As noted in the introduction, the nineteenth century was a popular period for “discoveries” that illuminated an ancient American history.36 Joseph Smith’s discovery of the golden plates in western New York inspired a westward movement of pioneers to settle the American West. Starting in the 1850s, Mormon missionaries recruited new settlers from Europe to join their kingdom-building efforts in Utah. Mormons experienced their greatest success in Scandinavia and some thirty thousand converts from Denmark, Sweden, and Norway emigrated to the United States between 1850 and 1900.37 It is quite possible that Mormons, or at least former Mormons, settled the region where the Kensington Rune Stone was unearthed. Whether Mormons were present or not, the story of Joseph Smith’s unearthing an inscribed artifact from a primordial era was widely known by Swedish and Norwegian immigrants.38
In addition to the multiple sources of inspiration for creating a myth about pre-Columbian Vikings, Swedish and Norwegian immigrants in the late nineteenth century were quite familiar with rune stones and runic writing. In medieval Scandinavia, rune stones were typically used to commemorate dead family members. As Christian practices spread in Scandinavia, bodies were buried in churchyards rather than near homes. However, rune stones continued to offer family members a way to commemorate loved ones in a traditional pre-Christian way.39 Additionally, rune stones were sometimes erected to commemorate heroic Vikings who died on excursions abroad. Although the latter would account for a small percentage of rune stones, this purpose has most often been emphasized in Scandinavian-American popular culture.40 As historian Theodore Blegen observed, there was widespread popular interest in runic writing in Minnesota. Within days after a facsimile of the runic inscription appeared in local newspapers, three individuals submitted relatively accurate translations.41
“The Stone Is Resurrected”: Hjalmar Holand’s Rediscovery
Even though scholars quickly dismissed the artifact as an immigrant hoax, the Norwegian-American writer Hjalmar Holand dedicated his life to proving its authenticity. The historian and traveling book salesman “resurrected” the symbolic power of the stone that was all but dead.42 Holand had studied under Rasmus B. Anderson at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and developed a strong interest in pre-Columbian Norse explorations of North America. In 1907, Holand visited Douglas County as part of a research project for the Norwegian Society of Minneapolis. The Norwegian-born Holand had been commissioned by the organization to gather oral histories of pioneer immigrant communities from throughout the upper Midwest.
Although Holand claimed in his later writings that he knew nothing of the Kensington Stone prior to his visit to the Ohman farm, the evidence indicates that he first heard of the stone in 1899 and had long endeavored to see it.43 In his autobiography, he gives an account of his first encounter with the rune stone.44 He maintains that he stumbled on the artifact while questioning locals about “things of historical interest,” and claims that he was told a farmer named Olof Ohman had discovered a stone “with some writing on it,” but no one knew what it said. His curiosity was piqued and he went out to visit Ohman. Holand described his first meeting with the farmer: “I found him to be a tall, well-built man of about fifty years with a frank and rugged countenance and quiet dignity.” Holand notes that Ohman was from a province of northern Sweden, where students completed less than a year of schooling.45 He asked to see the artifact and Ohman escorted him to his granary, where the stone lay facedown as a step into the small building. After turning it over, Ohman took a broom and swept off the dirt. “To my amazement I saw that more than half of the face of the stone was covered with very neatly carved characters.”46 Ohman proceeded to tell Holand about how he found the stone clutched in the roots of a tree several years earlier. Holand asked Ohman if he still had the stump of the tree. “No,” said Ohman, “I kept it for several years, and I finally burnt it up. It was no use keeping it seeing the inscription was a fraud.” “Why was the inscription rejected?” asked Holand. “I don’t know,” responded Ohman. “It was something about the language.”
Hjalmar Holand, circa 1900. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, George Grantham Bain Collection.
