The story of the Kensington Rune Stone phenomenon is a helpful lens through which to examine several dimensions of Minnesota culture in particular, and American culture in general. The public debates over the authenticity of stone have been charged with class tension. By “class,” I am referring not to group differences based on material conditions, but on cultural distinctions.12 In this analysis, class distinctions are marked by residence (urban versus rural), region (Midwest versus East Coast), education level (academically trained versus self-taught), and aesthetic preference (the celebration of versus the condemnation of kitsch). Minnesotans variably embraced and condemned the stone with these class distinctions and power differentials in mind.
The quest for an ancient dimension to U.S. history and the desire to prove that one’s group “came here first” have been enduring elements of American culture and they were particularly fervent during the nineteenth century. Joseph Smith claimed that the angel Moroni led him to a collection of golden plates buried in a western New York hillside, which told of an ancient American civilization. Smith’s “translation” of the golden plates was published in 1830 as the Book of Mormon. The book situated the American landscape in the biblical narrative and inspired a westward migration of his followers. Around the same time period, New England historians and other writers were fascinated with the notion that Norsemen had visited their region prior to Columbus. Norwegian immigrants popularized this notion as a means to bolster their social status, but longtime New Englanders used the claim to address anxieties regarding immigration to the United States.13 The creation and interpretation of the Kensington Rune Stone will be examined in the context of the widely shared American desire to construct a national prehistory infused with meaning.
The rune stone debates in the twentieth century were inextricably linked to the ways that white Minnesotans talked and thought about the region’s first residents. The stone was unearthed during a time period in which there were fervent efforts to commemorate the hundreds of white settlers who died in the Dakota War of 1862. Chapter 2 describes how monuments, memorials, and written accounts of pioneer history flourished in turn-of-the-century Minnesota. In the decades immediately following the traumatic events of the so-called Sioux Uprising, white residents frequently portrayed Indians as irredeemably violent, but by the early decades of the twentieth century, most white Minnesotans portrayed Indians in nostalgic and romantic terms. However, as later chapters will illustrate, many of the rune stone defenders continued to evoke well into the twentieth century images of godless, threatening Indians lurking in the wilderness. This rune stone story exemplifies the enduring legacy of Indian savagery and white martyrdom motifs in American popular culture.
The Cult of the Kensington Rune Stone
Most of what has been written on the Kensington Rune Stone has been preoccupied with questions of authenticity.14 Was the stone inscribed by Norse explorers in the fourteenth century or by a Swedish immigrant in the nineteenth? Scholars and nonscholars alike have delved into the fields of archaeology, linguistics, runic studies, and Scandinavian history to make their case. Insufficient attention has been given to the reasons for the popular appeal of the Kensington Rune Stone since it was unearthed in 1898. What has been written in this regard has primarily focused on two explanations. The first is that Minnesotans have embraced the rune stone because of its benefits to the local economy. As a book on Minnesota tourism cynically concludes, rune stone enthusiasts were able to overlook scientific evidence against the stone because they “recognized a tourist attraction when they saw it.”15 The second explanation is that Swedish and Norwegian immigrants used the rune stone to justify their place in American society and assert their ethnic pride.16 Economics and ethnicity play starring roles in the rune stone story, but as the Runestone Pageant suggests, there were multiple factors at play. Religion, in particular, played a feature role in fueling the popular enthusiasm for the artifact and framing the rune stone story as a sacred civic narrative.17
Hjalmar Holand’s historical narrative became attractive largely because it told the story of heroic Christian sacrifice. However, the Christian motivations of the Norsemen were not at the forefront in Holand’s earliest writings about the Kensington Rune Stone. In fact, he posited several other motivating factors for why the Norsemen ventured into the heart of North America. In his first Harper’s Weekly article published in 1909, he asserted that the Norsemen were on a journey to explore the new continent in hopes of acquiring resources, such as timber, fish, and grapes for Norway.18 In his second article a year later, Holand said that the Norsemen had ventured westward to fight skrælings who were threatening Norse settlements in Greenland and beyond.19 It was not until years later that he posited Christian zeal as the central motivation for the medieval Norsemen to embark on their transatlantic journey. As scholarly challenges mounted and ethnic support wavered, Holand baptized his historical narrative to broaden its popular appeal. Thanks to this strategy, a variety of Catholic and Protestant leaders took an interest in the storied artifact who would not have otherwise done so. Although Holand expressed personal disdain for organized religion, he recognized the efficacy of using Christian rhetoric to solicit popular support for his defense of the Kensington Rune Stone.20
