The Elusive Panorama
THE MOUNTAINS OF ATLANTIS – PART I
In 1675, three men were sent to the province of Jämtland to explore and measure the highest mountains of the Kingdom – in order to prove a radical theory that the lost Atlantis was, in fact, Sweden. They returned with maps, measurements, and three puzzling mountain panorama drawings. Almost 350 years later, Renaissance scholar Bernhard Schirg and explorer Lars Larsson set out to shed light on this forgotten expedition.
by Lars Larsson
The Horizon of a Lost World
I feel a fresh breeze against my face as my eyes wander over the western horizon – a jagged mountain ridge separating Norway from Sweden. The view is magnificent. I balance my tripod and camera on a cliff near the summit of Suljätten, a lone, pointy peak in western Jämtland. Far below, between me and the border ridge, lies a great lake. Its light-reflecting surface creates a bright foreground, accentuating the darker, majestic mountain panorama rising across the horizon. The wind sweeping in from the Atlantic makes me pull my hoodie tighter around my head as my cold fingers trigger another shot.
I have been inside this scene before. I have skied those peaks in winter. I have kayaked their meltwater runoff. But I have never seen them like this – as the mountains of Atlantis.
Almost 350 years ago, three young men gazed at this same horizon. They were on a mission to find and measure the highest mountains in the Kingdom, sent out by Professor Olof Rudbeck, a universal genius and celebrated scientist in Uppsala. Their quest was to gather evidence in support of Rudbeck’s radical hypothesis: that Plato’s lost Atlantis was, in fact, Sweden.
As the low October sun sinks behind the clouds, painting the sky yellow and then red, Renaissance Latin scholar Bernhard Schirg and I pack up our equipment and start hiking down. We are following the traces of a historic expedition, trying to make sense of the intriguing panorama drawings they created – drawings Rudbeck later published in his monumental work, Atlantica.¹ Today, we caught what seems to be our first glimpse into one of these drawings. Our view was the first piece in the puzzle of the mountains of Atlantis.
Crossing Paths in Stockholm
It was the crossing of many paths that brought Bernhard and me to the top of Suljätten. Two months earlier, in August 2021, I attended the Transformative Environmental Humanities conference at KTH in Stockholm. The field gathers scholars alongside artists, journalists, and activists. Among them was Swiss researcher Philippe Forêt, whom I had first met at a London conference in 2012. Two years later, he introduced me to Environmental Humanities by inviting me to a symposium in Zürich. We bonded over a shared interest in the history of exploration, especially the Swedish geographer Sven Hedin (1865–1952), who a century ago mapped Central Asia’s last unknown regions. Now we had reunited to present an experimental session: Visualizing Change and Stability: The Science behind Sven Hedin’s Photographs of Iran.
Our session was on the second-to-last day. Before that, we were offered a diverse range of presentations to attend. One in particular caught my attention. Bernhard Schirg, a doctor of Renaissance Latin at Hamburg University, was presenting his new storytelling web platform, Too Long, Didn’t Read. It was dedicated to illustrated long-reads, positioned somewhere between historical essays, travel writing, photography, and nature writing. That sounded promising, but little did I know where it would lead us both. Bernhard began to tell an intriguing story with several branches, all interconnected through an ancient map of the Nordic countries. The polymath Olof Rudbeck created this map in the 17th century, and Bernhard used it as both illustration and entry point for the whole session.
He first took us to Österlen in Skåne, where Dag Hammarskjöld bought an estate during his time as Secretary-General of the United Nations. The estate, called Backåkra, is today a museum. Among Hammarskjöld’s many belongings, it keeps an ice axe given to him by Norgay Tenzing – the very tool used at the first ascent of Mount Everest in 1953. Hammarskjöld also served as chairman of the Swedish Alpine Club (1946–1951), and many of his writings were inspired by his time in the Swedish mountains. This gave Bernhard a reason for a detour to Sarek and the huts of Axel Hamberg, the father of Swedish mountaineering. He guided us on this journey with poetic words, illustrated by stunning photographs of majestic mountains and glaciers.
For someone like me, who had spent the last ten years researching the Swedish history of mountaineering – especially high-altitude ranges like the Himalayas – this was right up my alley. And more was to come.