As Holand stood there “gazing at the strange and mystic characters on the stone,” he considered the circumstances behind its discovery and concluded it was not a fraud. “I recognized them as runic signs, because I had pondered over many runic inscriptions in my favorite study of Norse antiquities.” He then told Ohman that he would like to study the stone and asked how much he would accept for it. In Holand’s telling of the story, Ohman asked him how much he was willing to pay and Holand reached into his “nearly empty wallet” and pulled out a five-dollar bill. Ohman responded, “Hm. It ought to be worth ten anyhow.” Holand then told Ohman that this artifact was quite possibly priceless and that he wished to subject it to “a thorough study and that may give you some satisfaction. I would be willing to meet your price, but at present five dollars is all I have.” “Well,” said Ohman, “I think you’re just as poor as I am, so you can have the stone for nothing.”
Most observers agree that Ohman gave Holand permission to take the stone and study it, but it is unclear if ownership was actually transferred to Holand or if Ohman merely lent it to him. In Holand’s mind, there was no ambiguity.47 Just three years later, Holand tried to sell the stone to the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) for five thousand dollars. According to MHS documents, Holand delivered “an impassioned sales pitch about the merits of the stone” and tried to persuade the MHS of the stone’s “rightful place in history and the appropriateness of having it permanently housed at the Society.” Despite what he described as the priceless quality of the stone, Holand conceded, “I have, however, decided that I would not avail myself of my position as owner of the stone to ask a higher price.”48 Holand, ever a salesman, was trying to persuade the MHS that the five-thousand-dollar price tag was a bargain. The historical society grew suspicious about his claim of ownership and sent a representative to Kensington to speak with Ohman. The MHS concluded that the stone was not Holand’s to sell and Ohman, soon after, asked the society to keep it until Holand had “settled this question of disposing the same with me.”49 The MHS voted against purchasing the Kensington Stone owing to the controversy over ownership and Holand’s high asking price.50 Although we don’t know the true details of what transpired during the summer of 1907, we do know that Holand then took possession of the rune stone and began a tireless, lifelong struggle to prove its authenticity.
Holand’s Rune Stone Crusade
Holand was well prepared to promote the story of the Kensington Rune Stone through his writings about Norwegian immigrant pioneers in the Midwest. He first introduced the artifact to a public audience in De Norske Settlementers Historie (History of Norwegian Settlements) published the year after his visit to Ohman’s farm. He opened his volume with a prologue titled “Vinland Expeditions,” which frames his immigrant peers as heroic men and women who made sacrifices to build a nation. Building on Rasmus B. Anderson’s theme of transatlantic Viking travel, Holand juxtaposes the Norsemen’s need to move west during the medieval era with that of Norwegian pioneers of the nineteenth century. In this westward sojourn, Holand also applied Anderson’s theme of sacrifice. When read in the context of his historical writings about the Norwegian settlement of the upper Midwest, Holand’s narrative about Norsemen killed by Indians in the distant past is clearly a way to magnify the sacrifices of his immigrant peers. He boasted that Norwegians in the United States had brought an estimated 22 million acres of land under cultivation and, in doing so, lost many lives. He describes in vivid detail the experience of Norwegian settlers who were massacred by Indians at the Norway Lake settlement near Willmar, Minnesota, in 1862: “Without the slightest warning, the storm struck. It made this smiling and friendly plain the bloody stage setting for murder, fire, violence, rape and desperate flight.”51 According to Holand, both the Norwegian Americans and the medieval Norsemen struggled to build
peaceful settlements in the midst of hostile “skrælings,” be they Indians in Minnesota or Inuit in Greenland. Holand emphasizes the innocent motivations of the Norwegian pioneers with their plows and axes: “They were not out to assault humans, but the savagery of nature.”52 His portrayal of Knutson’s men as the “first white martyrs of the West” was a public assertion that persons of Scandinavian descent in the United States were truly Americans.53
The Norwegian Society took a keen interest in Holand’s rune stone research and commissioned an investigation in 1908 by a medical doctor named Knut Hoegh, who interviewed Kensington-area residents. Hoegh and Holand worked together to collect signed and notarized affidavits from Ohman, his son, and other neighbors. These affidavits testify that Ohman had indeed unearthed the stone from his field and that he did not manipulate the evidence. At the conclusion of his investigation, Hoegh published his report in a Norwegian-American periodical. He praised the integrity of local residents, describing one as “a faithful example of trustworthy, wise, Norwegian farmer.”54
