Myths of the Rune Stone

by David M Krueger

  “The Saga of the Runestone,” by Sister Mary Christine. Courtesy of the Kensington Area Heritage Society.

  Other Lutherans attempted to wrest control of the Kensington Rune Stone from Catholics by reinterpreting its inscription. To American Catholics such as Ireland and Bartholome, it was self-evident that the letters AVM in the runic inscription reveal a prayer to the Blessed Mother. As already noted, this assertion did not go unchallenged. The Lutheran college professor Johannes Holvik argued that the Latin letters referred not to Ave Virgo Maria but to the Hindu word AUM, which was used in “to call upon the Supreme power.”60 Holvik claimed that after a visit with the Ohman family in 1938, he procured a family scrapbook containing articles about “exotic religions.” One such article about the death of the Buddha concluded with the letters, AUM.61 Holvik said that Ohman, whom he argued was the forger of the inscription, was trying to say, “Supreme power, save us from evil.”62

  It is not known if Holvik was motivated by anti-Catholicism or if he was simply trying to discredit the despised artifact by any means necessary. Nonetheless, Catholic writers lashed out at anyone who questioned the Catholicity of the stone artifact. Father Henry Retzek wrote a scathing review of Erik Wahlgren’s The Kensington Stone: A Mystery Solved, which had endorsed Holvik’s theory. Retzek described rune stone opponents as an “inimical clan of critics” who will not let the stone rest as a tombstone for the Norse Catholic visitors. Retzek said that it should be obvious that Catholics were on this journey and even a child could confirm that the letters AVM refer to Mary, the Mother of God. Retzek evoked the trope of Catholic persecution when he claimed that those who attack Holand’s scholarship are guilty of libel.63

  Viking Altar Rock: Consecrating the Catholic American Landscape

  The genesis of Our Lady of Guadalupe began when an apparition of the Mother of God appeared before an Indian peasant named Juan Diego near Mexico City in 1531. Our Lady of the Runestone could claim no such appearance in Minnesota. Nonetheless, Catholic enthusiasts found ways to incorporate her presence into the rural landscape. Although much of Stearns County, Minnesota, had a high concentration of German Catholics in the mid-twentieth century, the town of Sauk Centre had a reputation as a “bastion of Yankeeism” owing to Catholics arriving rather late in the city’s development.64 This Protestant image was reinforced in Sinclair Lewis’s popular novel Main Street. With the discovery of an unusual rock formation, local Catholic leaders initiated a campaign to promote Catholicism as the region’s original religion. In 1943, Holand received a letter from a local priest who claimed he had discovered a Viking mooring stone. Rev. Henry Retzek told Holand that he had been contacted by a parishioner, Frank Gettys, who told the priest about a large rock formation with peculiar-looking holes. As a child, Gettys claimed that he and his brothers used to play at this location and the mysterious holes had “excited our curiosity.”65

  The following spring, Holand visited the site accompanied by Retzek, another priest from the nearby town of Sauk Centre, and Holand’s son Harold. Holand found what he described as a large semicircular boulder, twenty-seven feet long by seventeen feet wide with two vertical holes on the top of the boulder and two horizontal holes on the side. Surveying the nearby terrain, he concluded that this boulder had not been used as a mooring stone for Nordic ships because it was too far above water level. Instead, Holand said the stone resembled “the choir of a small church or a miniature amphitheater.” In his later writings, Holand argued that this site conformed to Catholic church criteria for constructing temporary chapels to conduct the Eucharist while traveling.66 The two horizontal holes, he theorized, were used as receptacles for wooden dowels to hold a small portable altar table that would have been earlier consecrated by a bishop. The two vertical holes were used to erect a canopy over the altar in order to shield the candles from the wind. In short, Holand declared the rock to be the site of a Catholic worship service conducted by the same Norse travelers who had carved the inscription on the Kensington Rune Stone.

