Discovering Viking America Critical Inquiry 28 (Summer 2002) � 2002 by The University of Chicago. 0093–1896/02/2804–0003$10.00. All rights reserved. 868 This project was supportedby grants from the Departmentof Archives and Special Collections of the ElizabethDafoe Library,Universityof Manitoba; the MinnesotaHistoricalSociety; and Mount Royal College; and by the efforts of numerous friends and colleagues.I would also like to say a special word of thanks to Cathy Jurca. 1. RasmusB. Anderson, America Not Discovered by Columbus: An Historical Sketch of the Discovery of America by the Norsemen in the Tenth Century (1874; Chicago,1877), p. 63; hereafter abbreviated A. 2. There is a vast and fraught literatureon the question of the immigrantcultural response to relocation.In the main, historianshave set up this problem as a dialecticbetween assimilationand resistance,exemplified at either pole by Oscar Handlin’s seminal The Uprooted (1951; Boston, 1973), and John Bodnar’s The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington,Ind., 1985). Even as “resistance”emerged as the dominantparadigmin the 1980s (seen, for example, in the hostile response to Richard Rodriguez’sHunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez [Boston,1982]), however, it proved to be unsustainableas a fit-all Discovering Viking America J. M. Mancini In 1874, Professor Rasmus Bjørn Anderson of the University of Wiscon- sin offered the following unapologeticassessmentofhisancestors,theNor- wegians. “Yes,” he wrote, “the Norsemen were truly a great people! Their spirit found its way into the Magna Charta of England and into the Dec- laration of In[d]ependence in America. The spirit of the Vikings still sur- vives in the bosoms of Englishmen, Americans and Norsemen, extending theircommerce, takingboldpositionsagainsttyranny,andproducingwon- derful internal improvements in these countries.”1 Anderson’s statement providesthetemplateforanimmigranthistoricalliteraturethatwouldspan two centuries and two nations and would provide Scandinavians with a powerful strategy for the attainment of ethnic autonomy. Arguing that the Norsemen had discovered America nearly five centuries before Columbus, Anderson rejected more familiar immigrant literary strategies of assimila- tion or resistance and attempted to win a place for New World Norwegians by rewriting the very foundation myths of the American nation.2 By dis- Critical Inquiry / Summer 2002 869 theory, and signs of its instabilitymark much of the literatureof the past two decades. Both Roy Rosenzweig,Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York, 1983) and David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London,1991), two otherwisebrilliant works, stumble on their inability to reconcile a desire for (authentic) immigrantresistanceto the reality of assimilation.Thus when Rosenzweig’smakers of ethnic saloons, fraternalassociations,and foreign-languagepresses are inevitably ground down into a homogenizedarmy of cinema-watching,motorcar-drivingrobots, and assimilationturns Roediger’smusic-sharing,race-mixing, land-lovingIrish into psychologicallydamaged,race-baitingIrish Americans,both seem to suggest that this representsa falling away from immigrants’“true” selves. This problem is not limited to contemporary scholarshipbut is rooted in historicalanalyses of immigrationand assimilation,such as Randolph Bourne’s seminal essay “Trans-NationalAmerica,” in War and the Intellectuals,ed. Carl Resek (New York, 1964), pp. 107–24. Indeed, it is possible that Bourne furnished contemporary immigrationscholarshipwith one of its central ironies: its insistence,on the one hand, on the “constructedness”of ethnicity—seen,for example, in Mary Waters’s fascinatingEthnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley, 1990), or David Hollinger,Post-Ethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism(New York, 1995)—and its clear suggestionon the other that assimilationis defined by a loss of authenticity. covering Viking America, Anderson was able, at the most vulnerable mo- ment in the trajectory of acculturation, to fashion an immigrant historyof his own and to script his group’s entry onto the American stage. AndersonhimselfwasthebeneficiaryofanearlierNorwegianimmigrant strategy that began to come to fruition in his own generation: the choiceto move west rather than to settle in the urban industrial centers of the east. This decision placed Norwegian immigrants at the physical and political margins of the nation. Within this frontier context, which had the added benefit of seeming less threatening to the native born than the wards that bore America’s urban immigrant politicians, Norwegian Americans en- joyed their first major political successes. Indeed, their ascent within the American power structure in the second generation was predicated not on their assimilation (as frontier theorists might have expected), as much as ontheirabilitytoconsolidatethepoliticalmargin.Inparticular,theyproved adept at using ethnic bloc voting, enabled by the unusuallyhighpercentage of immigrants and relative lack of an entrenched power structure in the upper Midwest (fig. 1) to gain access to local, state, and national politics. Thus, it is no accident that Minnesota congressman, governor, andsenator J. M. Mancini is college lecturer in the departmentof history at University College Cork—NationalUniversityof Ireland,Cork. She has just completed a book manuscriptentitled The Structure of an Artistic Revolution: The Critical Origins of American Modernism. She is currentlyworking on a book to be entitled The Global Anthology: Hearing Country, Folk, and World Music Metadiscursively. “DiscoveringViking America” is the first in a series of essays that will consider the historiographyof migrationfrom an internationalperspective.Her email is j.mancini@ucc.ie 870 J. M. Mancini / Discovering Viking America figure 1. The foreign-bornpopulationin 1900. create, rather than merely to bend to, the social, cultural,political,and economicstructuresof the community.See David M. Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 (Urbana, Ill., 1989). 4. Clearly there were differences between the constituentScandinavianimmigrantgroups, and I do not wish to suggest that there were not. What is importantin this context, however, is that authors from a number of different backgrounds—Norwegian,Swedish, Danish, Icelandic,and mixed—used the Vikingsand used the more general strategiesoutlined here. KnuteNelson,whoasaNorwegianAmericanwasunabletoreachCongress in the more settled district that included MinneapolisandSaintPaul,made his first successful entry into national politics in 1882 only after thecreation ofabrandnewcongressionaldistrict inMinnesota’sheavilyimmigrantUp- per Country.3 Norwegians and other Scandinavian immigrants employed a similar strategy within higher education, first by founding a host of long-lived in- stitutions of their own and then by making a place for themselves within the newly forming, less dug-in public universities of the west such as Min- nesota, Iowa, Wyoming, and Anderson’s own University of Wisconsin, which itself had created Anderson’s position as a response to immigrant pressure.4 If figures like Nelson acted as political brokers between the im- 3. See Millard L. Gieske and Steven J. Keillor, Norwegian Yankee: Knute Nelson and the Failure of American Politics, 1860–1923 (Northfield,Minn., 1995), p. 99. As David Emmons has shown, this consolidationof the marginscan also be seen in Irish America in the case of Butte, Montana, where the fact that the Irish were the “first” immigrantsmeant that they were able in large part to Critical Inquiry / Summer 2002 871 5. Of course, there were other factorsthat increased Scandinavians’“ethnic options.”On the most obvious level, their ethnic and religiousmakeup make them less vulnerable to racismthan other immigrants;as white Protestants, they managedto avoid the most abusive programsof assimilationother groups suffered, particularlybefore the First World War, and they were never in the racially liminal position occupiedby Jewish or Irish immigrants.Nonetheless, the choices they made within this context were instrumental.For a fascinatinglook at how the limits placed on other immigrantgroups could influence the outcome of such choices, see Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley, 1996). 6. O. M. Norlie, History of the Norwegian People in America (Minneapolis, 1925), p. 73. migrant west and the established east, so too did Scandinavian American cultural politicians, and it was within this context thattheybegantopursue the Vikings. The literature of Viking discovery made a number of claims about the Scandinavian origins of the American past. First, it argued that theVikings hadbeenthetruediscoverersofAmerica.Second,itarguedthat Scandinavians, as the progenitors of the American “race” and the creators of democracy itself, were America’s ancestors in body and mind. And, fi- nally, it argued not only that Scandinavians had arrived first but they had doneitbetter,bysuggestingthattheVikingshadnegotiatedthemostvexing aspect of New World discovery—contact with Native peoples and itsgeno- cidal implications—more successfully than their later rivals. In this way, Viking theorists inverted a discourse of discovery that usually limited the options of immigrants. For Scandinavians, discovery did not begin with Columbus and did not end in genocide.5 ButifScandinavianimmigrants’claimtoaspecialplacewithinAmerican culture was not based on assimilation to NorthAmericannorms, itwasnot based on an assault on the native born, either. If discovery theorists were happy enough to blame Columbus for the bloodier aspects of the conquest of America, they were reluctant to condemn their Anglo-American hosts directly. Professor O. M. Norlie of Luther College, for instance, shuddered at the horror of the Columbian conquest but described the settling of the United States as harmonious andconflict-free.Withastrikinglackofirony, he wrote in his 1925 History of the Norwegian People that “the great mi- grationsoftheearlycenturieswerenearlyalwaysaccompaniedbyviolence andbloodshed,byconquestandsubjugationofthenativepopulation.The immigration to America has been peaceful.”6 Indeed, in both form and content, immigrant arguments for Viking discovery took the shape of a compromise with the elite. Discovery theorists were much more likelythan immigrant novelists and poets to write in English, and they celebrated American institutions. Even the choice of Viking discovery as a theme for Scandinavianimmigrantliteraturewasgovernedbyitssimultaneousappeal to both immigrant and native-born constituencies; although Viking dis- coverybecameanethnicliterature, itwasalsoapowerfullyAmericantheme 872 J. M. Mancini / Discovering Viking America 7. For a concise history of this revival as well as its transplantationto the United States, see Matti Enn Kaups, “Shifting Vinland—Traditionand Myth,” Terrae Incognitae 2 (1970): 29–60. As Kaups notes, there was a long-standingScandinavianand European debate on the Viking discovery of America well before such accountsbecame generally familiar to Americans,and as early as the late eighteenth century some Americans,most notably BenjaminFranklin, had a passing familiaritywith the Vinland sagas. Still, it was not until the 1830s and 1840s that such accounts began to be widely spread. 8. See Antiquitates Americanae sive scriptores septentrionalesrerum ante-Columbianarumin America, ed. Carl ChristianRafn (1837; Osnabrück, 1968), selectionsof which appear in The Discovery of America by the Northmen, in the Tenth Century, with Notices of the Early Settlements of the Irish in the Western Hemisphere, trans. North Ludlow Beamish (London, 1841); see also Snorre Sturlason, The Heimskringla, or the Sagas of the Norse Kings, trans. Samuel Laing, 4 vols. (London, 1839). Another popular translationwas The Finding of Wineland the Good: The History of the Icelandic Discovery of America, trans. Arthur MiddletonReeves (London, 1895). 