In 1675, Uppsala polymath Olof Rudbeck sent out an expedition to the north of Sweden. His students returned with drawings of antiquities, maps, and mountain panoramas. Four years later, Rudbeck published the findings as part of his Atlantica. The heavily illustrated work presented Sweden as the cradle of all mythology, of a high culture brought forth from lands of ice and snow.
Three centuries later, Bernhard Schirg, a scholar of Renaissance literature, sets out to Sweden’s north again, to lands which Rudbeck made resonate with our oldest myths. What wonders of nature had given rise to these stories, to the utopian visions of Atlantis or Elysium?
Accompanied by panorama expert and map enthusiast Lars Larsson, the men immerse themselves into landscapes from which Rudbeck wrote his Atlantica. Yet first cracks soon emerge in the picture once drawn from Sweden’s nature. What Rudbeck presented as the ever-stable foundation of his all-connecting work today tells a story of rapid change. It is this unravelling bond between nature and the stories of our place in it which leads towards a new quest – to find awe and wonder in the world we leave behind.
