collection.

Studying this fingerprint of Hammarskjöld’s intellectual world, I began to look forward to the rest of the day, when I would be free to lose myself in his books.

On the way to his study, I followed Karin through the exhibition spaces where I had just seen the glass display case with Norgay’s axe. On a long wooden table, desk lamps illuminated reading copies of books about the Secretary-General’s life. A year after the re-opening, the wood still smelled fresh.

For Swedes of an older generation, the man whom Kennedy called ‘the most important statesman of the twentieth century’ is still the most visible example of their nation’s ideals. Today, memory of Hammarskjöld’s name has faded, while the UN is criticised for being a bureaucratic behemoth no longer capable of living up to its agenda and mission.

From the open loft above the table hung a UN flag. For a moment, I remembered the summit photograph of Tenzing Norgay, showing a small rag of the blue-and-white banner tied to the top of his ice axe, raised into the winds that sweep the top of Everest.

Interviews and archival footage from Hammarskjöld’s two terms flickered across the flat screens on the walls. As I passed, I caught fragments of his voice from the headphones hanging on the wall. His native language still shone through the colour of the vowels and in the melody that carried the English in which he diplomatically defied Khrushchev’s demands to resign from his position.

Exploring the Study

In the next room, two windows flooded the study with the light of Swedish summer. Beside the door stood wooden object with a concave surface.

“The staff had no idea what this thing was – so complicated to vacuum around,” Karin explained. “That was until Kofi Annan visited in 1999,” she smiled. “The Secretary-General was surprised to see an Ashanti headrest from his home country on the floor of a former farmhouse in southern Sweden.”

A glass case against the wall held an antique vase and a replica of the Santa Maria, the ship on which Columbus sailed across the Atlantic. Hammarskjöld had received the model of on the first United Nations Day in office. He originally kept the model on the mantelpiece of his NYC apartment. Beneath it, Tenzing’s axe would later hang.

On the wall behind Hammarskjöld’s desk hung a black-and-white panorama of the Gauri Shankar range in the Himalayas.

“Hammarskjöld took those photographs in 1960,” Karin said. “That year he was on a mission in Nepal. On the last day of his visit, the king lent him his personal plane for a courtesy flight in the Himalayas.”

“He would later publish an article in National Geographic,” she added, pointing to a copy of the magazine on a music stand.4

Reaching behind the frame, Karin unlocked a hinge. The photograph swung open. Behind, seventeen wooden rollers came into view, each tied with white cotton ribbon. With a gentle tug, Karin untied one of them, unrolling a map of the United States.

“A National Geographic Society map cabinet,” she explained. “Every American president since World War II has received one of these.”

“For Hammarskjöld, they made an exception,” she continued with a note of pride.

Beneath the map, I noticed a row of books placed on a low shelf just above the floor, folio-sized volumes that stood against the wall, protected in a plexiglass case.

I squatted down to read the titles. There were some old acquaintances amongst them.

Between books on Greek art or the Impressionists, I spotted Manker’s large-scale volumes on Sámi drums. Further along were seventeenth-century publications on Sweden, including Erik Dahlberg’s Suecia antiqua et hodierna (“Ancient and Modern Sweden”), with its lavish engravings of buildings and monuments of the Kingdom.

Then, among the Latin-titled prints, Olof Rudbeck’s Atlantica – two volumes.

A shiver ran down my spine.

For years, I had been studying this work by one of Europe’s last universal geniuses.

Olof Rudbeck, a professor of anatomy at Uppsala University, published the four volumes of Atlantica from 1679 to 1702. In the monumental work, he presented ‘evidence’ that Sweden was Europe’s first high culture – the cradle of languages and the origin of classical mythology. For him and dozens who followed his ideas, the high civilization described by Plato under the name of Atlantis was, in reality, Sweden (more on this in the About section).

Libraries in Europe preserve several dozen copies of this bizarre yet fascinating work, and whenever I get the opportunity, I study them. However, no catalogue I knew of listed the two volumes in Hammarskjöld’s private library.

What I did know though was that throughout his life, Hammarskjöld collected books on everything Swedish. Besides, he cultivated friendships with bibliophiles such as Uno Willers, head of the Royal Library at Stockholm and a close friend of his.