Although Holand had successfully gained the endorsement of Norwegian cultural organizations, he had mixed success in the academic and scientific communities. In 1909, he persuaded Professor George T. Flom, a Scandinavian linguist from the University of Illinois, to analyze the runic inscription. Flom concluded that the stone “must be adjudged a fake” because the linguistic forms on the inscription were “a mixture of nineteenth century Norwegian and Swedish, with a few antiquated words modified further by an evident antiquarian effort in orthography, which, however, the modern rune-master not possessing a knowledge of Old Swedish, fails to harmonize with the orthography and pronunciation of the time.”55
Unable to persuade linguists of the authenticity of his rune stone, Holand turned to a geologist, Newton Winchell, who chaired the Department of Archaeology at the Minnesota Historical Society. From 1909 to 1910, Winchell investigated the geological conditions of Ohman’s farm and interviewed Ohman and his neighbors about the discovery of the stone. He also studied the physical properties of the stone and its inscription. He concluded that that the age of the inscription was “at least 50 to 100 years” because he found no evidence of a residue of white stone powder in the crevices of the inscription indicating a recent carving.56 The historical society issued a report in the spring of 1910 that stated that the authenticity of the Kensington Rune Stone could not be proven with certainty, but that the weight of the evidence indicated that it could be authentic.57 The committee decided to withhold its tentative endorsement of the stone until it could be subjected to further analysis by linguists.58
Holand was unable to get the full endorsement by scholars in the United States, so in the summer of 1911 he turned to Europe. He traveled with the rune stone to Rouen, France, and gave a presentation at a history conference. Later, he went to Sweden, where he was able to display the Minnesota artifact in the Stockholm Museum. Despite these efforts, he had little success in persuading European scholars of the stone’s authenticity. University of Christiana runic scholar Alexander Bugge declared the Kensington inscription to be a hoax in a Norwegian newspaper.59 While speaking at the University of Christiana, Holand was challenged by another runic specialist, Professor Marius Haegstad, who also concluded that the Kensington Rune Stone was a nineteenth-century creation.
Westward from Vinland: The Saga of Paul Knutson
Undeterred, Holand continued to write prolifically over the coming decades. He self-published a first book-length treatment, The Kensington Stone, in 1932. This book was slightly revised and retitled Westward from Vinland: An Account of Norse Discoveries and Explorations in America 982–1362, which was released by a New York publisher in 1940. In these volumes, Holand advanced several forms of evidence to support his belief in the rune stone’s authenticity. He embeds this evidence in a lively narrative, dedicating the first third of his books to early Norse explorations in Iceland, Greenland, and, finally, Vinland. He shares Anderson’s assumption that Vinland is the eastern shore of North America.
The bulk of the book, however, deviates from Anderson’s interpretation of pre-Columbian history. While Anderson would depend almost exclusively on the Vinland Saga texts for his historical narrative, Holand would, in essence, produce his own saga by consolidating disparate historical and archaeological evidences.60 The title of his book Westward from Vinland asserts that medieval Norsemen’s travels did not end in New England; they penetrated deep into the heart of the continent. In doing so, Holand challenged one of the great orthodoxies of historiography about the United States: the nation’s origins were on the East Coast.
Holand asserted that the party of Norse explorers who had carved the rune stone inscription was on an expedition commissioned by the king of Sweden. He cites Gustav Storm’s 1887 text Studier over Vinlandsreiserne, which reprints an obscure sixteenth-century Danish copy of a decree that King Magnus had written in 1354. In this decree, the king expressed his concern upon hearing that some Norse residents in Greenland had fallen away from the Christian faith. In response, the king commissioned an expedition led by Paul Knutson to search out the missing Norsemen and bring them back to the church. Holand argued that members of this expedition traveled west of Greenland, found their way through Hudson Bay, and traveled up the Nelson and Red rivers, eventually making their way to what is now Kensington, Minnesota, in 1362. Holand theorized that ten members of the expedition were killed by Indians. Before returning to Norway in 1364, the survivors commemorated the tragic event by carving a memorial rune stone.