While Bernhard glanced over a bookshelf in Hammarskjöld’s study at Backåkra, a surprising discovery sent a shock down his spine. Among the ancient prints with Latin titles were the first two volumes of Olof Rudbeck’s Atlantica – the very work at the center of Bernhard’s research.
An old Acquaintance from Uppsala
Rudbeck was a renowned professor of anatomy at Uppsala University. He dedicated the last decades of his life to his opus magnum, published between 1679 and 1702 in four volumes spanning thousands of pages. The Atlantica presents “evidence” that Sweden was Europe’s first high culture – the cradle of languages and the origin of classical mythology. Its most striking claim is that Plato’s lost civilization of Atlantis was, in fact, Sweden.
In recent years, I have studied the history of science and ideas, which naturally brought me into contact with Rudbeck as one of the most significant Swedish figures of the 17th century. But our acquaintance goes much further back.
In my mid-twenties, I attended university in Uppsala, eventually graduating with a master’s degree in social science with a focus on psychology. At the time, the Department of Psychology was housed in the old Anatomicum – the former Department of Anatomy. Alongside the Conservatory in the botanical gardens and the iconic Gustavianum, with its anatomical theatre constructed by Rudbeck himself, this block by the river in the city center contains the oldest surviving university buildings in Uppsala. The courtyard is idyllic, with green lawns, blooming lilacs, and a giant old pine tree towering beside the light-yellow building with its characteristic stepped gables.
Most of my lectures were held in the former dissection room on the south wing, riverside. It was here that my eyes were opened, and my curiosity sparked by the abundance of academic knowledge suddenly within reach. My first professor, William S. Dockens III, was of African American origin and looked like a heavyweight boxer, yet he was also a Tai Chi master. He captivated me with stories of history, philosophy, and psychology, often drawn from his early work as a research assistant in the United States, where he conducted animal experiments for NASA and DARPA, influenced by B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism. Still, at times, I lost focus, and my eyes drifted across the room. Just outside the window stood a high stone pedestal with a bronze bust erected in 1910,² commemorating Sweden’s first internationally recognized scientist and anatomist, celebrated for revealing the lymphatic system at the age of 22. This would-be universal genius has been called a Swedish Leonardo da Vinci³ and left an indelible mark on Uppsala University.
That was the first time I encountered the magnificent Olof Rudbeck. Twenty years later, the circle would close, and I would meet him again.
Tab 43 in Atlantica I - Plates. Map of the middle part of Sweden. You can zoom and pan the map by clicking/pinching and dragging it.
Panoramas and Rephotography
So far, Bernhard had touched on virtually all of my special interests in his talk: ancient maps, mysterious antiquarian books, mountaineering history, environmental change, and digital storytelling. Yet he still managed to turn up the excitement one more notch – introducing mountain panorama drawings and rephotography.
For more than a decade, I have been researching the works of the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin. While this is a wide-ranging project, rephotography has been one of its core activities. What fascinates me most about Hedin’s geographical work is his systematic use of panorama drawings. These enabled transitions from the two-dimensional bird’s-eye view of maps to a three-dimensional way of seeing the world. In my project, I have traveled in Hedin’s footsteps, trying to locate the exact camera positions and points of view he used when drawing these panoramas. Through rephotography, I have created matching image pairs that reveal how natural and cultural landscapes have changed over the last century.
Bernhard recounted how he had traveled up the Dalälven River to explore the first of the three mountain panoramas printed in Rudbeck’s Atlantica. Rudbeck named the highest peak “Idra Fjäll,” which Bernhard identified as Städjan, near the ski resort Idre Fjäll. He explained how he had spent several days scouting the forests and mountains around Lake Idre, only to realize that it was impossible to find the vantage point used by Rudbeck’s men. It was not until after he had given up and left that a photograph in a book by Karl-Erik Forsslund made him realize he had been searching in the wrong area, too close to the actual mountains. Forsslund’s photograph, by contrast, had been shot some 30 kilometers away – from a vantage point remarkably similar to that of the panorama artist.⁴
I have always loved the process of locating geographical vantage points used in historical imagery, whether photographs or drawings, and I have relied extensively on digital techniques for this during my expeditions in Central Asia. So I was completely hooked when Bernhard explained that the other two panoramas depicted mountains further north in Jämtland – most notably Helags and Sylarna. I live in Jämtland, and Sylarna happens to be my favorite massif for mountaineering and alpine ski touring. Still, I had never heard of the 1675 expedition or the existence of these panoramas.