Still, I was amazed. An earnest reader, Hammarskjöld might well have belonged to the small readership of the Atlantica – or at least to those who could appreciate Rudbeck’s quirky scholarship enough to acquire two historic volumes of the work.

I turned to Karin.

“Is there a way I could see these books,” I asked, pointing to the two volumes behind plexiglass. She thought for a moment.

“Let me talk to Claes,” she replied.

Later that day, Karin’s husband and I returned to the study. Carefully, we lifted the plexiglass case off the books. I picked up the two volumes and placed them on Hammarskjöld’s desk.

“You’ll be all right here, won’t you?” Claes asked.

I nodded.

“And do use the chair,” he said as he headed back to the ticket office. I nodded again, flattered by his trust, standing alone in Hammarskjöld’s study.

Digressions at the Desk

My eyes began to wander over Hammarskjöld’s desk and the chair behind it, over its cognac brown leather backrest, edged with brass rivets. Designed by Carl Malmsten, Karin had told me. On the desktop lay a few personal items: a typewriter under a green protective cover, a lamp, an analogue clock, a miniature UN flag on its pole.

Among them was a further object to which Karin had drawn my attention before, a clay bird used as a paperweight. “The sanningsfågel,” she had explained – ‘the Bird of Truth’. “Sometimes, Hammarskjöld’s friends said, he would turn the bird toward a guest – to make sure that he’d hear the truth.”

I took a seat in the chair. Beneath the desk, I felt my shoes sink into a soft Persian rug. Having arranged the two volumes, I turned the clay bird toward the books, and let my fingers wander over their heavy leather binding.

What will I find?, I wondered. A dedication, perhaps; bookmarks, some personal notes?

As I relished the moment of anticipation, a flicker from the corner of my eye. I turned my head. Behind a stained-glass window with Hammarskjöld’s initials, a cow swung its tail.

A gift from his friend, the painter Bo Beskow, Karin had explained the artwork that blurred the cow into a patch of yellow and blue as it strolled through the pasture.

My view wandered back to the whitewashed surface of the farmhouse wall across the desk. It landed on an abstract painting, again by Beskow.

In 1957, Hammarskjöld invited the painter to visit him in New York. That same year, the Secretary-General had a non-denominational meditation room installed in the UN headquarters.

At first, Hammarskjöld had asked French modernists such as Jacques Villon or Georges Braque to design its wall paintings. As Braque couldn’t travel overseas, Hammarskjöld decided to assign it to Beskow. The draft of his design remained at Backåkra.

Beskow and Hammarskjöld had already met in 1953 – not far from here beyond the dunes, in the cottage Beskow owned at Rytterskulle. That year, he painted Hammarskjöld’s portrait, when he was still working for the Swedish foreign office.

Beskow was among the few people by whom he felt truly seen. The man who first captured Hammarskjöld on canvas became a close friend – perhaps the closest he ever had.

Between the Lines

My gaze returned to the weighty tome in front of me. Carefully, I lifted the cover. With a slight groan, the leather binding bent.

Along the side of the front cover, traces of sealing wax. The paper it once held had been removed. In the upper right corner was Hammarskjöld’s ex libris, the paper emblem he used to mark his books. A pair of crossed hammers with his monogram, the UN logo below.

“Call me hammer-shield”, the diplomat would tell journalists struggling with his name. “That’s actually what it means.”

I touched the corner of the first page. The seventeenth-century paper, made from cloth rags instead of woodchips, felt thick and heavy. I began turning the pages.

The margins did contain some notes, I discovered browsing through the volumes; some jottings in ink and pencil. From documents I had seen in the Royal Library in Stockholm, I was familiar with the Secretary-General’s minute handwriting, which colleagues at the UN referred to as ‘Hammarskjöld’s Arabic’.

These annotations, however, stemmed from previous owners. Disenchantment set in as I turned the pages. There seemed to be no traces of Hammarskjöld himself.

I flipped through the Atlantica, through its familiar maps and illustrations, disappointed.

Until – until I turned that page.