9. This included William Morris’shandsomelyproduced Saga Library, published between 1891 and 1905. See The Saga Library, ed. Morrisand Eirı́kr Magnússon,6 vols. (London,1891–1905).The Vikings enjoyed a similarpopularityat this time in Germany, leading to the translationof several accounts of Viking discoveryinto English. See, for example, Joseph Fischer, The Discoveries of the Norsemen in America, trans. Basil H. Soulsby (London,1903), and J. G. Kohl, A Popular History of the Discovery of America, trans. Major R. R. Noel (London,1865). by the end of the nineteenth century, appearing in numerous works by the native born. Within their discussions of Viking discovery, moreover, im- migrant writers embraced contemporary elite discourses and cast their ar- gument for acceptance in terms that clearlyhadbeensetbythenativeborn. It was this strategy of compromise and appropriation that set Viking the- orists apart and allowed them to make a case for their presence in America without embracing ethnic assimilation per se. Teutons, Brahmins, Skraellings, and Others ThestrategyofcompromiseandappropriationthatunderlayVikingdis- covery narratives began with the choice of this theme as a subject for Scan- dinavian immigrant writings. Although Viking discovery had a special meaning for Scandinavian immigrants, it also exerted a powerful pull on Americansengagedinthesearchfornationalmythsfromthemid-nineteenth century onward, and by choosing it immigrant authors accessed a sym- pathetic audience of native-stock readers. American fascination with the Viking discovery of the New World had begun in earnest in the middle of the nineteenth century, following in the footsteps of a Scandinavian redis- covery of the medieval past starting in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.7 Increasing scholarly attention to the sagas in Scandinavia, fol- lowed bytheir translationintoEnglishbyN. L.Beamish,SamuelLaing,and others,8 opened a new audience in both Britain and the United States for themasterworksofOldNorseliterature,sothatbytheendofthenineteenth century readers of English could avail themselves of dozens of translations and treatments of the sagas.9 Whetted by the publication of Danishscholar Critical Inquiry / Summer 2002 873 10. See Antiquitates Americanae sive scriptores septentrionalesrerum ante-Columbianarumin America. Although the fact that this volume was initially published in Latin and Danish would have reduced its direct readershipin the United States, soon after its publicationextracts were translatedand the volume was reviewed in English-languagejournalssuch as the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, the North American Review, the Knickerbocker, the New York Review, and elsewhere, so that many more Americanswould have been exposed to the ideas therein. For bibliographicinformationon Rafn’s receptionin English,see Halldór Hermannsson, “The Northmen in America (982–c. 1500): A Contributionto the Bibliographyof the Subject,” Islandica 2 (1909): 6–7, 65–68. 11. It also invited direct correspondencewith Rafn himself on the part of American scholars eager to identify various archaeologicalfinds that might point to Viking or other European presence. See, for example, Henry R. Schoolcraft,“Brief Notices of a Runic InscriptionFound in North America,” Memoires de la Société Royale des Antiquaires du Nord (1840–44):119–27. 12. See Charles W. Elliott, New England History from the Discovery of the Continent by the Northmen, A.D. 986, to the Period When the Colonies Declared their Independence,A.D. 1776, vol. 1 of The New England History (New York, 1857). See also the first volume of William Cullen Bryant and Sydney Howard Gay, A Popular History of the United States from the First Discovery of the Western Hemisphere by the Northmen, to the End of the First Century of the Union of the States, vol. 1 of The Popular History of the United States (New York, 1876). 13. A. Davis, A Lecture on the Antiquities of Central America, and on the Discovery of New England by the Northmen, Five Hundred Years before Columbus (New York, 1840), p. 21. 14. See Robin Fleming, “PicturesqueHistory and the Medieval in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review 100 (Oct. 1995): 1061–94.See also Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny (Cambridge,Mass., 1981). Carl Christian Rafn’s American Antiquities,10 an 1837 compendium of his- torical and literary documents proposing that the Vikings had discovered the shores of America five hundred years before Columbus, this general literaryappetiteforNorseliteraturequicklyturnedintheUnitedStatesinto a wide and sometimes contentious debate on the nature and scope of the Vikings’ New World adventures.11 Thus the Vikings began to find a promi- nent position within general histories of the United States and of New En- gland,12 literary works like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1841poem“The Skeleton in Armor,” inspired by the discovery of a “Viking” grave in Mas- sachusetts in the 1830s, and lectures such as Asahel Davis’s admiring but vague dissertation on “the discovery of New England by the Northmen,” which went through at least twenty editions by the end of the 1840s.13 As the century wore on, Viking discovery became intertwined withlines of historical inquiry that linked race and politics in an attempt to explain American democracy as an outgrowth of a distant Anglo-Saxon,Teutonic, or Nordic past. As Robin Fleming has argued, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century medieval history enjoyed a lengthy heyday, as Henry Adams and others strove to bolster the authority of the Brahmin elite by forging a direct and unbroken link between the present, the intermediary past of the founding fathers, and a medieval past in which Teutonic tribes had planted the original seeds of contemporary democracy.14 With their 874 J. M. Mancini / Discovering Viking America 15. See Eben Norton Horsford, Sketch of the Norse Discovery of America (Boston, 1891), p. 25 and Leif’s House in Vineland (Boston,1893). For informationon Horsford,see Stephen Williams, Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Prehistory (Philadelphia,1991), pp. 206–10. On the “Viking Revival” in architecture,see Richard Guy Wilson, “Oscar Wilde, Colonialists,and Vikings: Newport and the Aesthetic Movement,” Nineteenth Century 19 (Spring 1999): 4–11. 16. Thisorganization,establishedin 1858, was an affiliated society of the New-EnglandHistoric, GenealogicalSociety, named in honor of the eighteenth-centuryantiquarianThomas Prince. Its purpose was “the publicationof rare works” relating to the history of America and particularly New England, with the purpose of, as Slafter put it, “the perfectingof what we have begun as a library of New-Englandhistory.”Members included Charles Francis Adams, Charles Eliot Norton, and Francis Parkman (Edmund Slafter, Discourse Delivered before the New-England Historic, Genealogical Society [Boston,1870], pp. 24, 31; see also Voyages of the Northmen to America, ed. Slafter [1877; New York, 1967], pp. 144–49). 17. See Slafter, The Discovery of America by the Northmen, 985–1015 (Concord, N.H., 1891). 18. See Slafter, Discourse Delivered before the New-England Historic, Genealogical Society, p. 12. This project began with the history of his own family in his Memorial of John Slafter, with a Genealogical Account of His Descendants(Boston,1869). 19. Slafter, The Discovery of America by the Northmen, 985–1015, pp. 3–4. supposed discovery of America nearly five hundred years before the more swarthy Columbus, the Vikings offered a special fascination to New En- glanders. Notable citizens like Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Low- ell, and Edward Everett Hale clamored for a statue of Leif Erikson to commemorate Boston’s other founding father (fig. 2), Viking-style trim- mings adorned the fashionable homes ofNewport,andHarvardUniversity hoarded great numbers of “Viking” artefacts uncoveredbyM.I.T.professor Eben Norton Horsford, who devoted decades to proving through publi- cations, tours, and large-scale endeavors in amateur archaeology that Leif Erikson not only had stumbled upon American shores, but had settled Cambridge itself (fig. 3).15 This craze for Viking discovery was joined to a surging interest in New England history and genealogy, exemplifiedbytheworkofEdmundSlafter. Slafter, who as an officer of Boston’s Prince Society16 promoted the Viking discovery of America through his republicationofBeamish’sEnglishtrans- lation of the sagas and who celebrated the eventual success of the Erikson statue movement,17 devoted most of his literary and historical attention to producinganintricatefamilyhistoryofNewEngland.18 InSlafter’swritings, the historical triangle described by Fleming revealed itself in an emphasis on the primacy of the desire for freedom among the Vikings, the “Anglo- Saxon” colonials, and their present-day descendants. Thus, just as he char- acterized the Vikings’ gradual westward movement as a reaction to the “despotic rule” of King Harald Haarfagr (rather than,say,aseriesofbloody and piratical quests for economic and political power), and the primary qualities of the colonial “patriarchs” as their “love of liberty,” he also putin a strong word for the continued democratic tendencies of contemporary NewEnglanders.19 Indeed,Slafterwentsofarastosuggestthatthehistorical figure 2. Boston’sother founding father. f ig u r e 3. H o rs fo rd ’s C am b ri d ge . Critical Inquiry / Summer 2002 877 20. Slafter, Discourse Delivered before the New-England Historic, Genealogical Society, pp. 19, 11. 21. Slafter, The Discovery of America by the Northmen, 985–1015, p. 3. 22. Duringhis long life, Anderson (1846–1936)was also United States minister to Denmark (1885–1889)and long-time editor of Amerika, a prominentNorwegian-Americannewspaper enterprise itself, as practiced in that region, was successful because its practitioners had sprung from “a people of unusual political and social equality, coming of the Anglo-Saxon stock, with an inheritance of many elements of character in which they always feel a just but not ostentatious pride.”20 Slafter was so convinced of this connection between New Englan- ders and the Vikings, in fact, that he insisted that the Leif Erikson statue “should be placed in Boston, the metropolis of New England,” despite har- boringadeepskepticismtowardsmostofthearchaeologicalevidenceinfavor of the New England thesis.21 The prominent map of Cape Cod and Massa- chusetts Bay facing the title page of his Voyages of the Northmen to America, bearing the unequivocal title “A Map of Vinland, from accounts contained in Old Northern M.S.S.,” made the same point in visual terms (fig. 4).Thus, while earlier writers such as Davis had represented the Norsemen as an ap- pealing, though strange and distant people, towards the end of the century they were coming to resemble old friends or, more precisely, family. The mainstreaming of Viking discovery in the last quarter of the nine- teenth century served a similar purpose as that served by the larger trend towards racialized history. At a moment of increasing fear that the nation was committing race suicide, the thought of Viking ghosts roaming the streets of a city increasinglyfilledwithIrish,Italian,andJewishhordesmust have been comforting to an Anglo-Saxon elite whose political power, at least, was decidedly on the wane. At the same time, claims to such virile ancestors as the Vikings also answered charges of effeminacy on the partof the literary elite, itself seen as part of the dangerous trend towards racial degeneration. Native-stock writers, however, were not the onlyonestoem- ploy the Vikings for political purposes. Significantly, at the same time that native-stock writers were using Viking discovery to cope with the massive social and political transformations of the late nineteenth century, immi- grants, who themselves comprised a major force behindthesechanges,also began to see that the Vikings could serve their interests. The first volume by an American author of immigrant stock to turn to these themes was Rasmus B. Anderson’s provocatively titled America Not Discovered by Columbus, first published in 1874 and reissued in severalsub- sequent editions (fig. 5). Like native-stock writers, Anderson, the son of Norwegian immigrants and professor of Scandinavian languagesattheUni- versityofWisconsin,arguedthataseriesofNorseadventurers,from986until the fourteenth century, had seen, touched, and settled America.22 With its uncritical catalogue of four decades of “evidence,” including Viking place- 878 J. M. Mancini / Discovering Viking America figure 4. “A Map of Vinland from accountscontainedin Old Northern MSS,” Voyages of the Northmen to America, frontispiece. (1898–1922).For biographical informationon Anderson, see Lloyd Hustvedt, Rasmus Bjørn Anderson: Pioneer Scholar (1966; New York, 1979); Paul Knaplund, “Rasmus B. Anderson, Pioneer and Crusader,”Norwegian-AmericanStudies and Records 18 (1954): 23–43; Einar Haugen, “WisconsinPioneers in ScandinavianStudies: Anderson and Olson, 1875–1931,”Wisconsin Magazine of History (Autumn 1950): 28–39; and C. W. Butterfield, Literary and Biographical Sketch of Prof. Rasmus B. Anderson (Madison,Wis., 1879). names on Cape Cod and Viking tablets in the Taunton River in additionto the standard “skeleton in armor,” Anderson’s volume was tinged with an air of fantasy, and some contemporaries were quick to accuse him of an Critical Inquiry / Summer 2002 879 figure 5. Prof. R. B. Anderson, Madison,Wis. and the Newport Tower, which Anderson insisted was a Norse, rather than a colonial,edifice. See Thomas Wentworth Higginson, letters to Anderson, 5 May 1877 and 10 June 1877, Anderson correspondence,State HistoricalSociety of Wisconsin,Madison(SHSW), reel 1. See also Voyages of the Northmen, p. 137. For another skepticalview of the time, see Charles Rau, “Observationson the Dighton Rock Inscription,”Magazine of American History 2, no. 1 (1878): 82–85. 24. Althoughskeptics such as HigginsonquestionedAnderson’scredulity, he was hardly the last Viking theorist to see Norse ruins everywhere he looked. The Newport Tower, the Dighton Rock, and many other “Viking” sites and artefactshave had their promotersthroughoutthe twentieth century and continue to inspire heated defences. See, for example, A. C. Clausen, Leif Erikson’s Discovery of America (Spokane, Wash., 1938); BarthiniusL. Wick, Did the Norsemen Erect the Newport Round Tower? (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1911); and Carl H. Strandbergand Glyn Nelson, “Possible Norse Settlement Traceson Cape Cod,” unpublishedms., 196–?, MinnesotaHistorical Society (MHS). Even the usually sober Royal Ontario Museum produced a pamphlet in the 1960s that giddily suggestedthat a trove of Viking swords and axes might actually have been left by Norse travellers to Northern Ontario. See A.D. Tushingham,The Beardmore Relics: Hoax or History? (Toronto,1966). For a more skeptical analysisof these remains,see Johannes Brønsted, “Norsemen in North America before Columbus,”Smithsonian Institution Annual Report for 1953 (Washington,D.C., 1954), pp. 367–405. 