Instinctively, I felt these panoramas were the key to a great story, and I was astonished that I had never come across them myself. When Bernhard mentioned that he planned to return to Sweden to look for the other two panoramas, I seized the opportunity to invite him for a coffee if he ever passed through my hometown, Åre.
A Latin Scholar at the Door
On a Monday morning in early October, my doorbell rang. There stood Bernhard, smiling, having just arrived by train a few minutes earlier. In his mid-thirties, he looked sportier than the archetypal Latin scholar – in tights, with a backpack and a flat-brimmed cap over his shaved head. After a brief exchange of greetings, I made tea and we sat down to discuss his project and how I might help. While sipping his tea, Bernhard introduced me to the quirky yet fascinating thought-world of Olof Rudbeck.
In essence, Rudbeck claimed that the mountains his men measured in Sweden were the highest in Europe and therefore the first to emerge from the water after the Deluge. Consequently, Scandinavia was, in his view, where human civilization began anew after the biblical flood. According to Rudbeck, the Norse literary tradition was the oldest, and the North was the origin of virtually all myths and stories from classical antiquity.
“For him, Plato’s lost island of Atlantis was real – and in Sweden,” Bernhard explained, adding, “it corresponds to the Scandinavian peninsula, with Uppsala as its metropolis.” He reached for his backpack and pulled out a folder and a notebook. The folder contained printouts of the three panorama drawings and Rudbeck’s map, which he spread out on the glass table before us.
“So, these are the mountains of Atlantis, then?” I asked, pointing at the panoramas. “Quite so,” Bernhard replied with a subtle smile.
A few days before Bernhard’s arrival, we had already been in contact online. He had set up a digital whiteboard for our collaboration, where he had uploaded images of the two panoramas believed to depict Jämtland and sketched out a rough interpretation of a possible vantage point. His working hypothesis was that the Helags panorama might have been drawn from a viewpoint northeast of Lake Kallsjön.
Fig 102 in Atlantica I - Plates. The Jämtland Panorama, originally drawn by Samuel Otto in 1675.
Deciphering the Panorama
As soon as I got my hands on the high-resolution images of the panoramas and maps, I set to work. I began by identifying mountains, lakes, and rivers on Rudbeck’s map, which, of course, contained major distortions and incorrectly placed or connected land and water features. Many had garbled or missing names. But by methodically adding notes with their modern equivalents, a more comprehensible map began to emerge. This allowed me to compare the names attached to the panorama peaks with those on the map and, by deduction, identify the true names and locations of several mountains.
Another invaluable piece of the puzzle was Rudbeck’s personal copy of the Atlantica’s Atlas volume. It is kept at the Royal Library in Stockholm and contains annotations in Rudbeck’s own hand. Bernhard had studied it extensively on-site and had photographed the panorama page, which he supplied me with. On the Helags panorama I was working with, a mountain in the upper right corner was marked with a capital S in the printed version. In his own copy, Rudbeck had written “Sÿlen eller kiolen” above it, and I instinctively assumed it referred to the famous Syl massif.
After working almost nonstop for three days – so absorbed that I even forgot to eat – I had finally deciphered the Helags panorama, just in time for Bernhard’s arrival. Yet the mountains in the upper right were not the Sylarna massif. I had instead identified them as Skäckerfjällen, a more isolated range northwest of Åre and Kallsjön. “I know a place where we can get a perfect view of these mountains,” I told Bernhard, pointing toward the upper-right section of the panorama.
“Let’s go tomorrow then!” Bernhard replied with enthusiasm.
The sunset, as seen on the way down from the summit of Suljätten in October 2021.
Toward the Giant’s Nose
The next day, we sat in the car on our way to Suljätten – a lone and lofty peak with a peculiar shape that has inspired many legends. The most widespread tells that the mountain is the nose of a fallen giant lying on his back. For me, it carried different meanings.