There is another way that religion factors prominently into the Kensington Rune Stone story. Enthusiasm for Holand’s rune stone narrative can be thought of in terms of a cultural religion that transcends the boundaries of traditional denominations and institutions.21 In other words, belief in the authenticity of the stone can be conceived in terms of a religious expression in and of itself.22 Religious terms have been frequently used by enthusiasts to describe their endorsement of the artifact. For example, an Alexandria physician and one of the founders of the Runestone Museum, was highlighted in a 1959 newspaper article titled “Dr. Tanquist’s Testimony: Why I Believe in the Runestone.” During his speech, Tanquist presented his reasons why he believed the artifact to be authentic to a group of local residents.23 When Hjalmar Holand released his 1956 book Explorations in America before Columbus, Alexandria’s Calvary Lutheran Church hosted a “testimonial dinner” to celebrate the book’s distribution to public schools across the state. More than three hundred people attended the event and local students were encouraged to read Holand’s book in advance of the dinner and write essays about why they believed the Kensington Stone to be true.24
Outside observers have also used religious terminology to describe the zeal of Kensington Rune Stone enthusiasts. These characterizations have often been pejorative, implying that the artifact’s supporters have abandoned reason. Brian Branston, a British TV producer who spent time in Alexandria researching the rune stone during the 1970s, described the popular enthusiasm in terms of irrational belief:
Those who believe it bogus rest their case on the arguments of reputable scholars, particularly linguists and runologists who are practically unanimous in declaring the inscription a hoax. Those who believe in the genuineness of the inscription hold on to their beliefs much as one would hold to a religious faith. You cannot reason with faith.25
In a subsequent article, Branston addresses a rune stone enthusiast directly: “Holand was a false prophet who has led you and all other ascribers to the Runestone religion astray. You have been literally brought to worship a graven image.”26
Accusations of idolatry levied toward Kensington Rune Stone supporters have done more to obscure than illuminate the complex cultural and religious dynamics at play. Rather than dismiss the strident devotion to the rune stone narrative as unreasonable, it is necessary to consider what a religious disposition toward the artifact offered its adherents. It has often been argued that science has usurped the authority that science once held.27 However, it is clear that scientific thinking is limited in its ability to satisfy many human desires.28 Despite the lack of scientific evidence to authenticate the Kensington Rune Stone, scores of Minnesotans came to its defense because they felt a need for meaning and
assurance that the stone’s story could provide. The chapters that follow show how belief in the Kensington Rune Stone helped Minnesotans cope with a variety of social challenges in the twentieth century.29
Parallels to American Civil and Cultural Religion
Popular devotion to the Kensington Rune Stone and the mythic narrative it symbolizes shares much in common with what has come to be known as American civil religion. In the 1960s, sociologist Robert Bellah observed the overt God language of presidential addresses and founding American documents. He described American civil religion as a “public religious expression” characterized by “a set of beliefs, symbols and rituals” and as “an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality.”30 Although Bellah, and many scholars who followed him, emphasized civil religious discourse, practices, and symbols at the national level, the present analysis considers how a region appropriated elements of American civil religion for its own purposes.31 The devotion to the Kensington Rune Stone can be thought of as a local sect of American civil religion that fused national narratives with ethnic, racial, and regional concerns.32
The mythic narrative of the Kensington Rune Stone must be understood in the context of several enduring myths in American life.33 One of the most popular is the notion that the United States is God’s “chosen nation” set apart with a special destiny. This trope is frequently appealed to under a secularized guise of “American exceptionalism.” The term “manifest destiny,” popularized in the mid-nineteenth century, functioned as a divinely ordained ideology to justify westward expansion of white settlement and the displacement of Native Americans. Related to this myth is the notion that the United States is an innocent nation. Such claims are often used by the powerful to disguise their domination over others.34 Chapter 2 shows how rune stone enthusiasts frequently deployed the language of “innocent domination” and constructed a rigid moral binary between white victim and Indian perpetrator.
Holand’s claim that that America was discovered by Christian Norsemen on a journey to save the faith resonated with a popular myth that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.”35 This claim was particularly fervent during the height of the Cold War, as American leaders contrasted a Christian America with the “godless” Soviet Union.36 Chapter 5 illustrates how the Runestone Pageant of 1962 and writings produced by rune stone enthusiasts around the same time reveal a degree of anxiety about Minnesotans abandoning the Christian faith. That anxiety was likely fueled by recent Supreme Court decisions and popular media depictions that were perceived as threatening to the Christian faith.37 Imagining that a Christian nation was birthed in Minnesota gave locals the confidence and hope that the faith would endure.
Holand’s rune stone narrative is at its heart a story of American sacrifice. The “ten men red with blood and dead” became martyrs for a variety of causes championed by Minnesotans and had the effect of forging group identity.38 Immigrant writers in the United States have long endeavored to prove that their group has made sacrifices for the nation. Norwegian immigrants, for example, frequently trumpeted the sacrificial deaths of their peers in the Civil War to prove their commitment to their American home.39 Scandinavian Americans and other white pioneer residents in Minnesota paralleled their own sacrifices with those of the fourteenth-century Norsemen. Catholic Minnesotans, likewise, upheld the dead Vikings as martyrs for the cause of bringing Christ to the North American wilderness.