Holand argued that the Knutson expedition left evidence behind on its journey through the North American landscape. For example, the path from Hudson Bay to Minnesota is strewn with a number of large stones with clearly demarcated holes, which Holand declared to be “mooring stones.” According to Holand, these so-called mooring stone holes were chiseled for the purpose of holding a ringbolt to secure a boat to the shore. He declared that the Norse explorers had brought large, thousand-pound boats that could carry twenty men. These boats were so heavy, he reasoned, that they would have needed a solid place to secure them. He claimed to have identified thirteen mooring stones, each of them seventy-five miles from the other in western Minnesota. The number of mooring stones conveniently fit with the rune stone passage indicating that it is located fourteen days’ journey from where the ships were left behind.
Along Holand’s trail of mooring stones, he identified several artifacts that he attributed to the presence of medieval Norsemen. Inspired by Holand’s writings, immigrant farmers from throughout the upper Midwest sent him artifacts they hoped would help prove the authenticity of the Kensington Stone and validate the early presence of their ancestors in the region. In 1910, Holand wrote that Ole Skaalrud presented him with an ax head that he had found next to Norway Lake. In 1911, a Clay County man, Hans O. Hanson Strand, showed Ohman a sword he had found in his field. Another farmer from Polk County, Ole Jevning, reported that he had found an iron fire-starting tool known as a firesteel while digging posthole for a fence back in the 1870s. To the delight of area residents, Holand declared these items to be Norse artifacts dating to the medieval era.
A map showing the Vikings’ route as they traveled from Norway to near Alexandria, Minnesota, printed in Door to the North: A Saga of Fourteenth-Century America, by Elizabeth Coatsworth, 1950.
Most of Holand’s “Nordic” tools and weapons would be debunked as fraudulent in later decades. Some of the so-called Viking battle-axes had actually been discovered throughout the United States. They were tobacco cutters manufactured by an iron company in Ohio and distributed as part of a promotional campaign by the Battle Ax Tobacco Company.61 Additionally, the chiseled boulders of Holand’s “mooring stone” theory would later be identified variously as receptacles for blasting dynamite, markings for surveyors, and anchors for fish traps.62 Nonetheless, this material evidence, Holand argued, marked the western Minnesota landscape with signposts of “one of the greatest exploring trips in the
world’s history.”63
One of Holand’s alleged mooring stones located near the rune stone discovery site. Photograph by the author.
Purest Nordic Stock: Viking Survivors and the Blond, Blue-Eyed Mandans
In addition to the material evidence allegedly left behind, Holand identified what he believed to be biological and cultural evidence of Nordic explorers in North America. Holand theorized what became of the Viking survivors who were not found “red with blood and dead.” He ultimately concluded that they had been captured by American Indians and eventually intermarried with them. As proof, he cited the European characteristics observed among the Mandan Indians.
Since the eighteenth century, historians had speculated about pre-Columbian contact between the Mandan Indians and Europeans. The French explorer and trader Captain Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de La Vérendrye was the first known European to encounter the Mandan Indians in 1738. At the time, they were living in the upper Missouri River Valley in what is now North and South Dakota. Holand noted that La Vérendrye’s journals revealed that he had encountered Mandan Indians with blond hair and light skin who lived in spacious homes kept clean and well supplied, a fact that La Vérendrye claimed to be different from other tribes.64 Additionally, La Vérendrye observed that they sustained themselves through settled agriculture rather than nomadic hunting. Holand also referred to the writings of nineteenth-century traveling artist George Catlin, who claimed to have found evidence that the Mandan had incorporated a number of biblical stories into their belief system.65
Myths of the Rune Stone Page 4