23. ThomasWentworth Higginson,for example, chided Anderson for his uncriticalacceptance of two particular“finds”: the Dighton Rock, which Anderson claimed to have runic inscriptions, excess of enthusiasm.23 Yet, although Anderson may have approached the limits of contemporary credulity with some of his claims,24 the work was well within the boundaries of the discovery discourse as practiced by the native-born cultural and social elite, an elite which surely was Anderson’s intended readership. That Anderson saw this elite as a significant audience for his work can be seen not only in the work itself but in his actions surroundingit.Forone 880 J. M. Mancini / Discovering Viking America 25. Thisfact is noted in Butterfield, Literary and Biographical Sketch of Prof. Rasmus B. Anderson, p. 4. 26. For informationon the Norwegianimmigrantpress, see Arlow W. Andersen, The Immigrant Takes His Stand: The Norwegian-AmericanPress and Public Affairs, 1847–1872 (Northfield, Minn., 1953), and Odd S. Lovoll, The Promise of America: A History of the Norwegian- American People, trans. Lovoll (Minneapolis, 1984). 27. See RutherfordB. Hayes. letter to Anderson, 15 Oct. 1878, Anderson correspondence,SHSW, reel 1. 28. Longfellowrefused on the groundsthat he had never written a letter “of that nature” but assuagedAnderson’s fears by writing that the book was “interestingand valuable,” that it would “make its own way in the world,” and that Anderson’swork would give “name and fame to you and to your University”(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, letter to Anderson,11 Aug. 1875, Anderson correspondence,SHSW, reel 1). Anderson continued to send later works and informationto Longfellow,who received his correspondenceenthusiastically.See Longfellow, letters to Anderson, 1 Nov. 1876, 28 Nov. 1876, and 15 Dec. 1879; see also Edith Longfellow, letter to Anderson, 19 May 1875, Anderson correspondence,SHSW, reel 1. 29. GeorgeBancroft, letter to Anderson, 26 Apr. 1877, Anderson correspondence,SHSW, reel 1. Even the doubter Higginsonwrote, “the book as a whole seems to me of value as popularizing certain facts and traditionswith which people ought to be familiar,and I thank you for your courtesy in sending it” (Higginson, letter to Anderson, 10 June 1877, Anderson correspondence, SHSW, reel 1; see also Charles W. Tuttle, letter to Anderson, 9 Mar. 1878, Anderson correspondence,SHSW, reel 1). Anderson also correspondedon Northern matters with Bayard Taylor, a self-described“admirerof the Scandinavianrace and poetry” (Bayard Taylor, letter to Anderson, 12 Dec. 1874, Anderson correspondence,SHSW, box 19), successfullyproposeda book swap with Universityof PennsylvaniaanthropologistDaniel G. Brinton (see Daniel G. Brinton, letter to Anderson, 13 Dec. 1882, Anderson correspondence,SHSW, box 26), and had a lengthy correspondencewith E. N. Horsfordand his daughterCornelia, who carried on the Viking project after her father’s death. 30. An idea for which Butterfieldsomewhat dubiouslycredits Anderson in the first place. See Butterfield, Literary and Biographical Sketch of Prof. Rasmus B. Anderson, p. 5. thing, Anderson chose to write the volume in English, something he had not done with his previous books.25 Given the period’s still-flourishing Norwegian-language press and the lack of English facility among many Norwegian immigrants, this decision suggests that Anderson did not view immigrants as his most important audience.26 Moreover, Anderson en- gaged in a crusade of publicity to bring the book to the attention of the native-born elite, sending copies and correspondence to numerouspromi- nent historians, writers, and others (including President Rutherford B. Hayes),27 and even attempting to enlist Longfellow to write a letter of en- dorsement for it.28 Although the success of this campaign is hard to gauge, Anderson must have found it flattering to discover that a historical lumi- nary such as George Bancroft would have “immediately secured it” upon its release and that the book gained a sufficiently positive response to gain him election to the Prince Society.29 Just incasetheseprivatemeasureswere not enough to soften up these valued readers, Anderson added a lengthy preface in the second edition praising the worthy men of Boston who had contributed to the Erikson statue movement,30 just as he had dedicated his Critical Inquiry / Summer 2002 881 31. A dedicationto which Longfellowseems to have respondedfavorably.The title of the volume was Norse Mythology: The Religion of Our Forefathers Containing All the Myths of the Eddas, Systematized and Interpolated(Chicago,1875). See Longfellow, letters to Anderson, 10 Mar. 1873 and 11 Aug. 1875, Anderson correspondence,SHSW, reel 1. 32. Sometimes,Anderson’spleas to the native born to accept the continuityof immigrantways took a more direct form. In his First Norwegian Settlements in America within the Present Century, for instance,Anderson directly addressed the native-bornreader with the admonitionthat “you should not blame the foreignersfor clinging to their language and traditions.By doing so they bridge the Atlantic ocean and bring to this country the fruits of all the progressmade from year to year in Europe,” without which American society would be immeasurablypoorer (Anderson, The First Norwegian Settlements in America within the Present Century [1898; Madison,Wis., 1899], p. 167). For a thorough overview of Scandinavianimmigrant literaturein its other guises, see Dorothy Burton Skårdal, The Divided Heart: ScandinavianImmigrant Experience through Literary Sources (Lincoln,Nebr., 1974). 33. Due to the successof his Viking writingsand his “authentic”position as a scholar of Scandinavianliterature,Anderson also had somethingmore concrete to offer to certain native- stock enthusiastsof the Vikings:positive reviews of their books. Rabid anti-ColumbianViking theorist Marie Brown Shipley, for example, virtually begged Anderson to review her translations of Swedish literature,“and in the ‘Nation,’ by preference,”so that she could successfullyself- publish them and avoid the “treachery”of greedy publishinghouses (Marie A. Brown, letters to Anderson, 29 Nov. 1878, 3 Feb. 1879, and 15 Mar. 1879, Anderson correspondence,SHSW, box 22). 34. And, it might be added, contrastswith the tendency of twentieth-centuryViking theoristsof immigrantdescent to emphasizethe hypothesis that, wherever they may have landed initially, the Vikings somehow managed to wind up in Minnesotaor other parts of the Middle West with a deeper connectionto the immigrantcommunity itself. 35. As BarbaraMiller Solomon writes, the relative distanceof most Scandinaviansfrom the teeming masses of immigrantsin the eastern cities did not always prevent them from being seen as objectionable.While Charles FrancisAdams, Henry Cabot Lodge, and other late nineteenth- century defenders of Teutonicsuperiorityfrequently saw Scandinaviansand Germans, particularly in the rural west, as the last hope for raciallyhealthy immigration,other observers in the late nineteenth century blamed all non-English“‘old’” immigrants, includingScandinavians, for “the degradationof American civilization,”which the arrival of even strangernew groups in the last decades of the century had only furthered (BarbaraMiller Solomon, Ancestors and earlier book on northern mythology to Longfellow.31 Thus, unlike many purveyors of immigrant literature, Anderson did not primarily reach in- ward with his work in order to bolster an insecure ethnic community throughaccountsofhardshipandsurvivalanddidnotproposeassimilation as the path by which that community would gain a solid foundationwithin American society as a whole.32 In Anderson’s hands, immigrant literature was a project that reached outward to those who set the boundaries of im- migrant participation in American life, while working to stretch those boundariesbyredefiningtheimmigrantcommunityintermsthatflattered, rather than challenged, the native-born elite.33 This strategy can be seen most readily in the text itself. Anderson’s des- ignation of New England as the site of Viking landing, for instance, can hardly have been accidental.34 Indeed, it seems that Anderson’svolumewas a plea to the same Brahmin audience that in its softer moments produced sentimentalized accounts of Viking discovery and the democratic inheri- tance of the Teutonic race but that in everyday practice was not alwayswel- coming to newcomers from the fjords and farms of Norway.35 Thus, just as 882 J. M. Mancini / Discovering Viking America Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition [Cambridge,Mass., 1956], p. 159; see also pp. 31, 160). For a comprehensivelook at attitudes towardsimmigrants in the Midwest in the nineteenth century, see Jon Gjerde, The Minds of the West: EthnoculturalEvolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830–1917 (Chapel Hill, 1997), esp. chaps. 1–2. 36. Andersonwas not the only ethnic writer to situate the Viking discoveryof America within the context of an inevitable westwardAryan progression.This cause was also taken up by the Danish/Norwegian-AmericanHarold W. Foght, who wrote that the Aryan migration,although it commencedthousandsof years ago while the history of man was young, has not yet come to an end . . . the overflow is being dispersed over the whole earth, peopling America and Australia,setting up there and elsewhere, a new and powerful dominion over the aborigines.Wherever they go the Aryans carry with them their enlightenment.[Harold W. Foght, The Norse Discovery of America, with Some Reference to Its True Significance(Blair, Nebr., 1901)] For a comprehensivediscussionof the idea of the westwardprogressionof the Aryan people and their origins, see Horsman,Race and Manifest Destiny. 37. Elsewhere,Anderson also made the more conventionalclaim that Norwegianswere patriotic, industrious,and quick to learn English. See Anderson, First Norwegian Settlements within the Present Century, p. 167. 38. Certainlater Norwegian-Americanwriters such as Olaf Morgan Norlie, who sweepingly attributed Norse origin to the “PilgrimFathers” and their descendants,did not show this restraint (Norlie, History of the Norwegian People in America, p. 24). Adams’sworkwasintendedtodrawadirectlinkbetweentheTeutonicdem- ocrats of the medieval past and the Brahmins of the nineteenth century, Anderson’s tract was meant to remind people like Adams that those Nor- wegians who had just stepped off the boat were the direct descendants of the original settlers, who were the descendants of a branch of the Teutonic race that, in early times, emigrated from Asia and traveled westward and northward, fi- nally settling down in what is now the west central part of the king- dom of Norway . . . . They were a free people. Their rulers were elected by the people in convention assembled, and all public matters of im- portance were decided in the assemblies, or open parliaments of the people.[A, p. 49]36 With its emphasis on the freedom-loving racial characteristics of the Norwegians, Anderson’s account seems designed to suggest to Americans that their own racialist ideology implied that race, rather than ethnicity or nationalorigin,shouldbetheprimarycategoryforjudgingimmigrantsand thatScandinavians’racialheritagewouldmakethemgoodAmericanswith- out abusive programs of assimilation. After all, as the quotation at the be- ginningofthisessayshows,Americansthemselvesowedtheirbestqualities, at least in part, to the Norsemen.37 Lest anyone should mistake the persis- tence of the Norse “spirit” for a vague or coincidental sympathy of mind, Anderson made sure to mention that both Englishmen and Americans owed not only their habits but their actual lines of descent to the Norman conquest and earlier Norse incursions, stopping just short of claimingthat George Washington himself was descended from the Vikings.38 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2002 883 39. One other risk of this strategy was that it would lead to a cartoonishtypecastingof Norwegiansand their culture. Indeed, although Anderson’sViking campaignwas successful in creating a positive image of Scandinavians, it did nothing to further his simultaneousgoal of spreadingthe good word about contemporaryScandinavianculture. As it turned out, editors such as S. S. McClure and J. B. Gilder of the Critic wanted “stirringviking stories of adventure,”but not Ibsen (S. S. McClure, letter to Anderson,17 Oct. 1890, Anderson correspondence,SHSW, box 32; see also J. B. Gilder, letters to Anderson,14 Apr. 1882 and 18 Dec. 1882, Anderson correspondence, SHSW, boxes 25 and 26). 40. It should be pointed out that at least one critic of Anderson and his fellow Viking theorists was unpersuadedby this line of argumentnot just because the critic disputed Anderson’sevidence for Norse discoverybut because he scorned the Norse character itself. Rather than a culture of “freedom and enlightenment,”J. P. MacLeaninsisted that the Vikings were “lawless in a bad sense,” their natures “more savage than that of any North American Indian at the time of the discovery,”and ridiculed Anderson and others like him for attributingall progressand enlightenmentto the “fable” of “our Saxon inheritance.”As MacLeanhimself indicated,however, his view was not a common one (J. P. MacLean, A Critical Examination of the Evidences Adduced to Establish the Theory of the Norse Discovery of America [Chicago,1892], pp. 52, 53, 54). 