Chapter Three, “On the Time when Sweden was First Settled and by What People”. On the column of Latin words, just beneath the heading, lay two pressed blossoms, four leaves, and a stem.

My heart missed a beat.

What if? the thought shot through my head: what if Hammarskjöld had picked these plants?

I couldn’t know if or when or where he had done so. I didn’t even know what I was looking at. But as to why he would have done that – after all that I had read before about the man, his poetry, his love of nature, and his hope to retreat here, to a home secluded in the nature of southern Sweden – the answer felt intuitively clear.

'All Sorts of Plants Salute the Lord of this House'

From the desk, my gaze wandered out the window again, across the pastures leading to the sea. Somewhere down there stood the first house Hammarskjöld had bought in Österlen. Backåkra, where I had come, had been the second.

In 1953, Hammarskjöld met Beskow at his place to have his portray painted. He knew the landscape from cycling tours he undertook as young man, along the gentle dunes and the wild shores covered in driftwood and shipwrecks.

In the course of their sessions, Hammarskjöld had told Beskow how much these surroundings resonated with him. It had registered with the painter that his new friend was seriously looking for a place to retreat, somewhere in the green and close to the sound of the Baltic waves.

Just after Dag had started his position in NYC in 1953, Beskow wrote to him about a farmer selling a house nearby. Hammarskjöld took the opportunity and bought the old fisherman’s cottage near Hagestad.

His duties in New York allowed the diplomat to drop by only a few days each year. While Hammarskjöld was across the Atlantic, Beskow oversaw the renovations of the house his friend had bought.

With his letters, he sent regular reports and photographs. A few weeks earlier, I had read some of them in the Royal Library in Stockholm. Beskow, so I had learned on that visit to the Special Reading Room, had the wonderful habit of illustrating letters he sent to close friends.

In one of them from 1954, Beskow drew the cottage his friend had acquired the year before. A carpet of green pours out in front of the house. In the clear sky above, a flock of birds passes over (perhaps on their way back from the south?). Below, bare birch trees and hedges that still await the touch of spring.

“The evening sun gilds your house,” Beskow wrote, “and thousands of crocuses and grape hyacinths and primula and all sorts of plants gleam and delight, and salute the lord of this house. Your beach troll is keeping guard.”

Then, in English: “Remember?”5

Remember.

The year before, Hammarskjöld had spent a few summer days in Österlen. He passed them with Beskow watching birds, chasing butterflies, picking flowers, collecting shells and draping sea weed on driftwood, leaving behind bearded faces on the beach. The coming year, however, he could not be there, to witness as spring arrived at his new place.

In a a tender gesture, Bo drew for his friend what he was denied to see.

Waymarks

In 1953, Hammarskjöld had become the leader of the UN when the young institution was in a deep crisis. He had a reputation as a hard-working diplomat, a self-disciplined Protestant, a somewhat aloof intellectual who kept his distance.

During his tenure as Secretary-General, the UN emerged as a protector of new democracies, inconvenient to both the Eastern Bloc and the West alike. Hammarskjöld’s esteem rose as he defused international conflicts. At the height of the Suez Crisis, the coasts of Österlen rose on his horizon of longing – a harbour of inner peace that, ultimately, remained out of reach.

The world is slightly mad, and the more you are compelled to witness this, the more you long for good, wise friends in a quiet nook, where you don't listen to the radio and are more interested in the migrating birds (that probably by now, passing Rytterskulle, have returned to the frogs in the Nile (not minding Nasser).

Dag Hammarskjöld, Letter to Bo Beskow, 15 September 19566

Behind the façade of the skilled and effective diplomat, Hammarskjöld longed deeply for friendship, for quiet, for nature. The life he chose – or that chose him, as he put it – left many of those longings unfulfilled.

Throughout his adult life, Hammarskjöld gave voice to his doubts, inner conflicts, and insights in writing. A manuscript collecting his reflections and poems was found when friends cleared out his New York apartment after his death. Poeticised by W.H. Auden, it eventually appeared in English as Markings (from the original Vägmärken, literally Waymarks).