  Holand was not only willing to identify what happened at this location; he was also willing to claim exactly when it happened: August 15, 1362. If, as he reasoned, the Norse travelers left their larger boats behind at Hudson Bay on June 1, it would be “plausible” that they could have reached this area by the middle of August. The fifteenth of this month, said Holand, was an important day for Catholics: the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin:

  [I]t is reasonable to assume that they found a real pleasure in giving expression to their gratitude by creating, in this inviting spot, a semblance of the house of God in their homeland. And, as their priest stood before the altar arrayed in his full vestments, they must have sung their Te Deum Laudamus with more than customary fervor.67

  In Holand’s account, his son Harold was the first to suggest this idea. Regardless of whose idea it was, it is certain that the priests would have been eager to embrace Holand’s imaginative projections. If Holand was correct, this site would be of enormous historical value to local Catholic leaders who sought to spread their religious influence in an area that was still a Protestant holdout. A local newspaper article later affirmed the religious significance of the site, describing it as “the first prepared place of Christian Worship in the New World,” and it was widely referred to as the “Viking Altar Rock.”68

  A few years after Bishop Bartholome delivered his address at the dedication of the Our Lady of the Runestone shrine, two Catholic laypersons from Douglas County approached Bartholome about establishing a new parish near the village of Kensington to serve a small group of Catholics of Czech, German, and Irish descent. Bartholome supported this new parish as a “mission church” because he hoped to attract Catholics to a part of Douglas County heavily populated by Swedish and Norwegian Lutherans.69 Like Ireland in the early twentieth century, Bartholome saw an opportunity to use the Scandinavian symbol to convert Protestants to the Catholic religion of their Viking forebears. The choice of the name Our Lady of the Runestone originated with the bishop, and it is documented that he expressed interest in purchasing the site where the rune stone was unearthed on Ohman’s farm for the construction of the church.70 However, at the time, this land was not available, and the new church was constructed on a ten-acre parcel of land adjacent to the village of Kensington. The construction of the new church in Kensington was completed in 1964.

  The founding of Our Lady of the Runestone parish inspired other Catholic enthusiasts to incorporate Catholic myth into the local landscape. In the summer of 1970 a Chokio, Minnesota, woman unearthed a mysterious-looking stone while tilling her garden. The stone was approximately five inches wide, seven inches long, and a little over an inch thick with markings on the surface. Suspecting it might be an important historical artifact, she contacted local historian and Viking enthusiast Marion Dahm, who recognized its markings to be runic letters. Dahm consulted a local priest, Father Nicholas Zimmer, and they both quickly concluded that this was an artifact of Catholic significance. Specifically, they believed that the stone was the same kind that a medieval Norse priest would use as a portable table for the Eucharist. They further postulated that this particular stone was used for the Catholic Mass at the Viking Altar Rock and it became known, henceforth, as the “Chokio Altar Stone.”71 Zimmer promoted the stone’s discovery in the local media, touting it as “the oldest artifact to substantiate the presence of the Catholic religion on the North American continent.”72 Seeking further validation of his new find, Dahm consulted Professor Ole Landsverk, a retired physicist who traveled to Minnesota from California in the spring of 1971. Landsverk, who had recently authored a book titled Ancient Norse Messages on American Stones, concluded that the stone was authentic and that the runic letters were part of a cryptic religious message.73

  Local Catholic leaders did not seem concerned that Landsverk’s credentials were in atomic radiation research and not in runic linguistics or Norse history. As has often been the case with the history of the Kensington Run
e Stone, a person with expertise in one field is often perceived by the public to be an expert in any field. With the help of Landsverk’s dubious yet influential endorsement of the “altar stone,” Catholic enthusiasts accelerated their efforts during the 1970s to portray the Viking Altar Rock as an authentically Catholic site. In 1973, Lloyd Herfindahl, an internationally known artist from southern Minnesota, produced a series of paintings called “Vikings in Minnesota.” After reading about the discovery of the Chokio Altar Stone, Herfindahl teamed up with Dahm to produce a visual interpretation of the Viking Altar Rock site. The painting, Altar in the Wilderness, is an imagined depiction of the first Catholic Mass in North America. In the painting, the priest stands facing the small altar stone table attached to the side of the curved boulder. Two poles erect a canopy over the wilderness altar and several “Vikings” kneel before it. In producing it, Herfindahl used Dahm as a model for the priest and fragments from the Chokio Altar Stone and the Viking Altar Rock were both mixed into the paint.74