41. Olson himself was preoccupiedwith this issue and believed that the Viking discoveryof America was the best tool to put Norwegians“in the front part of American history books” and to thereby erase the backwoodsimage of Norwegiansamong “Plymouth-Rock-Americans”(Julius Olson, “The Vinland Voyages,”speech delivered at Leif EriksonDay Festival, Chicago,1923, unpublished ms., Olson Papers, NorwegianAmerican HistoricalAssociation,Northfield, Minn. [NAHA]). Anderson’s strategy of compromise without assimilation may have placed him in the somewhat undignifiedroleofasalesman,forcedtoflatter the racial, social, and political vanities of his most desirable customers,but it would be a mistake to think that he expected nothing in return.39 In fact, Anderson made significant demands in this exchange, asking specifically that Americans not only accept Scandinavians as their brethrenbutrewrite their own history. It was not enough for a few books here and there to toss in a word or two about the Vikings; Anderson demanded that the proto- typicalagentofassimilationandAmericanization,thepublicschool,should teach American children that the Norse were Americans’ common ances- tors.40 Charging that Leif Erikson, his brother Thorvald, and others like them should “become household words in every house and hamlet inthese United States,” he exhorted Americans to “let every child learn the stories abouttheNorsediscoverersofVinlandtheGood”(A,p.34).Althoughthere is no evidence to suggest that the historical profession dropped everything to follow his command, it should be noted that many of the native-stock Viking books, including Slafter’s, were published after Anderson’s. More- over, the American Historical Association invited Anderson’s son-in-law, Julius Olson, to coedit the first volume of J. Franklin Jameson’s Original Narratives of Early American History series, The Northmen, Columbus,and Cabot, 985–1503, published in 1906.41 Anderson’s text also employed more specific strategies for insinuating the Norsemen into the heart of American national history. In particular, 884 J. M. Mancini / Discovering Viking America 42. In this, Anderson foreshadowedsimilarargumentsattributingNorse ancestryto various Indian languagesand linking English place-namesto the Norse discovery.See, for example, Wilfred Harold Munro, Tales of an Old Sea Port (Princeton,N.J., 1917), which claimed that Rhode Island’s Mount Hope was originally“Hóp,” from the Icelandicfor “bay,” a claim echoed in Matthias Thórdarson,The Vinland Voyages, commissionedfor an American audience by the American GeographicalSociety (MatthiasThórdarson,The Vinland Voyages, trans. Thorstina Jackson Walters [New York, 1930], p. 42). 43. Andersonwas not the last to argue for a Norse origin to Native languages.In the 1940s and 1950s, Norwegian-AmericanReider ThorbjornSherwin compiled an eight-volumelexicography outlining the “Old Norse origin of the Algonquinlanguage.”See Reider ThorbjornSherwin, The Viking and the Red Man: The Old Norse Origin of the Algonquin Language, 8 vols. (New York, 1940–56). 44. That Anderson had tapped into a powerful vein of anti-Catholicismin his support of the Vikings can be seen in the commentsmade by Marie Brown (later Shipley) before the U.S. Senate during an 1888 hearing to decide whether to recognizeofficially the discoveryof America by Leif Erikson: The vital and all-absorbingquestionnow is, whether this American Republic, founded on surely secular principles,wishes to pay posthumoushonors, on a scale of unprecedented magnificence,and at the bidding of the pope, and the countriesunder his dominion. . . to the Roman Catholic missionaryand devotee, ChristopherColumbus, who was sent out by the Church of Rome to convert the natives of a land whose localityhe knew, having ascertainedit definitely in Iceland before he started forth on his voyage to the western continent.[To do so] would be to publicly sanctionthe claims of the Church of Rome to this land, and virtually to invite the pope to come and take possessionof it. [Brown, “Leif Erikson,”speech delivered 23 Mar. 1888, MHS] Anderson appealed to historical connections among race, geography, and religion,constructingtheVikings’foraysintoNewEnglandasapreparation for the Puritan arrival. In the first instance, Anderson argued that the Vi- kings had taken possession of the landscape by giving it place-names that survived to the modern era, presumably passed down through the Native population.42 Quoting at length from a tract sent to him by “Joseph Story Fay,Esq.,ofWood’sHoll,Massachusetts,”Andersonpromotedtheideathat this town’s name had been “given” to the Indians by the Vikings, forwhom the word holl signified hill, andthat ithadstuckbecauseoftheIndians’own linguistic weakness (A, p. 24; see p. 28).43 Anderson also suggested that the Vikings had prepared New England for the Puritans by bringingChristian- itytoitsshores.Despiteanodtothe“flowerofTeutonicheathendom”(and despitethefactthatChristianityhadatbestonlypartiallypenetratedViking culture by the time of the Vinland voyages), Anderson repeatedly empha- sized the Christianity of the Norsemen. More than that, Anderson implied that the Vikings had been the right kind of Christians to bring religion to America by distinguishing them from Columbus, who “talkedofhimselfas chosen by Heaven to make this discovery” but was “subservient to the do- minion of inquisition.” What Anderson avoided saying, of course,wasthat the Vikings were as Catholic as Columbus (A, pp. 57, 91),44 even if their Critical Inquiry / Summer 2002 885 See also Shipley, The Norse Colonization in America by the Light of the Vatican Finds (Lucerne, 1898). While this suspicionof Rome persisteduntil well after the turn of the century in Viking narratives,by the 1930s authors had come to embrace a more inclusive view of discovery and its symbols. The vice presidentof the MinnesotaLeif EriksonMonument Association,for instance, insisted in 1934 that “there is ample room for honoringboth of these men” (E. Klaveness, “Leif Erikson and ChristopherColumbus,”radio address,St. Paul, 1934, MHS); see also Ola Johann Saervold, The Discovery of America (Minneapolis, 1931), who suggeststhat Columbus learned about America from the Icelandersbut that this was a sign of his “earnestnessand diligence” (p. 14). For a twentieth-centurydiscussionof the Vikings that preceded this change of heart, see Olson, “The Teutonic Spirit: An Address Delivered on the Occasionof the Unveiling of a Statue to Rollo of Normandy,at Fargo, N. Dakota, July 12th, 1912” (Minneapolis, 1912). 45. While Anderson’sconvenient neglect of the Catholicismof the Vikings seems calculatedto provide a means of distinguishingProtestantNorwegiansfrom other groups of immigrants, the fact that they were followers of the Church of Rome was picked up by Catholic writers and used to demonstratethe fitness of Catholicsas Americans.The renowned Catholic historianJohn Gilmary Shea’s 1855 History of the Catholic Missions, for instance,began with a chapter on the “Norwegian Missionsin New England.”In it, Shea explicitly attempted to restore Catholics to their proper place in American history by arguingthat the Vikings were Catholicsand that the Catholic Church had as a result been the first European institutionnot only in the New World generally, but in the United States itself. See John Gilmary Shea, History of the Catholic Missions among the Indian Tribes of the United States, 1529–1854 (1855; New York, 1969). Other Catholicappropriations of the Vikings include Vincent A. Yzermans,“Our Lady of the Runestones,”Marian Era 5 (1964): 73–73, 106–7; Sister Mary Jean Dorcy, “Ave Maria, Save Us from Evil,” Our Lady’s Digest 38 (Fall 1983): 37–42; and Raphael M. Huber, “Pre-ColumbianDevotion to Mary in America: The Testimonyof the KensingtonStone,” American EcclesiasticalReview 118 (July 1947): 7–21. 46. The desire to clean up the violent reputationof the Vikingsalso penetratedthe accountsof later Norwegian-Americanauthors such as Knut Gjerset, whose Norwegian Sailors in American Waters: A Study in the History of Maritime Activity on the Eastern Seaboard (Northfield,Minn., 1933) fulminated against“the fallaciousnotion . . . that they were merely adventurersand lawless buccaneers”(p. 8); a similartendency can be seen in the official statement of purpose of the descendants had turned away from the Church of Rome to areligionseem- ingly more appropriate for aspiring Americans.45 Although the mere presence of Christian Norsemen in Anderson’s nar- rativewouldhaveservedtoconnecttheVikingsandthePuritans,Anderson strengthenedthisassociationbyrepresentingVikingNewEnglandasaplace steeped in sanctifying Christian blood. The death of Leif Erikson’s brother Thorvald, he suggested, had been one of the most significant episodes in the Vikings’ New World history because it had consecrated America as a Christianlandand,byimplication,setthestageforthearrivaloflaterChris- tians.Thorvald,heexclaimed,“wasburiedinVinland,andtwocrosseswere erectedonhisgrave,—oneathisheadandoneathisfeet.Hallowedground, this, beneath whose sod rests the dust of the first Christian and the first European who died in America!” (A, p. 75). In describing the VikingChris- tianization of New England in these terms, Anderson provided an addi- tional incentive for native-stock Americans to accept the Vikings as the “discoverers” of New England; his account of this incident sidesteppedthe increasingly sensitive issue of anti-Native violence on the part of European colonists.46 In direct contrast to known accounts of the post-Columbian 886 J. M. Mancini / Discovering Viking America MinnesotaLeif Erikson Monument Association,which complainedthat “the general understandingof Leif Erikson seems to be that he was an adventurer, a sea-roverof some kind, an uncouth Viking. This is a complete misunderstandingof the man” (MinnesotaLeif Erikson Monument Associationpamphlet, 1931, p. 2, MHS; see also Louis H. Roddis, The Norsemen in the New World [Minneapolis, 1923], pp. 22–23). 47. Concernover this issue can be seen in governmentand pedagogicalpublicationsof the time, as well; for example, the Departmentof the Interior’srepresentativeat the Philadelphia Exhibition of 1876, John Eaton, published a dire volume entitled Are the Indians Dying Out? (Washington,1877), and the introductionto a mid-nineteenth-centuryedition of Robertson’s Discovery of America intended for use in the schools included the warning that perceptive readers had found Robertson’sdescriptionsof Cortez and other Spanish conquerorstoo forgiving;see John Frost, “The Life of Dr. Robertson,”in William Robertson,The History of the Discovery and Settlement of America (1777; New York, 1858), p. xxiii. 48. WilliamJ. Miller’s Notes Concerning the Wampanoag Tribe of Indians, with Some Account of a Rock Picture on the Shor of Mount Hope Bay, in Bristol, R.I. (Providence,R.I., 1880), for instance, combined a regretful and nostalgic look back at the noble life and shockingdeath of King Philip with a somewhatextraneous account of the discoveryof America by the “hardy Norse” (p. 5). In an interestingtwist, Miller located Leif Erikson’ssettlement at the same spot as Philip’s death, the aforementionedMount Hope/“Hóp.”Similarly,Charles G. Leland’s disquisitionon the Norse origin of Algonquinreligionand myth mournfullyasked, when the last Indian shall be in his grave, scholarswill wonder at the indifference of the “learned” men of these times to such treasuresas they have allowed to perish. What the world wants is not people to write about what others have gathered as to the Indians,but men to collect directly from them. (Charles G. Leland, “The Edda among the AlgonquinIndians,” Atlantic Monthly 54 [Aug. 1884]: 234). This associationof Norse discoveryand Indian disappearancecan also be found in Shea’s History of the Catholic Missions, which explicitly argued that the Catholic colonizationof the New World had been far less devastatingthan its Protestantcounterpart,and implied that a successful Viking colonizationmight have prevented the later decimationof Northern tribes. Christianization of the New World, in Anderson’s tract the event that en- abled the sacralization of the American landscape was not the brutal con- version and death of American Indians, but the European Thorvald’s murder at the hands of marauding Natives, the Skraellings of the sagas. Writing that “the Norseman had no fire-arms, and their higher culture could not defend them against the swarms of savages that attacked them,” Anderson suggested that New World Christianity had been born not in the brutalconversionanddecimationofAboriginalpeoplesbutinbloodspilled by European Vikings upon the shores of Massachusetts (A, p. 91). In thus offering victimized Vikings as the true colonizers of New England, Ander- son offered a salve to Americans’ (and particularly New Englanders’) in- creasingly guilty conscience about “the future of the Indian,” whose degradation and disappearance were becoming causes célèbres (due to the work of Lewis Henry Morgan and other practitioners of the emergingfield of anthropology),47 and whose fate was frequently pondered by defenders of the Viking theory of New World discovery.48 This imaginative refiguring of discovery provided the basis for an inter- esting bargain between Norwegians and the native born, for it suggested Critical Inquiry / Summer 2002 887 49. See Ole Edvard Rølvaag, Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie, trans. Rølvaagand Lincoln Colcord (New York, 1927). Not all immigrantwriters were as ambivalentabout western land taking as Rølvaag.As April Schultz points out, the authors of the 1925 pageant celebratingthe centennial of Norwegiansettlement in North America representedNorwegianpioneers as peaceful civilizersof the wilderness,who shared peace pipes and plans for cultivationwith Indians who had already agreed to leave without a struggle.See April Schultz, Ethnicity on Parade: Inventing the Norwegian American through Celebration(Amherst, Mass., 1994), pp. 5–6, 120–21. 