So, yesterday I was running around on the Karin Boye library because I had found out that they had a biography of Olof Rudbeck the Elder there. I knew that a huge bulk of the biography was an evaluation of Rudbeck's strange scholarly methodology. Olof Rudbeck the Elder is along with Johannes Magnus one of Sweden's most notorious falsifiers of history, and he wrote the five volume epic tome Atland or Manheim, in which he puts forth the radical thesis that Sweden is the long lost island of Atlantis (Rudbeck argues that the notion that Atlantis was an island is due to a mistranslation of Plato, and that when read closely, you will come to the conclusion that Atlantis was in fact a peninsula and not an island). Not just that, many of the famous stories from Greek mythology took place not in the Mediterranean actually took place in the Baltic Sea, most notoriously the Story of Jason and the Argonauts which is the subject of much of his attention. Rudbeck was a very intriguing character, and wrote epic poems in Swedish with the gods of the Ancient Greek pantheon and the gods of the Asatrú Pantheon interacted. Think Homer meets Snorri Sturlasson.
Unfortunately, you can only find Atland or Manheim in Latin (which I won't even pretend to read) or in archaic Swedish with weird spelling, all printed in small Gothic fraktur which takes ages even for me to decipher. Still, some fellow named Gunnar Eriksson who is a Professor Emeritus in the History of Ideas and the History of Science has written a huge book in which he goes through each and every one of Rudbeck's ideas presented in his works and his strange arguments for them, and I was looking for this book which the online catalog told me was located at Karin Boye library, one of the many libraries that make up Uppsala University Library.
By I digress, while I was there, I discovered that they had an entire book case with dissertations and other publications on the Age of Liberty that they don't have the library I usually frequent (Carolina Rediviva Library). And some things just flabbergasted me. Someone had written a 350 page book that basically explained in detail how Realm Councillors were impeached in the 18th century, and most extraordinary of all, I found this huge tome from the 1970s where some fellow even more crazy than I am had actually drawn up schematic diagrams for the treatment and passage of hundreds of bills and decisions made by the Swedish government in the 1700s. Boxes marked "Realm Council", "Estate of Nobility", "Estate of Clergy", "Estate of Peasants", "Committee of Secrets", "Foreign Deputation", with arrows running in between them and small notes over the arrows notifying in what archive and then exactly where you could find the minutes and resolutions made by these bodies in the passages of all these bills.
Seeing this is of immense usefulness for my upcoming timeline, I was amazed that such a work even existed, and I wanted to share it.
So, I am now starting this threat for Weird Resources You've Found where you may post and discuss, well, weird resources that you've found while online or in libraries or whatever.
Unfortunately, you can only find Atland or Manheim in Latin (which I won't even pretend to read) or in archaic Swedish with weird spelling, all printed in small Gothic fraktur which takes ages even for me to decipher. Still, some fellow named Gunnar Eriksson who is a Professor Emeritus in the History of Ideas and the History of Science has written a huge book in which he goes through each and every one of Rudbeck's ideas presented in his works and his strange arguments for them, and I was looking for this book which the online catalog told me was located at Karin Boye library, one of the many libraries that make up Uppsala University Library.
By I digress, while I was there, I discovered that they had an entire book case with dissertations and other publications on the Age of Liberty that they don't have the library I usually frequent (Carolina Rediviva Library). And some things just flabbergasted me. Someone had written a 350 page book that basically explained in detail how Realm Councillors were impeached in the 18th century, and most extraordinary of all, I found this huge tome from the 1970s where some fellow even more crazy than I am had actually drawn up schematic diagrams for the treatment and passage of hundreds of bills and decisions made by the Swedish government in the 1700s. Boxes marked "Realm Council", "Estate of Nobility", "Estate of Clergy", "Estate of Peasants", "Committee of Secrets", "Foreign Deputation", with arrows running in between them and small notes over the arrows notifying in what archive and then exactly where you could find the minutes and resolutions made by these bodies in the passages of all these bills.
Seeing this is of immense usefulness for my upcoming timeline, I was amazed that such a work even existed, and I wanted to share it.
So, I am now starting this threat for Weird Resources You've Found where you may post and discuss, well, weird resources that you've found while online or in libraries or whatever.