Vikings in America (21 page)

Archaeology of the Canadian High Arctic has been hampered by the remoteness of the location. Many areas were visited only by the Inuit until well into the second half of the twentieth century, and there has not yet been an adequate survey of archaeological structures which are above ground, let alone any significant archaeological work which requires digging. Further south in Newfoundland, L'Anse aux Meadows was clearly visible above ground and in the vicinity of a village, yet had attracted little attention until the Ingstadts visited. High Arctic archaeology for the Vikings at this moment is little more than a list of promising sites which need excavating. Save for Ellesmere's Coburg Island, almost nothing has been excavated.

The region is full of intriguing sites. Typically, these are the foundations of stone-built buildings which cannot be attributed to the Inuit, and which carbon-14 dating of associated remains dates to the Viking period. It is a long step from saying these buildings are not Inuit to asserting that they are Viking, yet at the moment a Viking provenance is the most credible idea that has been advanced. The alternatives are not at all plausible. That the Inuit developed a culture innovation of making these stone buildings and
then forgot that culture seems most unlikely. That they belong to a Native American people that we have otherwise not recorded is also an implausible solution. Farley Mowat's assertion that they are built by the Irish I find likewise implausible,
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yet at least it suggests a European provenance. The Vikings do seem the only possible builders, and similarities with stone buildings from Viking Orkney and Shetland are strong, yet until proper archaeological investigation is carried out this idea must be considered unproven.

The vicinity of Ungava Bay also offers a number of stone crosses. These are in the form of an upright, a balanced horizontal stone, then a smaller upright on top. As with the stone building foundations, these cannot reasonably be attributed to the Inuit – and the Inuit believe them to be a relic of a different people. We do know that the sailors of Frobisher's voyages to Baffin Island set up stone crosses, but Ungava Bay is some distance from Baffin Island. The cross builders seem to have selected a horizontal stone for each cross which is thicker at one end than the other, which might suggest that they are not Christian crosses, but rather representations of Thor's hammer. This is an intriguing possibility, but so far without proof.

The greatest cluster of disputed archaeological finds is in the state of Minnesota. If there is any possibility of them being accepted as Viking, then a plausible means of entry for the Vikings must be suggested.

In fact, there is a clear route, as we can see from much more recent exploration of the area. On the south-west shore of Hudson Bay at the settlement of York Factory the Hudson Bay Company set up its main trading post.
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The location was determined by trade routes. The estuary of the Nelson River provided a major entry into the American interior. At first the Hudson Bay Company relied on Native Americans bringing furs to York Factory for trade; later Hudson Bay Company traders moved up the Nelson River. Transport was by boat. The Nelson River does have rapids, and porterage of boats is needed, but the distances are such that this is possible. There is no reason why the Vikings, who navigated the great rivers of Russia, could not have navigated the Nelson River. At its head is Lake Winnipeg.

No consideration of the Vikings in North America can avoid commenting on the Kensington Runestone, which appears to be a runic inscription found in the US state of Minnesota. Very many eminent scholars have staked their reputations on its authenticity; as many have insisted that it is a fake. Scholarly respectability was given to the artefact in 1949 when Dr M. W. Stirling of the Smithsonian Institute proclaimed the Kensington Runestone
as ‘probably the most important archaeological object yet found in North America'. If it is genuine he and countless other scholars are correct in their assessment of the impact of the find. This one artefact would act as incontrovertible proof that the Vikings reached deep into the American heartland in what is now the state of Minnesota. The Kensington Runestone alone would rewrite history.

The stone was discovered in 1898 by a farmer, Olaf Ohman, and his son, as they removed the root of an old aspen tree on their farm outside the village of Kensington in Douglas County, Minnesota. They found a stone covered in clearly cut runes – and as a Swede Ohman recognised them as runes. After a few weeks Ohman realised that his find was important and brought it to the attention of a local museum, which in turn called in specialists from the Smithsonian. Within months specialists had concluded that it was indeed genuine.