50. HillaryRodham Clinton, “Remarks,”NationalMuseum of Natural History,Baird Auditorium,NMNH, Washington,D.C., 8 Apr. 1999, http://www.mnh.si.edu/exhibits/vikings/ firstlady.html.That is not to say that the show did not attracta fair amount of public interest, including cover stories in Time and National Geographic. See Michael D. Lemonich and Andrea Dorfman, “The Truth about the Vikings,”Time, 8 May 2000, pp. 68–78, and Priit J. Visilind,“In Search of Vikings,”National Geographic 197 (May 2000): 2–27. thatbyacceptingtheNorsemenasancestorsandbrethren,Americanscould rid themselves of one of the most troubling aspects of their collective past. It also served the needsof ScandinaviannewcomerstotheWest,whothem- selves grappled not only with real Natives but with the sticky issue of their own complicity in the brutal conquest of Indian lands. As the uneasy en- counter with a Native grave by the pioneer Hansa family in Ole Edvard Rølvaag’s Giants in the Earth indicates, immigrant writers would become preoccupied over the ensuing decades with the sense that there was some- thing ominous about staking claims to landwhichhadbeendeclaredbythe authorities to be empty but which, uponcloser inspection,containedliving Indians as wellas their history.49 WhileRølvaag’sconclusion,madeinhind- sight in the 1920s, seems to have been that complicity in manifest destiny and a too-uncritical attitude towards the ideals of the native born had brought Norwegians only insanity and death, Anderson’s tract of the 1870s suggested that Norwegian-American history itself held the key to theprob- lem of cultural contact. A compromise with America was the only route to immigrant success. Westward the Course At the end of the nineteenth century, then, it appeared as though the Viking discovery of America was poised to play an important role within American literary and historical consciousness. And, yet, it has not. While American popular culture is glutted with the cast-off symbols of Scandinavian-American nation-building—the horned hats that the Vi- kingsfamouslyneverwore—ashistoricalfigurestheVikingsbarelyappear on the American radar. Indeed, although Norse discovery was the subject of a recent Smithsonian exhibition, which was preceded by rousing press releases of Hillary Clinton praising “the power of the human spirit,” the exhibitiondidlittle eithertopromoteastrongnarrativeofVikingdiscovery or to grapple with the historical and cultural meaning of that discovery.50 Asidefromafewcasesfilledwitharchaeologicalcopies,abitoflonelynorth- 888 J. M. Mancini / Discovering Viking America 51. On the Enola Gay controversyand the limits of public history in the United States, see David Thelen et al., “Historyafter the ‘Enola Gay’ Controversy:An Introduction,”Journal of American History 82 (Dec. 1995): 1029–115. 52. See HjalmarR. Holand, Norse Discoveries and Explorations in America, 982–1362: Leif Erikson to the Kensington Stone (New York, 1968). This volume was originallypublished in 1940 under the title Westward from Vinland: An Account of Norse Discoveries and Explorations in America, 982–1362 and as a pamphlet called “The KensingtonStone” in 1932. 53. Holandwas neither the first nor the last to promote the authenticityof the Kensington Stone. Over the past hundred years it has had many adherents and detractors,and it still inspires heated and sometimesunfriendly debate. Indeed, it seems that nearly every citizen of the Midwest has weighed in on the KensingtonStone at some point, includingFrederick JacksonTurner. This is particularlytrue in Minnesota,where it has become a significantpart of the local popular culture and where narrative legitimizationsof the stone are abetted by a shrinelikemuseum and ern video footage, and some panels vaguely praising Native culture, the most the exhibition seemed to offer was the bland suggestion that the Vi- kings were farmers and traders, farmers and traders, farmers and traders. Even the saga storytelling hut cut off its narrative before the killings began and contact really happened. The result was a history that, literallywithout blood, could not either present a coherent vision of cultural contactorfur- ther our understanding of its historical implications. There are several reasons for this. The first has to do with the climate surrounding public history that has developed during the past decade or so. The Enola Gay controversy and the preceding furore over the West as America exhibit most certainly have undermined the potential for all but the blandest kinds of public history in the United States.51 With itsBarney- ized content and its casual corporate references, Vikings: The NorthAtlan- tic Saga seemed better designed to sell Volvos, Husqvarma chain saws, and LeifEriksonpuppetsthantodelveintothefraughtquestionofculturalcon- tact. Yet, the degradation of public history after Enola Gay can onlyexplain so much. After all, the exhibit reflected more than it created, and what it reflected is the larger absence of the Vikings from academia, the schools, or, with a few exceptions, American public history. So, then, how to explain this disappearance of the Vikings from Amer- ican historical consciousness? It certainly cannot be explained by a falling away of interest on the part of Scandinavian-American authors after An- derson. The twentieth century has seen the growth of a vast literature of this kind, exemplified by the most widely circulated of all the Viking dis- covery narratives, Hjalmar R. Holand’s Norse Discoveries and Explorations in America, 982–1362,52 still in print after sixty years and superficially very similar to Anderson’s work. Like Anderson’s narrative, Holand’sworkpro- posed an archaeological argument in favor of Viking discovery, this timein the form of the Kensington Stone, a 202-pound runestonepurportedlyun- covered by a Minnesota farmer in 1898.53 And, like America Not Discovered Critical Inquiry / Summer 2002 889 monument erected near the site of its “discovery.”As a result, nearly all discussionsof the stone have been cast in terms of truth versus falsehood,and with few exceptions little has been said about its cultural significanceindependent of its status as an authentic relic from pre-Columbian times. What is usually left unsaid in these discussionsis the fact that the very persistenceof the stone in the face of its highly dubious origin is what makes it interesting.A brief selection of these treatises includes TheodoreC. Blegen, The Kensington Rune Stone: New Light on an Old Riddle (St. Paul, Minn., 1968); George T. Flom, The Kensington Rune-Stone: A Modern Inscription from Douglas County, Minnesota (Springfield,Ill., 1910); S. N. Hagen, “The KensingtonRunic Inscription,”Speculum 25 (July 1950): 321–56; Carl ChristianJensen, “Rune Stone Controversy,” unpublished ms., July 1969, MHS; History of Douglas and Grant Counties, Minnesota: Their People, Industries, and Institutions,ed. Constant Larson,2 vols. (Indianapolis,1916), 1:72–122;Vincent H. Malmstrom,“In Quest of Vikings:A Personal Inquiry into the Mystery of the KensingtonStone,” Middlebury College Newsletter(Spring 1970): 19–26; Erik Moltke, “The KensingtonStone,” Antiquity 25–26 (June 1951): 87–93; Jeffrey R. Redmond, “Viking” Hoaxes in North America (New York, 1979); Erik Wahlgren, The Kensington Stone: A Mystery Solved (Madison,Wis., 1958) and “The Case of the KensingtonRune Stone,” American Heritage 10 (Apr. 1959): 34–35, 101–5; The Museum Committeeof the MinnesotaHistoricalSociety, The Kensington Rune Stone: Preliminary Report to the Minnesota Historical Society (St. Paul, 1915); and “The Story of the Kensington Runestone,” a pamphlet printed by the Alexandria,MinnesotaChamber of Commerce(n.d.), MHS. Turner’s views can be found in his letter to Gisle Bothne, 10 Feb. 1910, Gisle Bothne Papers, MHS. 54. Holand,Norse Discoveries and Explorations in America, 982–1362, p. 188. by Columbus, Holand’s narrative also argued strenuously both for the Vi- kings’ Christianity and for their victimization. To Holand, the Kensington Stone embodied the Vikings’ Christian martyrdom, representingthedying lament of a party of Vikings who, having “been suddenly overwhelmed, killed and scalped by a party of Indians,” had managed to carve a runic account of their demise and appeal to the Virgin before disappearing into the mists of time.54 For all of these similarities, however, Holand’s text differed from An- derson’s in two key respects. Ironically, these differences account both for thepopularityofthebookandforitsfailureasaworkofimmigrantpolitical claim staking. The first difference was its originality. Unlike Anderson, whose work was in the main a glossed translation of the Vinlandsagas,Ho- land created his own narrative, out of local sources, in order to forge a new narrative of Viking discovery. This decision to stray from the sagas, which even in translation could be cumbersome and inscrutable, enabledHoland to perform the narrative chases and leaps that make the book such a good read: the visceral scenes of bloody Vikings, imagined by Holand as victims not of extinct New England tribes but ofstill-fearedandadmiredSioux;the titillating suggestion that the Vikings’ survivors had intermarried with the Mandans, producing a fair race of “White Indians,” still extant in the days of Lewis and Clark; and the absurd but locally pleasing claim that Vikings had penetrated deep into the continent, naturally choosing Minnesota as their western home. 890 J. M. Mancini / Discovering Viking America 55. HomiBhabha, “DissemiNation:Time, Narrative,and the Marginsof the Modern Nation,” The Location of Culture (New York, 1994), p. 145. 56. LawrenceVenuti, “Translation,Community,Utopia,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Venuti (London,2000), p. 477. Indeed, with the obvious exception ofJuliusOlson’scontributiontoThe Northmen, Columbus, and Cabot, twentieth-centurytextsintheVikingcor- pus tended to shy away from translation in favor of originality. Although this decision probably enhanced the popularity of the genre, itwasacrucial mistake as a political strategy. For in asking readers to believe that the Vi- kings hadpenetratedtheinterioroftheNorthAmericancontinent,Holand and others who deviated from translation abandoned not only standard explanations of American history but the verysourcesofauthoritythathad allowed Anderson to credibly demand that readers make such a departure. What this abandonment suggests is that Holand and other twentieth- century authors failed to appreciate the key element that hadsustainedAn- derson’snineteenth-centuryVikingnarrative:itsabilitytonegotiateacanny bargain between immigrants and the native born and, more specifically, its careful doubling, what Homi Bhabha has described as “the continuist, ac- cumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative.”55 Asanontranslation,Holand’stextlostthree important sources of authority on which Anderson’s had drawn. First, the text departed from the long line of saga translations that flooded the English-speaking world in the nineteenthcentury, thuslosingtheauthority of Beamish, Morris, Slafter, and its progenitors. Second, it lost the sedi- mentaryweightofthesagasthemselves,the“ancientmanuscripts”thatSlaf- ter’s map accepted and whose own origins resided in the depths of oral tradition. Third, Holand’s decision to chart a new course for the Vikings deprived him of one of the key sources of credibility that immigrants do have in cultures that receive them: that of speakers and translators of their “own” languages and literatures. Significantly, Anderson’svolumewasable to capitalize on his authority as both a native speaker of Norwegian and a professional translator of the Norse languages, while at the same time ef- facing his performative role as a producer of an agonistic narrative of im- migrant nationalism. As Lawrence Venuti has proposed more generally regarding translations“thathaveachievedmasscirculation,”inthiscontext Anderson’sdiscoverytranslationwasabletobecome“thesiteofunexpected groupings, fostering communitiesofreaderswhowouldotherwisebesepa- rated by cultural differences and social divisions yet [we]re now joined by a common fascination,” even though “the forms of reception” that these readers employed were “not . . . entirely commensurable.”56 Separated by class, ethnicity, and region, Anderson’s readers were nonetheless joined by Critical Inquiry / Summer 2002 891 57. The Arctic-routetheory was also developed by others who wished to prove Viking landfall in Minnesota,such as Andrew Fossum, author of The Norse Discovery of America (Minneapolis, 1918) and “The Route from Vinland to Minnesotain 1362,” unpublished ms., Andrew Fossum papers, NAHA. The debate over the locationof the Vikings’ travels and Vinland in particular is almost as voluminousas Viking discoveryliteratureitself. It is thoroughlydiscussedin Kaups, “Shifting Vinland—Traditionand Myth.” A few examples of efforts to locate Vinland include W. A. Munn, Wineland Voyages: Location of Helluland, Markland, and Vinland (St. John’s, Nfld., n.d.); Anderson, Where Was Vinland? A Reply to Prof. Gustav Storm Refuting His Arguments in Favor of Locating Vinland (Minneapolis, 1891); Olson, Review of the Problem of the Northmen and the Site of Norumbega (Chicago,1890); and A.D. Fraser, “The Norsemenin Canada,” Dalhousie Review 27 (1937): 175–86. 