The Consolation of Flowers

What is my role – what is our role – in creation? This question runs through the manuscript of Waymarks. For him, much of the answer rooted in a deep sense of spirituality, revolving around perceiving human existence as part of something larger. Experiencing nature with all his senses offered glimpses of insights that he sought to capture in his writing:

The language of flowers, mountains, shores, human bodies: the interplay of light and shade in a look, the aching beauty of a neckline, the grail of the white crocus on the alpine meadow in the morning sunshine –– words in a transcendental language of the senses.

Dag Hammarskjöld, Waymarks, 1950 (p. 42)

Yet there were aspects of the human experience to which Hammarskjöld remained only a bystander. He was never married, and we know of no significant relationships he maintained. Beskow was one of the friends Hammarskjöld trusted enough to share the dilemma he felt between achieving personal happiness and following a higher calling:

When I see other possibilities (like yours), I can feel a short pain of having missed something, but the final reaction is: what must be, is right.

Dag Hammarskjöld, Letter to Bo Beskow, 12 November 1955 7

After Beskow bought his home at Rytterskulle in 1945, the cottage on the hill with its large garden had become a place of inner nourishment for the artist. For long periods during the year, he and his wife Greta retreated there from Stockholm.

Through his friend in Österlen, Hammarskjöld communed with a world that for him felt mostly out of reach. When he visited in the summers, he and Beskow would try the herb liquors he concocted from the plants in his garden, drink red wine, and talk into the wee hours about art, international affairs, or matters of the heart.

For both men, the garden was a place to reconnect with what mattered to them, to feel themselves as part of nature’s cycles of growth, maturity, and decay:

When the nightmares set in, I go out with a glass of sherry in the herb garden and watch as the sun rises over the hills and feel how the herbs play their organ of scents to excess. It is remarkable what a garden helps. Banal – but it's banal truths for which one sometimes must be grateful.

Bo Beskow, Letter to Dag Hammarskjöld, 23 August 1953 8

With his letters, Beskow shared deeply from the world for which his friend longed. Each brief visit to Österlen refreshed his memory that across the Atlantic, there was a place abounding in all that nourished his inner life – close friends, nature, silence, and literature.

I dream of private writing down at Hagestad after the five years of fighting here. Then, if ever ...

Dag Hammarskjöld, Letter to Bo Beskow, Summer 1953 9

Seventeen Syllables

From his leather chair, I watched the afternoon light from the window cast shadows on the pages of Rudbeck’s Atlantica.

Carefully, I picked up the withered leaves, turning their brittle stems between my fingertips. Over time, the blossoms had turned a withered yellow, their faded colour speaking of an attempt to preserve what could not be preserved.

Buddha had tried this too, the thought shot through my mind.10

When Siddhartha married, he received a palace that was surrounded by the Garden of Four Seasons. He loved the early blossoms that reminded him of the beauty of his wife. And so Siddhartha gave her the room overlooking the Garden of Spring.

However, Siddhartha soon had to witness its flowers wither away in the tropical climate. His joy changed to grief. The rapid decay of the sensual pleasures that plants exuded, so legend has it, led him to gather and carefully preserve flowers. Thus the tradition of pressing flowers began, in an effort to keep their beauty from decaying.

Hammarskjöld was familiar with the language of flowers and seasons as expressed in Eastern traditions such as ikebana or the haiku. When his friends cleared out his NYC apartment after his death, they found a copy of Harold G. Henderson’s Introduction to Haiku among the books on the bedside table.

In 1959, Hammarskjöld had written a series of these seventeen-syllable poems. The poems recall his childhood in Uppsala – memories of collecting plants and insects around the castle where he grew up, capturing impressions of Swedish nature as it moved through the seasons.

In the shadow of the castle
The flowers closed
Long before nightfall.

Dag Hammarskjöld, Waymarks, 1959 (p. 178).

It seemed as if this genre of Japanese poetry, tied so closely to plants and the seasons, had resonated with Hammarskjöld in the last years of his life. At this time, he sought to reconnect with early memories of the home and the nature he had left behind. “Seventeen syllables,” he began the 1959 haiku cycle, “Opened the door / To memory, to meaning.”11

I arched my back and considered further.