The stone itself is a chunk of rock called Minnesota graywrack, a type of slate, and as its name suggests this is local to Kensington and vicinity. An outcrop of this rock is found in the immediate vicinity of the place where the Runestone was unearthed. It has a face roughly 30 inches by 16 inches, and is just over 5 inches thick. Without any doubt at all it had been buried for some years prior to its discovery, as the cuts of the inscription show weathering of a type which in slate is caused only by exposure to soil. The very shortest period of burial which is believed able to create this weathering is 20 years, which gives a latest possible date for the carving of the runes of 1878. On it is carved a long runic inscription, which is intact. Most of the runes are on the face, but a few – the end of the inscription – are on the side. There are very few difficulties in reading the runes, which are exceptionally clear. Similarly, translation is relatively straightforward, although there has been some scholarly revision over the years. The original reads:

8 göter ok 22 norrmen paa opthagelse farth fro winlanth of west Wi hathe läger weth 2 skylar en thags norder fro theno sten wi war ok fiske en thag äptir wi kom hem fan X man rothe af bloth og ded AVM frälse af illum

har X mans we hawet at se äptir wore skip 14 thag rise from theno odh Ar wars Herra 1362

I offer the following as an idiomatic translation:

We are eight Goths and twenty-two Norwegians on a journey of exploration to the west of Vinland. We set traps by two shelters one day's march north of this stone. One day some of us went out fishing. When we returned to camp we found ten men red with blood, dead. May the Blessed Virgin Mary save us from evil!

We left ten men by the sea looking after the ships fourteen days' journey from this property. The year 1362.

One name needs clarification – Goths. The term Goths usually means a Germanic people of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, one of the groups of barbarians that destroyed the Roman Empire. However in Scandinavia in the late Middle Ages, Goths had another meaning, simply an inhabitant of Gotland, part of modern Sweden. Some translators of the Kensington Runestone translate not as Goth but as Swede, which is correct in as much as the Gotlanders were a type of Swede – but the runes actually read Goth.

The problems with this inscription are numerous. Many have concluded that it is a fake, and with good reason.

First of all it is too perfect. It is the longest runestone inscription known from anywhere, it is conveniently dated, it gives precise information about the composition of the expedition, it mentions Vinland and, above all, it tells in brief an exciting story. An item of this nature would be precisely what an archaeologist would love to find, and there seems in retrospect to be little doubt that the experts who first examined it were so excited by it that they wanted it to be genuine. At the end of the nineteenth century, America was fascinated by the publication of a translation of
The Vinland Sagas
, and there was a popular cultural context in which evidence of Viking presence in America was wanted. With its reference to Mary the inscription found favour with clerics of the Roman Catholic Church in America as it suggests that pre-Columban exploration was Roman Catholic in character. This was exploited as a counter-blast to the pivotal role conventionally assigned by American Protestants to the non-conformist, Protestant Pilgrim Fathers. In short not just the experts but almost the whole of America wanted the Kensington Runestone to be genuine, and the critics of today argue that this is why the stone was not examined with enough scepticism.

There is plenty of cause for scepticism. The scenario it implies is implausible. Fourteen days' journey north from Kensington by small boat down
the Red River might take the supposed band of Goths and Norwegians to Lake Winnipeg, a vast expanse of water which could reasonably be called sea, and where the ships mentioned may have been moored. The distance from Lake Winnipeg to Kensington is substantial for a small party of explorers, and there is no obvious reason why they should have travelled so far inland, and particularly why they should leave the main artery of the Red River to follow a route through a series of minor streams and lakes to Kensington. Presumably we can infer that it was the Native Americans who slaughtered ten of the party, and the survivors now had to make the fourteen-day journey through hostile territory to regain their ships. For us this might make an exciting story; yet the supposed Vikings must have been full of dread at the prospect, and it seems strange that instead of making a start on this dash to safety one of them should spend time carving a long inscription. No specific work seems to have been carried out on just how long it would have taken to carve the Kensington Runestone, but the time would be several hours, perhaps a day's work. If the stone is genuine we have to assume that there was enough time for one of the band to find a suitable piece of stone, roughly shape it, carve the inscription – which is just over 200 runes in length – and set it up. There is no obvious motive for this. A message for other members of the party could have been much shorter, and would not have needed to spell out that the party consisted of eight Goths and twenty-two Norwegians.
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The critics have found fault with the language of the Runestone. They have argued that some of the runes are not genuine, or were not used in 1362. They have argued that the dating style by which the year is expressed is not appropriate for an inscription from 1362, and that two words used in the inscription are not recorded in Middle Swedish. For Erik Wahlgren writing in 1968, the Kensington Runestone is the prime example of what he calls ‘Buckram Vikings', the false supposed relics of Vikings in North America.