58. A few examples of the KensingtonStone’s penetrationinto the local popular culture include MargaretLeuthner, Mystery of the Runestone (Alexandria,Minn., 1962), a comic book for children; Bert Merling, “The Runestone Pageant Play,” unpublishedms., 1962, MHS, 1962; and “Runestone Festival Commemoratingthe 600th Anniversaryof the KensingtonRunestone,”festival program, MHS. For a few brief examinationsof the culturalsignificanceof the stone, see Iver Kjær, “Runes and Immigrantsin America: The KensingtonStone, the World’s ColumbianExposition,and Nordic Identity,” The Nordic Roundtable Papers 17 (July 1994): 7–31, and Michael G. Michlovicand Michael W. Hughey, “Norse Blood and Indian Character:Content, Context, and Transformation of Popular Mythology,”Journal of Ethnic Studies 10 (1982): 79–94. 59. See Michlovicand Hughey, “‘Making’History:The Vikings in the American Heartland,” Politics, Culture, and Society 2 (Spring 1989): 338–60; see also Rhoda Gilman and James P. Smith, “Vikings in Minnesota:A ControversialLegacy,” Roots 21 (Spring 1993). Correspondence demandingofficial recognitionof the KensingtonStone is in possessionof Debbie Miller, MHS. the translated text. Without this bond (and without the comfort of Ander- son’s institutional location), Anderson’s fragile reading community could not persist. Holand’s work thus splintered the once unified constituencies of western immigrants and eastern Brahmins. Holand’sfailuretoappreciatetheimportanceofcompromisecanbeseen in another element of his work. Not only did his text discard translationas a model for immigrant writing, but it also introduced a new geography of discovery that too obviously rejected Brahminhierarchies.Instead,Holand proposed an aggressive regionalism that privileged the upper Midwest, home to so many of his fellow Norwegian and other Scandinavian Amer- icans. Brushing aside the eastern voyages of Leif Erikson and his contem- poraries, Holand devoted not only Norse Discoveries but the better part of his adult life to proving how, through a complicated Arctic route, the Vi- kings had been able to leave the Kensington Stone inthegeographicalheart of the North American continent.57 This choice reflected the emergence of a growing regional immigrant popular culture that continues to thrive to this day.58 On a nice summer day it is not hard to find true believers at the Kensington Stone museum and site. Indeed, as Michael Michlovic andMi- chael Hughey have argued, Minnesota has been able to develop an entire tourism network based on the Viking appeal; the Minnesota HistoricalSo- ciety, moreover, is regularly besieged by letters and missives demanding to know why, as the official representative of the state’s history, it has not em- braced the authenticity of Minnesota’s Viking heritage.59 892 J. M. Mancini / Discovering Viking America 60. Indeed, that is exactly the angle pursued in one of the longest press articles to arise from the show: Mark K. Stengel, “The DiffusionistsHave Landed,” Atlantic Monthly 285 (Jan. 2000): 35–48. Nonetheless, despite the occasional seepage of runes and rune-chasing into the wider popular culture (fig. 6), it is difficult to find many people of non-Minnesotan, non-Scandinavian heritage who are deeplyengagedwith the Viking debate as history. Quite simply, it has become a curiosity of re- gional and immigrant culture.60 Unlike Anderson’s comfortably colonial plottingofVikingdiscovery,Holand’smappresentedthelessrepresentative and less represented terrain between the Great Lakes and the Arctic— terrain that, unlike Cape Cod, would not have been immediately recognis- ableasastand-alonegeography—asthenewcenterofitall(fig.7).Holand’s work therefore asked Americans not only to accept a new version of their history, but a jarringly new cultural geography, as well. Even leaving aside the issue of its believability, Holand’s Arctic map challenged, rather than conformed to, the “normal” geography of American discovery and de- manded that Americans create a new mental map of the American past.All in all, it was too much to ask. A Canadian Coda This was not the Vikings’ final NorthAmericanhurrah,however(fig.8). Although by midcentury the Norsemen had reverted to an ironically pop- ular obscurity in the United States, they did make another, more fleeting appearance upon the stage of national history, this time in 1960s Canada. Of course, 1960s Canada wasa completelydifferentworldthan1870sAmer- ica. Canadians had their own men in leaky boats to remember and two divergent and competing sets of discovering ancestors. More than that, by the 1960s it was no longer so fashionable to cast national origins in racial- ized, teleological tones. Or was it? Consider the similarities between 1870s America and 1960s Canada. For each nation, these were times of rapideco- nomic, political, and geographical expansion. They were points at which the nations stood on the brink of massive demographic change. For both nations, these were timesofself-conscioushistoricalreflectionandpolitical redefinition, not only because they marked the nations’ respective centen- nials, but because each nation’s one hundredth anniversary was preceded and shaped by significant challenges to national sovereignty. And for both nations these were periods of expansion in the public higher education sector; while the Morrill Act of 1862 set the stage for massive academic growth and for greater student and faculty diversity in the years after the Civil War, so too did Canada’s ambitious program of university building and deprivatization in the 1960s. Consider as well the similaritiesbetween Norwegian Americans in the 1870s and Icelandic Canadians in the 1960s. figure 6. 894 J. M. Mancini / Discovering Viking America figure 7. “Sketch Showing Route by Way of Hudson Bay,” from HjalmarR. Holand, Norse Discoveries and Explorations 982–1362, p. 141. 61. See TryggviJ. Oleson, Early Voyages and Northern Approaches, 1000–1632 (Toronto,1963). During these two periods, each group was experiencing a moment when Old World tongues were giving way to English (a situation that was par- ticularly acute for Icelandic Canadians in the wake of the Second World War); when elite members were emerging within the educational and pro- fessional hierarchy of the nonimmigrant community; when, inshort, iden- tities were in flux and deals could be struck. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the Viking cause was resurrected at exactly this point, in Tryggvi J. Oleson’s 1963 Early Voyages and Northern Approaches, 1000–1632.61 As the first volume in the series that defined aca- demic history in 1960s Canada, W. L. Morton and D. G. Creighton’s Ca- nadian Centenary series, Oleson’s work gained the imprimatur of both the historicalprofessionandacademicpublishing.Itwasalsoasignificantwork of immigrant historiography. For, just as Anderson had identified history as a suitable vector for the improvement of his group’s status in the New World, so too did Oleson, who was a professor of history at the University Critical Inquiry / Summer 2002 895 figure 8. “A Viking ship and a Red River Cart, sometimesused for transportationin the early days.” From Lundar Diamond Jubilee (Lundar, Manitoba,1948). 62. On Oleson, see W. J. Lindal, The Icelanders in Canada (Ottawa, 1967), pp. 298–99. 63. See “Arts IIIH,” 16 May 1963, box 2, collectionA95–26, departmentof history,Universityof Manitoba,Departmentof Archives and Special Collections,ElizabethDafoe Library,Universityof Manitoba (EDL-UM). of Manitoba.62 As a founding officer oftheIcelandicCanadianClub(begun in1938topromoteknowledgeoftheIcelandicheritageinCanada),aformer vice president of the Icelandic National League, and a member of a de- partment whose honors students had names like Douglas, Gadadhar, Kar- piak, Kung,Moore,Parasiuk,Salzberg,andWagschal,butwereveryseldom of obvious Icelandic descent, Oleson embarked on this project not only as an academic historian but as an Icelandic Canadian.63 896 J. M. Mancini / Discovering Viking America figure 9. From TryggviJ. Oleson, Early Voyages and Northern Approaches, 1000–1632, pp. 2–3. 64. AlthoughOleson did not claim Anderson as an influence, he was known to the Icelandic community in Manitobain his own lifetime through its first newspaper,Framfari. See untitled item, Framfari, 28 Mar. 1878. The entire run of the newspaper has been translatedinto English by George Houser in one volume (Winnipeg, 1986). The item on Anderson appears on p. 168. 65. The classicessay on the North in Canadian politicalconsciousnessis Carl Berger, “The True North Strong and Free,” in Nationalism in Canada, ed. Peter Russell (Toronto,1966), pp. 3–26. Visual imagerywas used frequently as a tool in the formationof Canadian national identity as a “Northern” phenomenon.For an interestinganalysis that links this process to similar issues in Scandinavia,see Roald Nasgaard,The Mystic North: Symbolist Landscape Painting in Northern Europe and North America, 1890–1940 (Toronto,1984). More generally, see Thomas H. B. Symons, “The Arctic and CanadianCulture,” in A Century of Canada’s Arctic Islands, 1880–1980, ed. Morris Zaslow (Ottawa, 1980), pp. 319–37. Oleson’s project was also similar to Anderson’s work in another respect. Just as Anderson had chosen the imagined Teutonic past as a fertileground for compromise between Norwegians and nineteenth-century New En- glanders, Oleson too chose compromise as his strategy,settinghisnarrative in terms that would appeal to mid-twentieth-century Canadian elites.64 Most importantly,OlesonappealedtoCanadians’ongoingfascinationwith the North, proposing a theory of Viking exploration that recast the discov- ery of America as the discovery of the Canadian Arctic.65 Fromtheveryfirst illustration of his book (fig. 9), a map that cast Arctic Canada as the virtual center of the world, Oleson offered the North not only as the cornerstone of Canada’s past but as the key to its future. Critical Inquiry / Summer 2002 897 66. W. L. Morton, The Canadian Identity (Madison,Wis., 1961), pp. x, vii, 92. See also “Annual Report of the Departmentof History, 1959–1960,”“Annual Reports”file, box 1, collectionA95–26, department of history,Universityof Manitoba,EDL-UM. 67. Oleson, Early Voyages and Northern Approaches, 1000–1632, p. 63 68. Morton,The Canadian Identity, p. 93. In choosing the North as the geographical and historical center of his treatise,OlesonreachedouttotwosignificantCanadianelites.First,hepro- vided historical support to his fellow academics, then engaged in agrowing effort to define the Canadian identity. Indeed, Oleson’s colleague and the coeditor of the Centenary series, W. L. Morton, had published a highly in- fluential work entitled The Canadian Identity in 1961. Like other historical works of the time, this volume identified the North as the key to Canada’s pressing need to “achieve a self-definition of greater clarity and more ring- ing tone than it has yet done.” Following an imperative that had lurked in CanadianhistoriographyatleastsinceC. P.Stacey’sTheUndefendedBorder: Myth and Reality, booklet #1 in the Canadian Historical Association’s fa- mous series of orange-covered primers, Morton argued that historians couldprovideacrucialservicetoCanadabydistinguishingitsdevelopment, and particularly its origins, from the United States. Somewhat ironically, then, as the book was written while Morton was Visiting Commonwealth Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Morton described (Canadian) Northerners as “a new breed of man” and offered readers a distinct para- digm of discovery that emphasized not only the familiar forays of JohnCa- bot and others but included a nod to the less well-studied voyages of the “Viking frontiersmen” who opened the northern reachesoftheNewWorld to the English and the French.66 Oleson’s work answered Morton’s call for an exceptionalist Canadian history. Arguing that medieval Icelandic settlers in Greenland (following the same “natural” westward movement ascribed to Scandinavians by Ho- land andothers)hadmovedfromGreenlandtoBaffinIslandandLabrador, Oleson provided Canadians with an alternative history to both theColum- bian conquest and American accounts of Viking discovery. Although Ole- son did not deny the possibility of Viking’s landing in New England, he argued that their only certifiable New World landfall was not in Massachu- setts, but in Canada. In Oleson’s account, then, these voyages formed the prehistory, not of Puritan America, but of the Canadian Arctic.Describing the period of Icelandic discovery and contact as “the mediæval phase of Ca- nadian history,” Oleson implied that “Canada” preceded “America,”67 thus offering bold support to Morton’s assertion that “Canadian history is not a parody of American, as Canada is not a second-rate United States.”68 Like Anderson’s work, Oleson’s treatise thus used native-stock historians’ own agendas to further his own. While this version of Canadian history sup- 898 J. M. Mancini / Discovering Viking America 69. See Lyle Dick, “‘A Growing Necessity for Canada’: W. L. Morton’sCentenary Series and the Forms of National History, 1955–80,” Canadian Historical Review 82 (June 2001): 223–52; hereafter abbreviated“GN.” ported