If Hammarskjöld himself pressed these plants in his Atlantica, then this copy must have been near the place where he picked them. Reflecting on this assumption, my view wandered through the stained-glass window again, toward the horizon.

From somewhere in the pasture, I heard mooing.

The Search Begins

After taking some photographs of the plants, I rose from the desk and went in search of Karin.

“I’m sure Dag left them in there”, she grinned ear to ear after I had shared the find.

Together, we checked the local index of Hammarskjöld’s books. Olof Rudbeck, Atland eller Manheim, vol. 1 and vol. 2, it read.

“Are there more detailed records of how and when Hammarskjöld would have acquired his copies of the Atlantica?” I asked.

Karin shook her head.

I need an expert on historical plant specimens, I texted my librarian friend Peter in Uppsala as I walked back the gravel road to the parking lot, I adding a few snapshots to the message.

I zoomed in on the photographs once again. The penciled note from the inside of one of the bindings caught my eye. In Swedish handwriting, a ‘head librarian’ had noted that the book was cleared to be sold off by the ‘University Library’.

I fired away a second message. And who could help me track down former head librarians in Sweden?

Then, I looked up from the screen. In the pastures, a few cows sank their heads into the sun-dried grass. A little further on, I spotted a meditation circle on the site that Hammarskjöld had originally reserved for a small chapel.

Could it have been some flower he picked around here?, I wondered.

My view roamed across the fields. Behind the wooden fences, ghost-like patches hovered over the grass, poplar fluff stirred by the breeze from the sea.

I don’t even know what to look for, I realised, and got into the car.

Lessons in Botany

When I opened my laptop back in Stockholm, the first replies to my queries had come in.

From a colleague in Gothenburg I learned that the pencilled note in the Atlantica had been written by a head librarian at the Helsinki National Library (still called University Library back then), in charge from 1934 until 1954. Hammarskjöld’s copies – or at least one of them, so it now seemed – had probably been sorted out for sale before he left for the UN.

The books may have been among the weighty folios he packed for New York, I thought; trusted companions travelling with him from Sweden. In my mind’s eye, I could see a phalanx of staff on a rural airstrip near Stockholm, manhandling book crates bound for the Upper East Side.

Picking flowers and chasing insects counted among the child-like joys in which Hammarskjöld and Beskow indulged during the precious summer days they shared in Österlen, and from which he returned rejuvenated to New York.

Exhibited in the same glass case that kept the ice axe, I remembered his atlas of butterflies, and the handwriting of an eleven-year-old pupil across the open title page: Dag Hammarskjöld 1916, Castle, Uppsala.

Collecting and identifying specimens of plants and insects was a hobby dear to many Swedish children at the time. In Sweden, creating herbaria from pressed plants had a long tradition in schools. After summer vacation, children returned from all parts of the country with their harvests that were then presented and identified at school.

Hammarskjöld grew up in this tradition. His home town Uppsala had been the place where Carl Linnaeus devised his System of Nature. For this eighteenth-century botanist, plants and the divine order he discerned in them were similar to what Hammarskjöld, in his own poetry, called “words in a transcendental language.”

Linnaeus dedicated his life to deciphering this hidden language of the divine. For Hammarskjöld, too, knowing nature was part of a spiritual path, and in this Linnaeus had been a guide. In his NYC apartment, historical editions, commemorative coins, and paintings of the “Flower King” filled a shrine-like niche.

The coins on top of his shelf date from 1957, the year Sweden celebrated the 250th anniversary of Linnaeus’s birth. The same year, Hammarskjöld gave the presidential address at the annual meeting of the Swedish Academy. As a member of the committee that awards the Nobel Prize, be presented a paper “The Linnaeus Tradition and Our Time.”

Legend has it that Hammarskjöld prepared the manuscript just days earlier, while sitting in the UN assembly as an Indian delegate monopolised the floor with a tedious monologue. The speech voiced a deep admiration for the wonder that Linnaeus rekindled in nature: his ability to read the small print in a language that for Hammarskjöld, too, expressed the harmony in God’s creation:

As an observer and a name-giver, Linnaeus taught us to see with insight, but freely as when ‘it is ten in the morning in the head and heart.’ With the creative power of the poet, he showed us how better to capture and hold the elusive experience of the moment in the net of language.

