Rudbeck does not owe his great renown to his mastery of any of these trades, arts or sciences, nor to any discovery, reform or invention by his versatile genius. It was his monumental work, “Atland or Manheim,” generally called “The Atlantica,” which made him world-famous. For centuries one had believed in the statement made by Jordanes, and based upon traditions current among his people, that the Goths who conquered Rome had migrated from the North, and that their ancestors, from the remotest period, were inhabitants of Sweden. Johannes Magnus constructed a line of Swedish kings, beginning with Magog, the son of Japhet, on the basis of which the sons of Gustavus Vasa, Eric XIV., and Charles IX., had accepted their high ordinals. In the time of Rudbeck it was considered a supremely praiseworthy effort to glorify the fatherland by strengthening its claims to a high antiquity. Rudbeck, the remarkable savant and able poet, got his head turned by the political grandeur of his country. He had in his youth read the story of Atlantis, found in Plato. Rudbeck undertook to prove, in “The Atlantica,” that the lost island, with its ancient ideal state from which the gods of antiquity were supposed to hail, was identical with Sweden. The work, in four large volumes, was written in Swedish and Latin of parallel columns. The first volume was printed in 1675, Rudbeck having made the types himself. In Sweden the work was greeted with an enthusiasm which had no bounds. The second volume was published by funds which Charles XI. with great generosity placed at the author’s disposal. The third volume was dedicated to the youthful Charles XII., a true child of the chauvinistic epoch, who hailed the book with delight. The fourth volume was in press when Upsala was destroyed by fire, in 1702. The aged Rudbeck led the battle against the ravaging element, by supreme exertions saving the university halls, at the expense of his home, his press and manuscripts, and the rest of the town. Rudbeck died in the autumn of the same year.
The elaborate construction which Rudbeck had completed by means of ingenious deductions and learned guesswork succumbed with the political grandeur of Sweden. “The Atlantica,” which once had its place beside the Bible on the tables of the mighty ones, was ridiculed and forgotten. On the continent of Europe, where similar books had been written in Germany and Holland, making for these respective countries similar claims, “The Atlantica” was at first received with surprise and admiration, later with doubt and criticism. The work, in spite of its mistakes, proved a foundation for archæological research, which gradually was developed into a science. In order to support the boldest and most impossible theories, the almost unparalleled power of combination of an eminent genius has brought together material which for the first time gave the suggestion of relationship between the Teutonic and the classical languages of Greece and Rome. Rudbeck was also the first to point out the unmistakable resemblance of the Old Norse and classical mythologies, as to the origin of which modern scholars have reached no absolute certainty, but radically different conclusions. The importance which Rudbeck placed upon popular customs and traditions was too great, but it has favorably influenced later students of ethnography and folk lore.