wider appeals for a separate identity for Canada, it placed Icelandic Canadians at the very center of the social order as the descendants of the people who literally had put Canada on the map. Indeed, Lyle Dick’s very interesting recent work on the Centenary series suggests that the publication of Oleson’s work in the series was directly at- tributable to its support of Morton’s vision of both Canadian identity and academic history’s role in realizing it.69 Not only did the series, and the works contained within it, support Morton’s desire tocombat,asDickputs it, the “advancingAmericancultural juggernaut[that]spelledadiminished role for Canada’s writers, including historians, in the Canadian body pol- itic” (“GN,” p. 251), but Oleson’s volume in particular proved to Morton “the existence of the northern seaway for almost five hundred years before Columbus. I find this of significance both for the history of the latter dis- covery and for the nature of Canadian ties to Europe. It has not been ac- cidental that we have not separated from Europe, as has the United States, and Latin America” (quoted in “GN,” p. 234). In Dick’s view, this was significant for two reasons. First, as I have sug- gested, it provided Morton with evidence of Canadian exceptionalism in the Americas. More than that, however, Dick argues that this formulation also offered epic history as a solution to the brewing separatist conflict in Quebec.AsDickargues,“inMorton’smindtherewereintegralconnections between early Viking approaches to northern North America, its subse- quent colonization by French and British settlers, and the incorporationof First Peoples into the eventual country of Canada.” Thus Morton selected volumes, like Oleson’s, that enhanced his vision of Canadian history “as a logical, even inevitable, progression to the modern nation-state,” and “re- jected topics he considered incompatible with his principal leitmotives of French-Englishdualityandintegrationoftheregions”(“GN,”pp.234,235). Dick concludes that this vision of Canadian history as the epic prefig- uring of the nation-state led to Morton’s marginalization of “alternative national aspirations, the history of Aboriginal peoples, or other groups or regions that did not fit in with its emphasis onAnglo-Frenchdualitywithin the Canadian nation-state” (“GN,” p. 237). In general, I would agree with this assessment. Regarding immigrants, however,whomDickdoesnotspe- cifically mention, I would make a further argument. Within the context of Morton’s epic history, immigrants could make claims to Canadianidentity. However, they could only do so effectively when those claims supported Morton’s (and, because of Morton’s influence, the historical profession’s) Critical Inquiry / Summer 2002 899 70. Interestingly,the French also occasionallyconceivedof themselvesas Viking descendants (“Normans,”of course),using this claim to shore up the more common claim of the French to Canadian discovery. In his Les Vikings des grandes étapes, vol. 1 of Les Northmans en Amérique (Montreal, 1954), Eugène Achard emphasizedthe common racial ancestryof French Canadians and the Vikings,writing that “Canadiens-françaisou Anglo-Canadiens,nous sommes les rameaux détachés d’une même race: la race normande,et, par le fait même, les frères de ces hardis Northmansqui sillonnèrent les mers du nord et, vers l’an mille, vinrent planter leurs tentes en Amérique” (p. 28). 71. It is importantto recognizethat Oleson was, in fact, very successfulas an academic.Not only did he publish Early Voyages and Northern Approaches, 1000–1632 alongsideCanadian historiography’srising elite, but in the eleven years following his receipt of the Ph.D. in 1950 he was the beneficiaryof numerousprestigiousgrants, including“a research grant of $6000.00by the Social Science Research Council of America,”a GuggenheimFellowship, three grants from the Ministry of Educationin Iceland, a Nuffield Travel Grant, and a grant from the CanadianSocial Science ResearchCouncil. He was also elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1959 (Annual Report of the Departmentof History, 1960–1961,”“Annual Reports” file, box 1, collection A95–26, departmentof history, Universityof Manitoba,EDL-UM;see also “CurriculumVitae: Tryggvi Julius Oleson,” 8 Dec. 1960, UA 20 004–047,EDL-UM). 72. It is importantto note that, outside academia, this was not necessarilythe case. Although Oleson pitched his vision of Icelandic-Canadianidentity in terms that meshed with prevailing academicdiscourse,other Icelandic-Canadianauthorsaligned themselves with different discourses,with very interestingresults. Most notably, Winnipeg judge and amateur historian W. J. Lindal, who was a vocal supporterof the chair of Icelandic languageand literatureat the University of Manitoba(1951) and the author of both The SaskatchewanIcelanders: A Strand of the Canadian Fabric (Winnipeg, 1955) and The Icelanders in Canada offered one of the most important alternative visions of Icelandic-Canadianidentity to that proposed by Oleson. Drawingon the many local historiesof the Icelandiccommunities in Manitoba,which in the traditionof Framfari, emphasizedthe Icelanders’compatibilityrather than their competitionwith the “valiant” Sitting Bull and later populationsof Ukrainians,Poles, and other immigrants,and drawing also on his firm convictionthat Canada’s ethnic diversity was the key to resistingtotalitarianism,Lindal’s work is characterizedby a strong multiculturalaspect. While Oleson’s narrative emphasizesthe inevitability(and danger) of racial fusion and the hegemony of certain strictly limited racial categories,Lindal’s vision promotes a much more fluid notion of both ethnicity and of identity. Thus Lindal’s work, which foreshadowsthe ascendanceof multiculturalismas perhaps the wider agenda. For Oleson (as for Anderson), then, who was deeply com- mitted to his own success (and the success of the Icelanders) within aca- demic discourse, this meant that the only way to make Icelanders fit was to figure them as forefathers in a master narrative whose endpoint was the predetermined coming together of the British and the French in an inte- grated, Europe-linked nation-state. Because of the twin threats of Quebec nationalism and the “American juggernaut,”mainstreamacademichistory intheearly1960swasonlypreparedforatheoryofCanadianethnicidentity that supported the dually racial, yet nonetheless racialized epic of French- English synthesis.70 Thus, for an immigrant historian like Oleson with as- pirations towards the academic elite,71 multiculturalism was simply not an option.72 There was also a more pragmatic element to Oleson’s appeal. For while Morton worried, as Dick shows, about America, about biculturalism, “the 900 J. M. Mancini / Discovering Viking America defining element of Canadianidentity discoursesince the 1970s, shows that “popular”immigrant historiographydoes not have to either take its cues from academicwriting or to consist in a watered-downversion of it. Indeed, unlike Holand’s tract, which in relationshipto Anderson’s work marked the marginalizationof the Viking narrativesfrom mainstreamdiscourse,Lindal’s work (and the local histories it drew upon) may hold an importantkey to the popular originsof Canadian multiculturalism.See “News of the Indians,” Framfari, 28 Mar. 1878, p. 171. For Lindal’s views on totalitarianism,see his Two Ways of Life: Freedom or Tyranny (Toronto,1940). 73. Departmentalenrollmentsare from “Departmentof History:Annual Report, 1958–59”; “Annual Report of the Departmentof History, 1959–60”;“Annual Report of the Departmentof History, 1960–1961”;“Departmentof History, 1961–62”;“Annual Report: Departmentof History, 1962–1963”;and “Annual Report: Departmentof History, 1963–1964,”in “Annual Reports” file, box 1, collectionA95–26, departmentof history,Universityof Manitoba,EDL-UM. Manitoba numbers are from the excerpt from “Universitiesand Colleges,”ManitobaEconomicConsultative Board 5th Annual Report (1967), table C-1, in “University in Community”file, box 4, collection A95–26, departmentof history, Universityof Manitoba,EDL-UM. 74. See RichardE. Bennett et al., A Guide to Major Holdings of the Department of Archives and Special Collections (Winnipeg, 1993), p. 102; “NorthernStudies Committee,”box 1, folder 1, mms. 41, Northern Studies Committee,EDL-UM; and G. W. Leckie, letter to Northern Studies Committee Planning Sub-Committee,7 May 1971, in “Northern Studies” file, box 3, collection A95–26, departmentof history, Universityof Manitoba,EDL-UM. 75. See Oleson, letter to Elizabeth Dafoe, 20 Oct. 1959; David W. Foley, letter to Morton, 2 Apr. 1962; Morton, letter to Foley, 14 Oct. 1961; and Dafoe, letter to history department, 15 Apr. 1957, in “Library—Universityof Manitoba”file, box 2, collectionA95–26, departmentof history, University of Manitoba,EDL-UM. See also Morton, letter to dean of the Faculty of Arts and even more hideous monster of ‘multiculturalism,’” and the role history could play in fashioning the Canadian nation, his relationshipwithOleson was forged within another context: the rapidexpansionofCanadianhigher education (“GN,” p. 243). For these were boom times. Between 1958 and 1964, student numbers in the department of history increased from 312 to 850;withinManitobaasawhole,full-timecollegeanduniversityenrollment between1957and1967jumpedfrom4,870to12,400.73 Asaresult,thisperiod saw not only the expansion of existing departments at the University of Manitoba but the emergence of entirely new ones like the department of anthropology and sociology, established in 1962, and the Northern Studies Committee, founded in the same year with Morton as chair.74 Morton, who was the head of the history department during this entire period, seems immediately to have realized that this expansion couldwork to the benefit of his department and his discipline and that Oleson could be an important ally in history’s ascent. Indeed,Olesonprovedtobeavalu- able pointman not only on seemingly mundane, local issues like library funding—with Oleson as his spokesman, Morton managed to increase the department’s library allocation five-fold between 1957 and 1961, to $5,200, which gave it the biggest budget in the faculty—but in a more global sense.75 For if the North offered a point of reentry for historians into the wider political culture, it could also provide something equally important: cold, hard cash. The fruits of expansion hadtobedividedupsomehow,and Critical Inquiry / Summer 2002 901 Science, 12 Apr. 1957 and n.d., 1956, box 1, collectionA95–26, department of history,Universityof Manitoba,EDL-UM. 76. Materialson this initiative, formed in 1967 to study “problemsassociatedwith human settlement” focusingon western and northern Canada, can be found in UA 33, EDL-UM. 77. “NorthernStudies Committee,”box 1, folder 1, mss. 41, Northern Studies Committee, EDL-UM. To put this sum in context, Morton’ssalary as head of the HistoryDepartmentwas $8,700 in 1957–58, and Oleson’s prestigiousSSRC grant for 1961–62was $6,000. See W. J. Condo, letter to W. L. Morton, 22 Mar. 1957, in “President: History—Administration”file, box 3, collectionA95–26, departmentof history, EDL-UM,and “Annual Report of the Departmentof History, 1960–1961,“Annual Reports” file, box 1, collectionA95–26, departmentof history, University of Manitoba,EDL-UM. 78. See “Applicationfor Grant in Aid of Northern Research by a Northern Research Institute,” signed by J. A. Hildes, 6 Jan. 1967, box 3, folder 2, mss. 41, Northern Studies Committee,EDL-UM; “Report of the Committee on Northern Studies—TheUniversityof Manitoba,Fiscal Year 1962– 63,” box 5, folder 1, mss. 41, Northern Studies Committee,EDL-UM; and “Grant Applications 1966,” box 3, mss. 41, Northern Studies Committee,EDL-UM. 79. Who claimed, as opposed to sociologists,to be “the only professionalgroup with training and residentialexperience among non-literatecultures”(Grant applicationsigned by John H. Steinbring,8 Dec. 1966, box 3, mss. 41, Northern Studies Committee,EDL-UM). 