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20 INTEODtrCTION.
ostentatious display of learnimg, and it contains some
of the most extravagant notions of mythological
history. Its name is derived from the fabulous
Atlantis dreamed of by Plato and the later Greeks,
which he assumes to be Scandinavia in general, or
more especially Sweden. Here he places the primi-
tive home of the human family, and he not only
refers the Grecian-legends of the Hyperboreans and
Kimmerians, and the uncertain accounts of the
Scythians, Kelts, &c., to Sweden, but thither he
transfers Acheron, the Elysian Fields, Olympus, and
the whole fable-world of Greece. According to him,
the Trojans were of Swedish origin, Hercules a
native Swede, and even Plato and his followers de-
rived the chief part of their wisdom from the songs
of the Swedish skalds.
The Atlantica, with all its extravagant fantasies,
was a natural result of the wild speculations which
had crept into the field of JSTorthern Mythology. It
was the whole reduced to a system, if .such foolish-
ness could be called a system. AU that had been
dreamed, or thought, or questioned, concerning the
gods and heroes of the Old-North, was brought
together by Eudbeck in a most fantastic manner,
with that barren erudition and total absence of
criticism which characterized the learning of the
seventeenth century.
This spirit exhausted itself in the Atlantica, and
the researches of the following age become more in-
telligible. Hitherto the contents of the Icelandic
books had been received as literally true, and the
Eddas especially had been believed in as immediate