Dag Hammarskjöld, The Linnaeus Tradition and Our Time (1957) 12

In several of his 1959 haiku, Hammarskjöld recalls the greenery around Uppsala Castle where he had gone on his first herbationes as a young boy – the hands-on explorations of the natural world that Linnaeus had introduced into the university curriculum.13

However, since Hammarskjöld started his job at the UN, it had become increasingly difficult for him to immerse in nature this way, even for a few days. In 1959, he was midway into his second term. Crises such as the one escalating in Laos only allowed for two brief visits to Backåkra.

In the meantime, Beskow carried forward the plans they had made for the estate and wrote to his friend about the progress. One of the letters Beskow sent late that summer opens with a list of Linnaean plant names, along with their Swedish counterparts.

This is to inform you about some of the plants that grow on your estate, he explained after an inspecting stroll he had taken across the property Hammarskjöld acquired in 1957. Both shared the hope to turn it into a protected area – a place that would allow future generations to learn to read in that ‘language of flowers’.

Botanical Revelations

A few days after my return from Backåkra, the mails that I had sent off in search for answers had spread out. Among the echos I received was a reply from Mats, an expert on historic plant material at Uppsala University. On the way to Stockholm, I had forwarded my shots from Hammarskjöld’s Atlantica to him.

“Seems like Philadelphus coronarius,” his email read, which I now opened back in the Royal Library.

Immediately, I looked up the Linnaean Latin.

“Mock-orange.” “White pipe tree.”

The sweet fragrance of spring walks in Rome returned to me, and I remembered the cascades of white blossoms spilling over ruined walls.

“In general, it’s difficult to date historic plant specimens,” his mail continued. “Could be a few decades, but also a few centuries.”14

The specimens could have been placed in the book much earlier, long before it was sold in Helsinki. Someone probably checked the volumes beforehand – and yet, even then, it is possible that the flowers simply went noticed.

So perhaps he had picked them, I thought. There seemed to be no way to prove it. But all ambiguity aside, which the academic in me acknowledged, I wanted the dots to connect.

A Picture Forms

I began to imagine how he had picked the flowers, on a brief escape from his apartment on the Upper East Side, during a stroll through Central Park.

A picture began to form in my mind: Hammarskjöld at his desk in the last summer of his life. That evening, Sweden must have felt far away. The year before, in 1960, a humanitarian crisis had begun to escalate in Africa.

He had already travelled to the Congo three times. For Hammarskjöld, retreating to his homeland had not been an option. In New York, debates on how to resolve the Congo Crisis trailed his trips around the globe.

Perhaps it was after one of those days in the UN assembly – on the way home, with dinner guests expected – that he asked his driver to stop near Central Park.

Behind the gates, the mock-orange blossoms perfumed the evening air.

Perhaps they kindled one of the “elusive experiences of the moment” as he inhaled their fragrance amid all the human folly and destruction he was grappling with. The flowers were in bloom again, as they had been the Junes before – their blossoms reminding of the restorative power that, even in the light of disenchantment, abides in nature’s cycles.

But it was an uphill battle. The summer before, Congo had elected a government. A few months later, Belgian forces began their withdrawal. Six decades of colonial rule had come to an end. Congo had become independent.

Yet with Western and Soviet intelligence agencies operating in the background, factions and mining companies quickly began vying for control of the country’s rich resources. In 1960, the new republic under President Lumumba became a member of the UN.

A year later, Congo’s elected head of government was assassinated. The troops that the UN had dispatched to stabilise the young democracy had failed.

Instead, the Blue Helmets soon found themselves fighting rebel troops and mercenaries, backed by Belgian mining companies and foreign intelligence services.

It was a mess, to say the least.

The morning after that imagined visit to Central Park, Hammarskjöld’s driver was already waiting to take him back to the UN. The night had been short, and his exhaustion deepened by the day. As he gathered his thoughts for the day in his study, his glance passed over Beskow’s latest letter, and the still-fresh blossoms he had picked the night before.

A sweet fragrance lingered in his study.