80. See “Annual Report of the Departmentof History, 1960–1961”;“CurriculumVitae: Tryggvi Julius Oleson”; and Morton, letter to dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, 12 Apr. 1957 and n.d., 1956. if departments and individuals could find a good argument on behalf of their particular field of expertise, they were more likely to gain support for their work. The North seems to have been just such a winner,asmoneywas handed over for institution-building projects like the Northern Studies Committee and the Centre for Settlement Studies, which had a significant Northern component,76 and for a multitude of individualprojects.Funded by the University of Manitoba, as well as government agencies like the De- partment of Indian Affairs and NorthernDevelopment, theseinitiativesof- fered excellent opportunities to faculty, with Northern Studies alone disbursing $116,000 in aid between 1962 and 1970.77 And yet, as Morton certainly realized, expanding opportunities also meant increased competition. Indeed, while annual funding for Northern Studies increased by fifteen or twenty timesin itsfirsttenyears,applications for funding would escalate one-hundred-fold in its first five.78 To get their sliceofthepie,historianslikeMortonwouldhavetojostleamongscientists, geographers, their new colleagues in anthropology,79 and numerous others and thus had to make sure that their language could accomplish not only the lofty feat of building the nation but the more pragmatic task of writing successfulgrantapplications.AsbothapersuasivetheoristoftheNorthand, like Morton himself, an experienced academic funding entrepreneur, Ole- son was a natural ally.80 Indeed, Morton certainly plannedonOleson’shelp inhisbidtoputthehistorydepartmentatthecenteroftheNorthernnexus, including Oleson in his 1962 plans for a program in Northern Historical 902 J. M. Mancini / Discovering Viking America 81. See “Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research proposedCourse Changes for the 1962–63 Calendar,” 2 Feb. 1962, “Calendar Material,New Course Proposals,Etc., 1957–1965,”box 1, collectionA95–26, departmentof history, EDL-UM. 82. W. L. Morton, “TryggviOleson, Scholar,” Winnipeg Free Press, 7 Dec. 1963, file UA 20 004– 047, Office of the President, President’sOriginalFiles, EDL-UM. 83. The quote is from Vincent Massey,first Canadian-borngovernorgeneral and “Honorary President of the CanadianCentenary Council,” speakingat Carleton UniversityConvocation,24 May 1963. See “Awarenessof Canada,”programfor a symposiumheld in Winnipeg, Oct. 1963, “Academic Year, Committee on Meetingsand Reports” file, box 1, collectionA95–26, department of history,Universityof Manitoba,EDL-UM. Studies that he hoped would eventually produce Ph.D.s.81 It is in this insti- tutional context, then, as well as in the context of the historical discourse, that we also must read Morton’s publication of Early Voyages and Northern Approaches. For while Oleson’s narrative supported Morton’s vision of the North as the founding region of an integrated, exceptionalist Canada, this vision itself supported Morton’s more personal ambitions for history as a discipline, a profession, and a component of his own institution. For Oleson, collaboration with Morton promised its own rewards: not onlythetangiblebenefitsofacademicsupportbuttheongoingopportunity to disseminate his views on Viking discovery (and Icelandic originality)to wider and wider audiences of students and readers. While he did not live to see its final results, dying prematurely at fifty-one in 1963, he died com- mitted to this project; for as Morton wrote in Oleson’s obituary, “in his last weeks with us, [. . .] he talked confidently of a book on the Vikings,[which] wouldhavegivenaverydifferentpictureofthoseseafaringsettlersandtrad- ers than do the histories of English and French scholars, derived from the chronicles of terrified monks.”82 Had he lived, one can be certain that Ole- son would have carried out this plan. While his work seems mainly to have been directed at fellow historians, Olesonalsoundoubtedlyrecognizedthattherewasawiderconstituencyfor works that offered answers to questions of identity and that provided le- gitimization for Canadian claims to the North. During the 1950s and 1960s politicians, like historians, seem continuously to have been asking “‘our- selves when we say “I am a Canadian” what do we really mean,’” and his- torians’ fetishizationoftheNorthmatchedapreoccupationwiththeregion among the nation’s political and bureaucratic elite.83 This is certainly true of John Diefenbaker, who represented the North as both “New Frontier” and “national consciousness” and who made northern development a ma- jor campaign issue in 1957 and 1958. For Diefenbaker, as for many others in Canada’s political class, the North represented not only an economic and political bonanza but the mythical soul of Canada. As the former prime minister reflected in his autobiography, he had spent a boyhood dreaming Critical Inquiry / Summer 2002 903 84. John G. Diefenbaker, One Canada: Memoir of the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker,3 vols. (Toronto,1976), 1:11–17,83–85. Stefánsson’sViking theories are explained in My Life with the Eskimo (1913; New York, 1971). See also Morton, letter to H. H. Saunderson,13 Apr. 1959, in “President: History—Administration”file, box 3, collectionA95–26, departmentof history, EDL- UM. Incidentally,Morton also had contactswith the MinnesotaHistoricalSociety, attendingtheir centenary celebrationsin 1949; see A. H. S. Gillson, letter to Morton, 4 Oct. 1949, box 3, collection A95–26, departmentof history, EDL-UM. 85. On the strategic importanceof the North in the twentieth century, see Shelagh D. Grant, Sovereignty or Security: Government Policy in the Canadian North, 1936–1950 (Vancouver,1988), and Matthew D. Evenden, “Harold Innis, the Arctic Survey, and the Politics of Social Science during the Second World War,” Canadian Historical Review 79 (Mar. 1998): 36–67. 86. See Frank James Tester and Peter Kulchyski, Tammarniit (Mistakes): Inuit Relocation in the Eastern Arctic, 1939–1963 (Vancouver,1994), pp. 320–25. 87. See Oleson, Early Voyages and Northern Approaches, 1000–1632, chaps. 7–12. oftheNorthPole, lookingtoVilhjálmurStefánsson(whohimselfpromoted aversionofVikingdiscoveryonwhichOlesonwoulddrawandwhomMor- ton personally visited in 1959) as a Canadian “hero.”84 Yet Canada’s compelling need for the North was complicated by thefact that its sovereignty over its Arctic territory was not entirelycertain.85 Asthe work of Frank James Tester and Peter Kulchyski has shown, thethreatening cold war presence of significant numbers of American military personnel, combinedwithencroachmentsbyforeignscientistsandthelingeringeffects of a scramble for the Arctic that had left the region littered with the flagsof a half a dozen nations, contributed to a feeling of insecurity that spawned a body of defensive Northern policies. Indeed, Tester and Kulchyski com- pellingly argue that disastrous efforts to relocate Inuit families into the far reaches of the high Arctic in the 1950s, which led to acute hardship and dislocation, were motivated as much by the desire to demonstrate a sov- ereignCanadianpresenceintheregionasbythewishtopromoteInuitwell- being.86 At the same time that it proposed the Vikings as Canada’s progenitors, Oleson’s medieval history provided a remedy for this uncertainty and an in- tellectual justificationforthepoliciesthatresultedfromitontwolevels.First, like Anderson’s place-names, itcircumventedthetangledwebofnineteenth- and twentieth-century discovery claims by suggesting that medieval Ice- landic—Icelandic-Canadian—forays rendered this modern crazy quilt of island-namingand flag-planting a dead issue. Second, justasAndersonhad offered the discovery of a “Viking” corpse as proof that the Norsemen had arrived and persisted in America, Oleson proposed his own body of evi- dence in the form of “white” Eskimos, suggesting that the bestevidencefor Viking discovery (and Canadian sovereignty) lay not in archaeology but genealogy.87 DenyingthatCanada’sVikingdiscoverershadsimplyvanished, Oleson argued that they had fused with the original people of the New World Arctic—the Skraelings of the sagas—whom he classified as the pre- 904 J. M. Mancini / Discovering Viking America 88. The prevailingview is that malnutrition,rather than amalgamationor extermination, spelled the end of the Viking colonies in what is now Canada and Greenland. See, for instance, Robert McGhee, “They Got Here First, But Why Didn’t They Stay?” Canadian Geographic 108 (Aug.–Sept. 1988): 13–21, and David B. Quinn, North America from Earliest Discovery to First Settlements: The Norse Voyages to 1612 (New York, 1977), p. 35. 89. See Oleson, Early Voyages and Northern Approaches, 1000–1632, p. 76. 90. Oleson, Early Voyages and Northern Approaches, 1000–1632, pp. 81, 88. 91. A useful discussionof Northern development in the postwar period, as well as its impact on Aboriginalpeoples, may be found in Peter Clancy, “NorthwestTerritories:Class Politics on the Northern Frontier,” in The Provincial State: Politics in the Provinces and Territories, ed. Keith Brownsey and Michael Howlett (Mississauga,Ont., 1992), pp. 297–322. decessors of the First People met by later European explorers.88 Citing nu- merous accounts of encounters with “white” or “blond” Eskimos in the annals of European exploration, Oleson insisted that the only plausibleex- planation for the disappearance of the Vikings in the Western Hemisphere was that they had literally become part of the Aboriginal population.89 Al- though it is clear that Oleson found race mixing distasteful—akin todeath for the Vikings—he argued that it had been a blessing to the Inuit. This mixture of virile Icelanders and “dirty black dwarfs, some three feet in height,” he argued, owed not only its European racial characteristicsbutall that was worthy of its culture, politics, and religion to its Nordic heritage, even going so far as to claim that “the coiffure of the Eskimos is Icelandic, going back to Germanic times.”90 Aside from the pure appeal of spurious race theory, by the 1960s there were powerfulpoliticalreasonsforembracingsuchaposition.Likehistem- poral claim of Viking “discovery,” Oleson’s genealogicalargumentjustified Canada’sclaimstotheNorthbothbyundercuttingclaimsofrivalEuropean discoverers (who in his history had arrived in the Arctic too latetodiscover the Arctic or its true Others, meeting instead only a Viking rearguard) as well as the Inuit themselves (who were descended from Vikings, just like Olesonhimself,andthuscouldbeexpectedtosharethebountyofNorthern development with their southern cousins). At a time whenthegovernment needed the Inuit in the North to prove its sovereignty—yet their presence posed one of the few potential challenges to Diefenbaker’s “uniquely Ca- nadian dream” of emptying the North of its resources for the benefit of the settler population—91 the idea that the Inuit were no more Aboriginalthan their immigrant neighbors to the south must have seemed appealing in- deed. Although it is not clear that Oleson’s work had a direct impact on pol- iticians, there is evidence that the historical community, at least, was sat- isfied with his very strange account. First, as we have seen, Oleson was able to win over the single most important arbiter of Canadian historical dis- Critical Inquiry / Summer 2002 905 92. Morton,“TryggviOleson, Scholar.” 93. See Morton, letter to the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, 18 May 1951, box 1, collectionA95–26, EDL-UM. 94. Not the University of Manitoba. 95. See The Norsemen in America/Les Scandinaves en Amérique (1963; Ottawa, 1970). course at the time. At Oleson’s untimely death in late 1963, Morton wrote admiringly that he had made “clear to the worldofscholarship—andtothe people of his own stock—all that the great folk-wandering of the Scandi- navian peoples in the ninth and tenth centuries meant to Europe and to thiscontinentinparticular.”92 It is infactquitepossible,even,thatMorton’s own formulation of Northernness, asexpressedinhisCanadianIdentity,was forged in his relationship with Oleson; after all, by the time Morton wrote that book, the two men had been colleagues and allies fortenyears.93 Indeed, Oleson seems to have succeeded in planting the seeds of a minor Viking obsessioninMorton’sbrain,evidencednotonlybyMorton’spublishedand editorial work but by what leaked out onto the paperwork during dull de- partmental meetings (fig. 10). Beyond personal influence, the publication of Early Voyages inMorton’s series gained Oleson something else: long-term access to Canada’s univer- sity libraries and to its students. Nearly forty years after Oleson’s death, a perusalofone suchlibrary94 turnedupnofewerthanfivecopiesofthebook on the shelves. Perhaps more disturbingly, the narrative gainedanother,par- allel set of lives when the Canadian Historical Association printed a con- densed, but substantively similar version of his theory in its familiar, orange-covered primer series, as Historical Booklet #14, The Norsemen in America/LesScandinavesenAmérique(figs.11–12).95 Thispamphlet,likeother tracts in the series, was distributed throughout schools and universities, where it was quite improbably still in use in classrooms as late as the 1980s (and may yet find its way today). Thus, there is no doubt that Oleson’s fantasy of disappearance, like An- derson’s discovery narrative, was successful. Unlike most historical works, nottomentionimmigrantnationalistpedagogies, itclearedthegatekeepers who controlled access to academic publishing and reachedat leasttwogen- erations of students. In the end, this success suggests that those immigrant authors who succeeded in making the Vikings part of New World history succeeded precisely because of the compromises they made. Just as “the appropriation of a dominant language [. . .] and the shift of dominant po- etics towards the standards of a minority or post-colonialpeoplearepotent means of realigning power structures in a shared cultural field and of as- serting an independent world-view,” Scandinavian-Americans’ appropri- figure 10.W. L. Morton, “Sub-Committeeof the Honours Committee,”“Honours Committee” file, box 2, coll. A95–26, EDL-UM. Critical Inquiry / Summer 2002 907 figure 11.“The Norsemen in America.”From The Norsemen in America, p. 23. figure 12.“Les Scandinavesen Amérique.” From Les Scandinaves en Amérique, p. 24. 96. MariaTymoczko,“Post-colonialWriting and LiteraryTranslation,”in Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice,ed. Susan Bassnettand Harish Trivedi (London, 1999), p. 35. ation of North American English as the language of immigrant literature and their shifting of a dominant pedagogy towards the standards of a mi- nority marked a significantplayforsovereignty.96 Althoughtherewereclear limits to this strategy, in significant ways both Anderson and Olesonfound a successful way to negotiate the path between assimilation and resistance that leads to immigrant autonomy.