Mountains have always held a special allure. From early childhood, my parents would bring my older sister and me to a high cliff on Björkberget, a small, forested mountain near where we grew up in Hälsingland. From the cliff, there was a beautiful view across a lake framed by endless pine forests. Every year, on Ascension Day morning, we went there for a picnic and to listen for spring birds, especially the cuckoo. This old Swedish tradition is called Gökotta, or “cuckoo morning.” I have returned to this spot throughout my life whenever I needed contemplation.
In my early teens, I first encountered the fjälls – the Swedish mountains that rise above the tree line – on a family trip to the summit of Sonfjället,⁵ the most easterly high mountain close to our area. Since my father was a farmer, he could never be away from the animals overnight, so this was the only fjäll reachable as a day trip. Sonfjället, declared a national park in 1909 as one of the first in Europe, offers a magnificent view of the southern Swedish mountain range. Later in life, I moved to Jämtland, and those same peaks visible from Sonfjället’s summit became my new playground.
Outside the car windows, the landscape rushed past in a stream of autumn colors. As we approached the small village of Kall, we caught a clear view of Kallsjön and the backside of Åreskutan from the high road, where open fields slope down toward the lake. Eventually, the road curved eastward, following the contours of the great lake. And suddenly, there it was, right in front of us – Suljätten – towering in the distance with its characteristic nose-shaped silhouette against the sky.
Suljätten was already a significant and well-known peak in the 17th century. It is one of the very few mountains in the area to be named and depicted on M. Beauman’s 1679 map of Jämtland, dedicated to Anders Planting, colonel of the Jämtland regiment.⁶ That was the same year the first volume of Atlantica was published. In the 1790s, the historian Fale Burman traveled through the province to collect material for a major description of Jämtland. In his travel diary, he noted Suljätten as:
One of the most remarkable [mountains] for its unique location on the north side of Kallsjön, its appearance, which changes as one travels in different directions, its column-like ascent toward the sky, the wide view that is afforded from there, and finally, the many rare plants that can be found without having to make longer and more difficult mountain trips.⁷
Suljätten’s easy access makes it an ideal vantage point for viewing Skäckerfjällen across Kallsjön, near the Norwegian border. The lake is 17 kilometers wide here. After passing Konäs Bay and the village of Upper Konäs, we turned onto a short gravel road leading to the Suljätten trailhead.
The author (Lars Larsson) and Bernhard Schirg on their first outing to Suljätten. Photo: Bernhard Schirg.
A Vortex of Curiosity
We soon gained distance along the trail, with Suljätten now mostly hidden by the surrounding forest. As we walked, we began talking about our different backgrounds and current paths. Stepping around a muddy patch, I asked Bernhard how he had first become interested in Rudbeck and the Atlantica. He told me it began more than a decade earlier, during his university studies, in a seminar led by a young professor who specialized in niche subjects such as Scandinavian Latin literature.
The Atlantica was printed in Swedish, with a Latin translation presented in parallel, since Latin was the international language of science at the time. Bernhard had always been drawn to languages and mythology, and that was what he eventually chose to pursue.
“I spent several years in Italy and fell in love with the Renaissance – its art, and the universal minds who breathed life into ancient myths,” he recalled. “One of my professors struck me as one of the last true polymaths. He opened the door to this whole story, and ever since I’ve felt there is something profoundly compelling about Rudbeck’s Atlantica.”
I already knew that Bernhard was not particularly interested in proving whether Rudbeck’s writings about Atlantis were right or wrong from a modern perspective. That was never his point. For me, the mere fact that the 1675 expedition had been real was enough to draw me into the story. But for Bernhard, it went much deeper.
“The Atlantica was obviously a mad project,” he said with a smile. “But it was that very madness – a vortex of curiosity and creativity – that drew me in. I was captivated by the fluidity of his associations, the sheer playfulness of his mind. Rudbeck created an enchanted way of seeing the world, where every place carried meaning and every tiny detail unfolded into a story. That’s what truly captivated me.”
Crossroads in Emotional Landscapes
In the summer of 1919, Sven Hedin and his sister, together with the Söderberg family, were guests of actor Anders de Wahl at Konäs. During their stay, they enjoyed a leisurely outing to Suljätten. Photo: The Sven Hedin Foundation.