He stretched his arms from his desk chair. The muscles around his neck felt tense. Then, his ears caught the ticking of his watch beneath the sleeve.

For one last moment, he leaned back in his chair. Gently, he twisted the stems of the plants between his fingers, watching the yellow pistils shift at the edge of his vision as he drifted into thought. Toward the windows, a humming A/C blocked his view.

“This will be the closest I get this year,” he may have thought as he took a last inhale of the fragrance that still lingered in the blossoms.

Perhaps it was then that he reached behind him, toward the large volumes he kept on the floor. From their row, he grabbed one of the heavy Atlantica folios.

And as he placed the white blossoms between the pages of Rudbeck’s learned madness, he thought of his hometown, where the volumes had come off the press, the nearby castle where he had grown up, the trees and flowers growing on its slopes, and the treasured days of childhood foraging – memories that rose for a brief moment before he closed the leather cover.

Stale air escaped from the pages, tinged with a faint note of citrus.

Eternal Recurrence

It was weeks later that Hammarskjöld got a few days of rest – not in Sweden, but along the Hudson River. At Brewster, the diplomat kept a cottage where he retreated with a few close friends.

They had never seen Hammarskjöld so exhausted and gloomy as in that August, some of them later remembered. Most days, they recalled, he spent alone outside – writing or listening to the birds in the hour before sunrise.

A few poems exist which Hammarskjöld composed during this time. One of them describes a meadow near Poughkeepsie.

Seven weeks earlier, he recalled, around the weeks of midsummer, the same meadow had been white with ox-eye daisies. It was a sight that reminded him of the precious weeks so dear to his home in Sweden – of wandering barefoot across the grass, of picking the seven flowers that, placed under the pillow, carry dreams revealing the future partner. And yet, here too, across the fields of America, nature had offered glimpses of that annual wonder of renewal:

Seven weeks have gone by
Seven kinds of blossoms
Have been picked or mowed.
Now the leaves of the Indian corn grow broad
And its cobs make much of themselves,
Waxing fat and fertile.
Was it here,
Here, that paradise was revealed
For one brief moment
On a night in midsummer?

Dag Hammarskjöld, Waymarks, 1961:18

For a while, I watched the wind rustle the leaves over Humlegården Park, still caught in the image that had spun in my head. From a distance I heard bell ring as the watchman announced the end of reading time.

I was about to close my laptop and call it a day when another mail popped up in my inbox. It had been the middle of the night in NYC when I had written to Daniel at the Botanical Garden in Manhattan earlier that day.

“What about Philadelphus coronarius in Central Park in the years around 1960”, I had asked.

“Frederick Olmsted, one of the designers of Central Park, was fond of Philadelphus, Deutzia, Forsythia, Rhodotypus, Syringa and other profusely-flowering shrubs that would make a dramatic show, fill large spaces and withstand the volume of traffic in Central Park”, he now replied. “These shrubs were planted early in the Park’s history and many of them have persisted to this day.”

“Today, Philadelphus coronarius blooms between late May and early June in Central Park”, Daniel continued. “In recent decades, the flowers have begun blooming earlier each year as global temperatures increase.”

“The phenomenon is called phenology,” he concluded his mail. “I’m sure DH would have been interested in it.”

Gethsemane 1961

Dag Hammarskjöld died on 18 September 1961, when his plane crashed over Central Africa. He was on the way to negotiate a cease-fire between the UN troops and Katangese rebels.15

The Secretary-General’s bed from the night before was untouched, his companions later reported. After the staff and guests had left to get a few hours rest, Hammarskjöld had gone out in the garden.

Dag spent his last night outdoors, a close friend recalled.16

Beneath rustling leaves and among the scent of flowers, he had waited for the birds to begin their morning song. ◆

Further Readings and References

All translations and photographs are my own unless stated otherwise.

A previous version of this article was first published on Too Long, Didn’t Read, an online platform we launched to explore alternative forms of storytelling. It is reposted here together with a postscript and minor modifications to content, layout, notes, and updates of links.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Daniel Atha, Claes and Karin Erlandsson, Mika Hakkarainen, Stephen Harris, Mats Hjertson, Anders Larsson, Peter Sjökvist, and Anna Svensson for their support and feedback.

