The image used to illustrate CONNOR is from Olaus Rudbeck the Elder (1630–1702) and his multivolume work Atlantica, in which Rudbeck claimed to discover that Sweden in fact was Atlantis, the ancient cradle of civilization. We see on this frontispiece how Rudbeck with a scalpel cuts through the outer layer of a globe to uncover the ‘real’ and deeper layer of the past, the Scandinavian peninsula as the ‘island of the gods’. His discovery is admired by philosophers and figures of antiquity, such as the philosophers Plato and Aristotle and historians Hesiod and Tacitus.

Rudbeck started off as a natural scientist, discovering the lymphatic system but devoted the last decades of his career to fanciful speculations about the history, language, and archaeology of Sweden we today would characterize as pseudoscientific, guided by random and exaggerated pattern recognition and the belief that everything was connected. Book historian Sten G Lindberg characterizes Atlantica in the following way: “the text is an ingenious absurdity with fantastic etymologies mixed with new ideas” (Lindberg, Swedish Books, 1968, 33).