The trail now led us above the tree line, and once again we could see the summit and the cliff rising behind it. I have always been drawn to dramatic landscapes and mountains with sheer cliffs, but Suljätten was different; it carried even more weight, charged with personal history and emotion. One of the things I love about historical research is when seemingly independent projects suddenly and unexpectedly interconnect – through a single historical figure, an event, or a certain place. Suljätten was the perfect example of how the strands of time wove themselves together, with three of my major life trajectories crossing here, at this mountain.
Seventeen years earlier, I made a decisive change in direction: I chose to pursue the great adventure of my life, which eventually led me to follow in the footsteps of Sven Hedin through Central Asia. Hedin explored and mapped more land-based unknown regions than any other explorer in history. Over the years, I have spent countless hours studying his photographic collections, and one day I came across a remarkable find in one of his family albums: a photograph of Sven, his sister, and friends on the summit of Suljätten in 1919.
This is a rare image, as Hedin – the great mountain explorer and high-altitude mountaineer – spent little time in the Swedish mountains. To my knowledge, it is the only photograph of him on a Swedish fjäll. The trip to Suljätten had been a brief respite from his relentless work on his magnum opus, Southern Tibet, published in twelve volumes between 1916 and 1922.⁸
The Sven Hedin project has occupied me for sixteen years and remains ongoing. But I had a second, more personal connection to Suljätten. It was here, some years ago, that I went on my first date with a woman who would become a very important part of my life. We spent a full day at the summit, in glorious weather, getting to know each other.
Ironically, the year 2021 had become the worst of my life. My father was diagnosed with aggressive cancer, a relative committed suicide, and my relationship ended when she broke up with me. Where one chapter closes, another opens. This now felt truer than ever as Bernhard and I made our way up the final stretch to the summit plateau. A bittersweet feeling came over me as I revisited this place, but the ways of fate are unfathomable. Here I was again, following the traces of Rudbeck’s 1675 mountain expedition.
Viewshed analysis produced with ArcGIS Pro and a 50x50 m elevation grid raster. The areas colored in green are seen from the summit of Suljätten in perfect visibility conditions. Note that visible water surfaces gets a more saturated blue color. Suljätten is marked with a red dot.
A First Glimpse of Atlantis
Reaching the summit, we finally had a good look around us – and there they were, on the other side of Kallsjön: the mountains of Atlantis. As Suljätten is a lone peak, it offers a truly awe-inspiring panorama of Skäckerfjällen. After taking in the summit, Bernhard put down his backpack, pulled out his notebook, and began scribbling. It was the same notebook I had seen him use the day before in my apartment, when I noticed how often he took notes.
“All that feels ‘noteworthy’ ends up in here – what you resonate with, what draws you in, sometimes for reasons you don’t understand yet,” he explained, adding: “It’s like a compass needle for my curiosity.”
While Bernhard found a spot to sit and write, I climbed atop the high cliff to shoot panoramas with my camera and tripod. The sun was quickly setting, and I used the last rays to capture the stunning views. The work from the outing confirmed the conclusions I had already drawn from the viewshed analysis I had performed on a digital elevation model. It became obvious to us that Bernhard’s first working hypothesis – that the Helags panorama could be seen from somewhere around Kallsjön – was impossible.
Åreskutan and Mullfjället effectively obscured the view to the south. Only from the very summit of Suljätten was it possible to discern peaks like Helags and Sylarna. But even there, they were difficult to recognize, with only their highest tips protruding above the obscuring mountain massifs in the foreground. In contrast, the westerly view toward Skäckerfjällen – the upper right part of Rudbeck’s panorama – was unparalleled. This was the ultimate vantage point for studying those mountains.
Fig 102. The Jämtland panorama with color codes and modern names attached for clarity.
To capture the "Jämtland panorama" in a single view, you need to be in a balloon a thousand meters above the ground, somewhere east of Östersund and Storsjön, looking west. The color codes corresponds to the panorama above and shows the true geographical location of those mountains.
Visions Beyond the Possible
In Google Earth, I had identified all the peaks in the panorama and highlighted them in bright colors within the three-dimensional digital terrain model. This made them stand out from the rest of the topography and allowed me to simulate the parallax effect from different viewpoints – leading to a groundbreaking conclusion: the vantage point used to draw this panorama did not exist. There was no geographic location that could provide anything even close to the view portrayed.