  In 1975, the local Catholic civic group Knights of Columbus purchased the site to “memorialize the dauntlessness of those long ago Vikings.”75 The Rev. Paul Schmelzer, a parish priest in Sauk Centre, promoted the Viking Altar Rock as a Catholic American site and managed to convince the state legislature to designate a number of area highways as part of a “Viking Trail” with the Viking Altar Rock at its eastern terminus.76 On Sunday, August 10, 1975, for the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, Rev. Schmelzer conducted a “rededication” ceremony at the site of the Viking Altar Rock and St. Cloud Diocese Bishop George Speltz presided.77 Smelzer promoted the ceremony as an ecumenical event and invited members of all denominations to attend.78

  As noted earlier, claims to sacred spaces are often substantiated by acts of symbolic violence. Just as white residents of western Minnesota used the Kensington Rune Stone to claim that they were the rightful heirs to the land, Catholic leaders asserted that Viking blood had been spilled to claim America for the Catholic church. With the help of Viking enthusiasts such as Holand and Dahm, the bishops and priests interpreted rock formations and found artifacts as evidence of this claim. The Catholic leaders used ceremonies as ideological tools to inculcate a disposition in western Minnesotans to recognize (or misrecognize) the Catholic church as the foundational religion in their community. Although the ecumenical invitation to the 1975 service could be seen as a noble attempt to build unity among Christian denominations in Sauk Centre, one cannot ignore the power dynamics at play. The service was a Catholic Mass consecrating a physical space that symbolically represented a Catholic presence near Sauk Centre, preceding the Yankee Protestant settlement of the town by hundreds of years. This was not the first time that Minnesota Catholics had used the rune stone in this strategy. Father Schaefer’s 1910 article emphasized that those who carved the Kensington Rune Stone were representatives of a unified Christian church: “It was only after the rise of the Protestant Reformation, that they were led away from the unity of the Catholic Church.”79 The narrative of Catholic missionaries traversing the Minnesota landscape provided a unique form of religious power. Through the promotion of the Knutson expedition, Catholic leaders could argue that representatives of a unified church had touched American soil before the church had splintered into numerous denominations. The “ecumenical” service at Viking Altar Rock was an attempt to strengthen Catholic cultural influence and expand the church’s market share of the area’s religious adherents.

  Viking Origin Myths and Catholic Modernity

  By the 1960s and 1970s, Catholic leaders no longer needed the Kensington Rune Stone to prove to other Minnesotans that Catholics were truly American. By this period, says Orsi, “Catholics in the United States seemed to have become indistinguishable from their fellow Americans.”80 Catholics had made significant gains in political power as evidenced by the election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency in 1960. In 1968, Congress dedicated the second Monday of October to commemorate the accomplishments of the Catholic explorer Christopher Columbus. After 1960, Minnesota Catholics primarily used the rune stone as a means to convert Swedish- and Norwegian-American Lutherans rather than bolster their credentials as America’s founders. However, the Catholic appeal of the Kensington Rune Stone was always limited. Despite the best efforts of Bartholome and other Catholics leaders, Our Lady of the Runestone was never embraced as broadly as other Marian figures among American Catholics.81 Neither the Viking Altar Rock nor Ohman’s farm site ever became significant sites of Catholic pilgrimage such as the shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Czestochowa in Pennsylvania or the Holy Hill National Shrine of Mary, Help of Christians in Wisconsin. Yzermans’s hope for Our Lady of the Runestone to be recognized as Our Lady of North America never materialized and the number of her devotees remained small, concentrated in a handful of rural communities.