Civic myths about the meaning, purpose, and trajectory of a community’s history are made all the more powerful when they are made concrete and visible in material form.40 Americans have considered several objects to be sacred symbols of national identity, including the Liberty Bell, the Statue of Liberty, and the American flag. The American flag in particular has functioned as a sacred, representative emblem of the United States, what Émile Durkheim would call a totem. A totem represents a group’s collective identity and has the power to evoke an emotional response when individuals stand in its midst.41 Identifying with a totem is at its heart an act of worship, or, more specifically, an act of collective self-worship. Thus, in Durkheim’s view, society is God.42 Throughout its history, the Kensington Rune Stone has been handled and conceived in terms of a sacred civic artifact. When on public display, the artifact was often accompanied by armed guards, and local residents frequently expressed concern that it might be desecrated. As chapter 3 demonstrates, defending the Kensington Rune Stone as an authentic artifact became a way to defend the cultural prestige of the region and its residents.
Critical to the symbolic power of the Kensington Rune Stone is its material constitution. Mircea Eliade once observed that “Rock shows the [human] something that transcends the precariousness of his humanity” and therefore conveys power and permanence.43 In other words, rocks perform cultural work. In the case of the rune stone, it anchored the identity of Minnesotans by claiming an American sacred space.44 There are numerous stone memorial and monuments that Americans consider to be significant. The Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., and Mount Rushmore in South Dakota are among them. Chapter 3 describes how civic boosters used the Kensington Rune Stone as an inspiration to construct a stone monument dedicated to the nation’s true founding fathers: the Norse explorers who memorialized their dead comrades in Ohman’s field.
The rune stone discovery site was just one location in a sacred landscape mapped by Hjalmar Holand. Holand identified an imagined pathway of Paul Knutson’s expedition as they traveled across the North Atlantic, through Hudson Bay, and up a series of waterways into the heart of North America. Marking this pathway were a series of purported Norse artifacts (battle-axes, swords, fire steels) and mooring stones (boulders with holes used to anchor ships). With the help of area residents who were all too eager to help him find such evidence, Holand claimed that he had found the site of a “Viking massacre” and the site of the first Catholic Mass in North America. By the mid-twentieth century, many white, western Minnesotans accepted it as a given that medieval Norse travelers had left their mark on their region. The following chapters describe the process by which Holand and other rune stone enthusiasts created an American birthplace that bolstered Midwestern identity and erased the claims of the region’s first residents.45
Sacred places, objects, and stories are often made so through the power of ritual. In American civil religion, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, making a pilgrimage to sacred civic sites, and celebrating civic holidays such as Memorial Day and Independence Day have the power to arouse patriotic sentiment. In his study of Australia’s indigenous population, Émile Durkheim observed that social/religious cohesiveness is created and preserved through sacred rites. Durkheim described how clan assemblies generated feelings of “collective effervescence” where participants experienced “a force external to them” and a sense of grandiosity that united the group members with the symbol that represented them.46 Enthusiasts of the Kensington Rune Stone also used ritual to foster civic unity and inculcate in the community an authorized historical narrative.47 The rune stone history pageants dramatized the imagined visit of the medieval Norsemen to Minnesota and community residents could take on the roles of Vikings, Nordic goddesses, skrælings, and even the heroic rune stone defender, Hjalmar Holand. Civic boosters and other community participants often spoke in euphoric terms when discussing these civic events. In addition to analyzing history pageants as sacred civic gatherings, this book will explore the ritualistic dimensions of archaeological excavations, monument fund-raising rallies, and the visits of the Kensington Rune Stone to the Smithsonian Institution and the New York World’s Fair.
The chapters of this book follow both a thematic and a chronological order. They are roughly organized by the multiple constituencies that took an interest in the Kensington Rune Stone during the twentieth century. Their interests converge and diverge over time in response to changing historical circumstances and shifting circles of identity. The first chapter traces the early history
of the rune stone and the meaning of the artifact for Scandinavian Americans. Chapter 2 illuminates the broader white American interest in the runic inscription and the influence of the Dakota War on its interpretation. Chapter 3 shows how the rune stone emerged as a symbol of regional and civic identity. The Catholic interest in the stone is considered in chapter 4 and chapter 5 situates the artifact in Cold War discourse about Christian identity and national meaning. To reiterate, this book renders visible the construction and evolution of an American myth of origin that Christian Vikings died at the hands of Indians in the Minnesota wilderness prior to Columbus. To begin the process of unveiling the anatomy of this cultural phenomenon, it is necessary to return to Ohman’s farm, where the stone hierophany was unearthed.
Chapter One
Westward from Vinland
An Immigrant Saga by Hjalmar Holand
Swedes and Norwegians are of the purest Nordic stock and a relatively smaller number would have been sufficient to transmit the physical peculiarities for which the Mandans were noted than if any other nationality had been represented by these early culture bearers.
Myths of the Rune Stone Page 2