The panorama spanned more than 150 kilometers of the main Swedish mountain range bordering Norway. To capture this in a single view, you would have needed to be in a balloon a thousand meters above the ground, somewhere east of Östersund and Storsjön, looking west.
This finding surprised us, as the first panorama of Städjan in Idre (fig. 101) was quite conventional and could be captured or depicted from a single geographical vantage point. By necessity, this led us to a new hypothesis: the Helags panorama – which we now call the Jämtland panorama, since it spans almost the entire western part of the province – must have been constructed by synthesizing several unique viewpoints into one idealized panorama drawing. One such viewpoint could be the summit of Suljätten, which offers a commanding view of what we have identified as the upper right section of the panorama. Our first-hand experience on Suljätten, looking toward Skäckerfjällen, confirmed that this was a valid hypothesis.
The consequence is clear: by identifying the most likely viewpoints for observing smaller sections of the panorama, we can connect those dots on the map and, in doing so, reconstruct a possible travel route used by the 1675 mountain explorers. This would be a major step toward piecing together the history of this pioneering expedition.
But one mystery remained. What about the third panorama? According to earlier research, it was supposed to depict Sylarna.⁹ But was its vantage point attainable from the ground – or was it another “impossible” panorama? More work lay ahead.
As the sun sank behind the horizon, we quickly hiked back down to the car and began driving home. It was the end of our first outing, yet we both felt it was only the beginning of a great adventure. For years, I had traveled the world in search of stories and discovery, only to realize that the greatest of them all was waiting here, at my own doorstep.
Virtual Tour of the Suljätten Summit
All music in the virtual tour is composed by Thomas von Wachenfeldt.
References
¹ Olaus Rudbeck, Olaus Rudbeck Atlantica Atland Eller Manheim (Uppsala, 1679), http://archive.org/details/OlausRudbeckAtlanticaAtlandEllerManheim.
² Edward Clason, Aftäckningen af Olof Rudbecks byst (Uppsala: Upsala Läkareförening, 1910).
³ Gunnar Brusewitz, Från Olof Rudbeck till Olof Thunman (Uppsala: Upsala nya tidning, 1998), 11-16 and Gunnar Eriksson, Rudbeck 1630–1702: Liv, lärdom, dröm i barockens Sverige ( Stockholm: Atlantis, 2002), 219.
⁴ Karl-Erik Forsslund, Med Dalälven från källorna till havet: Del 1 Öster-Dalälven, Bok 1 Storån (Idre-Särna) (Stockholm: Åhlén & Åkerlund, 1919).
⁵ Karl-Erik Forsslund, ”Rundt Sonfjället: dagboksblad från en vandringssommar”, i Svenska Turistföreningens årsskrift (Stockholm: Svenska turistföreningen, 1911), 191–217, http://runeberg.org/stf/1911/0241.html.
⁶ M. Beauman, Geometrische Affrijtningh öfwer Provincien Jämptlandh den 1 Martij Anno 1679 dedicerad till Anders Planting (Krigsarkivet, 01 mars 1679), SE/KrA/0425/07/187, Sveriges Krig, Bremiska kriget 1665–1666 – Kriget mot Danmark 1675–1679, https://sok.riksarkivet.se/bildvisning/K0024710_00001.
⁷ Fale Burman, Fale Burmans dagböcker över resor genom Jämtland 1793–1802, ed. Olof Holm, in Källor till Jämtland och Härjedalens historia (Östersund: Landsarkivet i Östersund och Jämtlands läns fornskriftsällskap, 2010), 7.
⁸ Sven Hedin, Southern Tibet: discoveries in former times compared with my own researches in 1906-1908. Maps I (Stockholm: Generalstabens litografiska anstalt, 1922).
⁹ Axel Nelson, Samuel Otto och Olaus Rudbecks Atlantica: Ett bidrag till Lapplandsforskningens äldre historia (Uppsala: Kungl. Humanistiska vetenskaps-samfundet i Uppsala, 1943), 61; Gunnar Eriksson, Rudbeck 1630–1702: Liv, lärdom, dröm i barockens Sverige ( Stockholm: Atlantis, 2002), 314; Ulla Ehrensvärd, Nordiska kartans historia: från myter till verklighet (Helsingfors: Schildt, 2006), 317.