Today, the estate Hammarskjöld acquired at Backåkra in 1957 serves as a museum and residence for the Swedish Academy. It is open to visitors during the summer months.

Bo Beskow recounts his friendship with Dag Hammarskjöld in his book Dag Hammarskjöld. Strictly Personal, Garden City 1969.

I quote Hammarskjöld's Vägmärken in Leif Sjöberg’s translation that was 'poeticised' by W.H. Auden (see below, note 1). The Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation has also published an edition and translation by Bernhard Erling online.

So far, the provenance for Hammarskjöld’s Atlantica can be traced only as far as Helsinki National Library. I was informed that there are no records indicating when or where the copies now at Backåkra were sold.

In 2018, Hammarskjöld’s papers were declared part of the UNESCO Documentary Heritage. They can be consulted at the Royal Library in Stockholm (=National Library of Sweden).

After this article was first published (see the introductory note above), curator Karin Erlandsson and her daughter Kristina published a number of histories of objects from Hammarskjöld’s collection as part of their book Dag Hammarskjölds Backåkra. Platsens magi och föremålens historia, Malmö 2021:

• Tenzing Norgay’s ice axe: pp. 120–2

• Beskow’s painting for the meditation room: pp. 133–6

• the National Geographic map cabinet: pp. 142f.

• the Bird of Truth: pp. 144–6

• Ashanti headrest: pp. 168–70

• p. 89 on ‘Hammarskjöld’s Flowers’, of which I am proud the authors integrated them into their presentation.

The fisherman's cottage Hammarskjöld already bought in 1953 still exists. It has remained in the family's possession. It lies in a secluded spot, and its location is kept within the family.

Please note the general bibliography available here.

This article was first published as an introductory text on our object database Reaching for Atlantis. It is reposted here with minor modifications and updates.

Save the Books!

Twin torches, the cathedral spires reached into an orange sky. On a nearby roof, their glow lit up the contours of an elderly face. Mouth agape, the man raised his view to the flames creeping up the church, his gaze locked on a printed sheet that danced between its towers, light and effortless as a swallow in flight.

Below, the heart of Swedish learning was ablaze.

The Great Fire of Uppsala had started after dusk on 15 May 1702, on the other side of Fyrisån River.1 Between crackling roofs that sent sparks into the night sky, families fled beneath a dome of eerily lit smoke; clamouring residents who tried to escape with the few belongings they could carry.

Against their streams, firemen fought their way, water sloshing in their buckets. As they moved between the walls of fire, the men buried their faces in their elbows, eyes squinted against the acrid fumes.

Through the thick smoke, a voice boomed across the cathedral square.

On top of the Gustavianum they spotted its origin – the outline of a man in his seventies, taking a commanding stance beneath the domed crown of the university building.

Scraps of paper spiralled around his hazy contours, bathed in amber light. Across the river, where many of the professors had their homes, collections of books, antiquities and life’s work in manuscripts had already gone up in flames.

It was also where his own house stood.

It had been in the early hours that the flames crossed the river, reaching towards the cathedral and the Gustavianum. Ten years prior, the university library had been moved into the building Rudbeck himself had designed.2 Beneath the feet of the clamouring man spread shelves filled with centuries of learning.

Supporting himself with one hand on the roof, Olof Rudbeck directed the firemen with the other hand, his hoarse voice forcing through the smoke, again and again: “Save the books!”

“Save the books!”

The Magnificent Mister Rudbeck

By 1702, the man shouting from the roof was a local celebrity. For decades, Olof Rudbeck had firmly held the reins of Sweden’s leading university in his hands.

Uppsala was the ground on which his family and his career as a professor of anatomy had flourished. It was here, in the old city with its grave mounds surrounded by a wide plain and rivers, that the polymath eventually embarked on a quest that dominated the last three decades of his life – the ancient promise made by the Greeks under the name Atlantis.

In the first volume of his Atlantica, Rudbeck argued that there was a historic truth underlying the legend told by Plato and others. It spoke eloquently about the origin of civilisation, of the gods, the alphabet, and astronomy. Their cradle, Rudbeck was certain, had stood in Scandinavia.