Answers could be advanced to all these objections, and the energetic work of Richard Nielsen throughout the 1990s has indeed provided rebuttals. That the Runestone is remarkable does not necessarily mean it is a forgery. That the story it tells seems implausible might in fact be our lack of understanding of the world of Viking America; perhaps if we knew the context we would have no problems with it. The language issues are far from clear – some rune specialists have asserted that the rune forms are genuine, and use mediaeval forms not understood in 1898 but discovered since. The vocabulary may well be correct for Middle Swedish, for we know so little
about this language that we are in no position to say that the Runestone does not present genuine forms. Thus any one objection to the Runestone could be resolved, but cumulatively the objections do seem to suggest that the Runestone is probably a forgery.

Those scholars who see the Runestone as a forgery conclude that Ohman created the inscription as a joke, using a mix of his native Swedish and some Old Norse he had picked up from a book, and that what we are seeing is a crude prank which may be readily dismissed. It is noted that very many Swedes do know runes, as they are part of Swedish popular culture, and there are even cases of immigrant Swedes in the vicinity of Kensington in the late nineteenth century scratching a few runes on a lintel of a new home as a good luck charm. To the critics the matter is resolved. Ohman is the forger.

Yet the Runestone cannot be so easily dismissed. It is in its language that the inscription has its greatest strength. Ohman spoke the Swedish of the nineteenth century, which is substantially different from the Swedish of the fourteenth century – just as the English language of the nineteenth century differs markedly from the fourteenth-century language of Geoffrey Chaucer. It is possible for English readers today to familiarise themselves with the language of Chaucer to the extent that his work can be read without too many difficulties, but it is another matter entirely to write convincingly in Chaucer's language. Should someone wish to do this, grammars and textbooks for Chaucer's Middle English do exist, and there is a scholarly community that has expertise in Chaucer's language. It could be done, though it would be exceptionally hard to write good, Chaucerian English. There are so many areas of vocabulary and grammar where a mistake could be made, and which would inevitably be spotted when the text produced was scrutinised by the academic community. For Middle Swedish the problems are much greater. Even today reference books for Middle Swedish are limited, while in Ohman's day there was nothing at all available. In theory Ohman had access to work on the grammar and vocabulary of Middle Swedish's parent language, Old Norse, though the books were for the Old West Norse dialect, while the ancestor of Middle Swedish is Old East Norse. A particular problem is in the area of word-order. The ordering of words in Old Norse and Middle Swedish was significantly different to that in modern Swedish. Word-order studies did not exist in 1898, and there is no possible reference book for a forger. Indeed it is only in very recent years that scholars, myself included, have looked in detail at the word-order of Old Norse, while no-one
appears to have done any significant work specifically on Middle Swedish. Yet the word-order exhibited by the Kensington Runestone conforms with the best information available today on word-order in Middle Swedish. In short the linguistic achievement needed to produce as a forgery the text of the Runestone is prodigious. It is just possible that the author was a linguist of genius who used his intuition as a native speaker of Swedish, his extensive reading in Old Norse and the Scandinavian languages and, additionally, had a lot of luck. The result might be an inscription of the linguistic sophistication of the Kensington Runestone – yet it seems implausible that this could really have happened.