  The limited effectiveness of Holand’s rune stone to generate Catholic religious power can be attributed to at least two factors. First, the Kensington Rune Stone did not embody a potent nexus of religious identity and ethnic identity. The utility of a Scandinavian artifact with a Catholic prayer was limited because so few Norwegian and Swedish Americans were Catholic.82 If Ohman had unearthed a stone with a medieval Catholic prayer written in German, Our Lady of the Runestone might have achieved worldwide fame among Catholics. The power of this ethnic overlay is evident in another, more widely known, Catholic origin myth. Despite the even flimsier evidence that the Catholic priest St. Brendan had traveled from Ireland to North America in the sixth century, many Irish Catholics embraced the notion as an assertion of ethnic pride.83

  Second, the debate over the Kensington Rune Stone’s historical authenticity affected its value for Catholics. No evidence has been found indicating that Archbishop Ireland publicly discussed the artifact following the 1909 meeting at the Minnesota Historical Society. One can speculate that Ireland recognized the risks of Catholics extracting social capital from the controversial stone. In a similar way that Holvik and Blegen denounced the Kensington Rune Stone to bolster the social status of Norwegian Americans in the eyes of the academic establishment, Ireland may have sought to protect the social status of Catholics, should the rune stone one day be proven a hoax. He may have been aware that even some highly respected Scandinavian Americans already viewed the rune stone as a hoax.84 In subsequent decades, prominent national Catholic scholars would also express doubt in the Kensington Rune Stone’s authenticity. In a 1925 article, Catholic historian Carl H. Meinberg gives a lengthy account of the medieval Catholic church’s American presence in Greenland, but implies that Francis Schaefer’s earlier article about the artifact was the work of an “enthusiast.” The authenticity of the runic inscription, Meinberg says, was, “to say the least, doubtful.” Even John LaFarge’s rosy endorsement in 1932 is a qualified one. For LaFarge, the religious value of the Kensington Rune Stone lay not in its authenticity as a historical artifact; its value was in its ability to inspire.85

  In sum, Catholic leaders used the Kensington Rune Stone narrative in ways that were similar to and different from other devotees of the rune stone. Like other white residents of western Minnesota, Catholics used the stone to situate themselves in the nation’s civic memory and demonstrate that their group embodied quintessential American values. At the same time, however, the Viking origin myth also served their own internal purposes that were at odds with dominant American values. The bloody sacrifice of the Catholic Norsemen “baptized” or claimed the nation for the Catholic church and it also provided a model for proper Catholic devotional practices. As of 2014, the Catholic Encyclopedia still referred to the Kensington Rune Stone as “the earliest Catholic record of what became afterwards the Diocese of St. Paul.”86

  Toward an Ecumenical Rune Stone Enthusiasm

  During the first half of the twentieth century, the Catholic narrative about the Kensington Rune Stone developed in isolation from other Christian groups. Protestants sometimes resented the Catholic claim to the rune
stone and they did not readily draw attention to the missionary impulse of the Norsemen in Holand’s narrative.87 Swedish and Norwegian Lutherans, in particular, were concerned that highlighting the fervent prayer of the Norsemen would amount to endorsing a religion based on rituals and Mariolatry, rather than on faith and the worship of Jesus Christ.88 As a result, non-Catholic Minnesotans in the early twentieth century used the Kensington Rune Stone primarily to construct ethnic and civic religious identities rather than denominational ones. Although the rune stone sometimes caused tensions between Protestants and Catholics in the first half of the twentieth century, there were moments where representatives of both sides of the religious divide found common interest in the artifact. In 1910, the membership of the Minnesota Historical Society committee commissioned to study the stone included a Swedenborgian minister and a Catholic priest. In addition, the committee’s report depended on the research of a Lutheran minister, who seemed untroubled to declare the runic inscription to be genuine because of its authentically Catholic prayer.89 In 1951, Alexandria’s Chamber of Commerce, primarily led by Protestants, enlisted the local Catholic priest Father William A. Renner to deliver the dedication address for the installation of a twenty-two-ton rune stone replica along the city’s major traffic artery. In sum, Protestant rune stone enthusiasts (often motivated by ethnic and civic agendas) collaborated with local Catholic priests and laity (motivated by a denominational agenda) in producing spaces that were meaningful for Catholics, Scandinavians, and other white Americans. In particular, Catholic Americans and Scandinavian-American Protestants found common ground in their critique of the Anglo-biased historical narratives of the United States. The Kensington Rune Stone inspired both constituencies to challenge the cultural hegemony of the academy. In other words, a Catholic Scandinavian artifact dating from the fourteenth century provided western Minnesotans with the symbolic power to disrupt the dominant historical-spatial narrative that the United States began with English Protestants in Massachusetts.