Myths of the Rune Stone

by David M Krueger

  Dahm finally got his wish three years after he made his “discovery.” On a rainy October Saturday, a group of Viking enthusiasts watched as an army helicopter descended on the Ohman farm piloted by local politician and National Guard Captain Dave Fjoslien. Dressed in full battle uniform, Fjoslien and nine other guardsmen leaped out of the chopper armed with metal detectors.80 The soldiers were greeted by Dahm and an archaeologist from the University of Minnesota. The rune stone supporters were not only eager to find Viking habitations; some, like Margaret Leuthner, were hopeful that Viking graves would be found. Leuthner was convinced that this was the location of the final resting place of the Knutson expedition’s victims. Although Holand claimed that they were buried near Lake Cormorant, the site where they were massacred, Leuthner maintained that the bodies had been brought back to their “home” in the “Christian colony” near Kensington, where they were given a proper “Christian burial.”81

  Throughout the day, the guardsmen scanned the terrain near where Ohman had unearthed the stone. Every time the detectors began to squeal, it would “arouse curious onlookers to huddle around in anticipation of a big discovery.” The guardsmen and the archaeologist managed to unearth a few scraps of metal, but the archaeologist identified them as rusty nails and broken pieces of farm machinery.

  Although the archaeological dig did not yield physical evidence of fourteenth-century Norsemen, the account of the day’s activities suggests the occurrence of a sacred civic event. Photographs in the local newspaper are pregnant with symbolism. One depicts a Vietnam War–era transport helicopter positioned at the top of Runestone Hill next to the four flagpoles representing Norway, Sweden, the state of Minnesota, and the United States of America.82 In another photo, a scowling guardsman crouches near the ground while an archaeologist carefully probes the soil in search of evidence of slain Vikings.

  Such evocative imagery requires that the day’s events be placed in historical context. America’s unpopular and failed involvement in the Vietnam conflict was nearing an end. The last U.S. troops would withdraw from Saigon when the city fell to the Communists the following April. As Richard Slotkin has observed, U.S. military leadership had often compared the fight against the Viet Cong to the “Indian Wars” of the nineteenth century. The parts of Vietnam controlled by the Viet Cong were frequently referred to as the “frontier” and the South Vietnamese who lived there were characterized as “settlers.” One military strategy required the “settlers” to live within “stockades” in order be protected from the savages outside.83

  Although Fjoslien likely orchestrated the theatrical approach to the excavation in hopes of fortifying his prospects in an upcoming election, the event unintentionally served as a civic religious ritual. As some scholars have observed, American civil religion during this era was fragmenting. Widely embraced notions of American innocence were called into question by the masses protesting the Vietnam War and the integrity of the nation’s leaders was heavily damaged in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.84 The guardsmen, the archaeologist, and the remnant of rune stone enthusiasts at the Ohman farm effectively consecrated the site as significant in the larger American narrative of mourning in the mid-1970s.85 Despite the unraveling of Holand’s sacred narrative undergirding the Kensington Rune Stone, the ritual seemed to convey the notion that neither the imagined Christian Vikings of the past nor the U.S. troops of the present age had given their lives in vain. Just as the descendants of Vikings would one day help anchor a new nation’s westward expansion, so too would the United States reassert itself in global affairs. The excavation is best understood as a symbolic “retaking” of Runestone Hill serving to reassert American military prowess and honor while memorializing the sacrifices of fallen American warriors, both past and present.

  Throughout the history of the Kensington Rune Stone in the twentieth century, memories of an ancient battle were repeatedly evoked to address the concerns about more recent battles.86 The skræling endured as a convenient symbol of the threats posed by secularization, urbanization, and diversification. As sociologist Richard K. Fenn observes, “Any society is a reservoir of old longings and ancient hatreds. These need to be understood, addressed, resolved and transcended if a society is to have a future that is different from its past.” Furthermore, when a society does not adequately confront its past, it perpetually finds “a new target that resembles but also differs from the source of original conflict.”87 If Fenn is correct, old enemies will continue to emerge in the face of new enemies unless Minnesotans can understand, address, resolve, and transcend the state’s original sin: the unjust treatment of the region’s first inhabitants.

  Conclusion

  The Enduring Legacy of American Viking Myths

  Not long after the episode at Runestone Hill, the Runestone Museum of Alexandria built a replica of the stockade first constructed in the aftermath of the “Sioux Outbreak” of 1862. The museum expansion was dedicated during the week of July 4, 1976—the nation’s bicentennial. Ten-foot-high log walls were erected to enclose a recently purchased lot adjacent to the museum. Within the perimeter of “Fort Alexandria,” the museum exhibited a collection of agricultural implements and other tools used by early pioneers to transform the wilderness into a productive landscape. In the ensuing years, replicas of a country school, a pioneer church, and a general store were also included. Today, inside the walls of the museum building rests the storied Kensington Rune Stone, encased in a Plexiglas case, with spotlights trained on its inscribed surface. Along one wall of the museum’s inner sanctum is a collection of purported Norse artifacts—rusty spears, swords, battle-axes, and the so-called Chokio altar stone—long since discredited as proof of pre-Columbian visitors to the area. Although the museum takes no official stance on the authenticity of the rune stone, it endeavors to make the rune stone “available to any serious researcher.”1

  The controversy continues to attract visitors to Alexandria from around the world.2 Across the street from the museum and fort stands the statue of Big Ole the Viking holding a spear in his right hand and a shield in his left. The twenty-eight-foot-tall giant looms over a quiet street as a civic sentinel. On almost any warm summer day, one can see parents encouraging their children to stand in front of the blond, bearded Viking while they snap photos. Within minutes, they are on their way to the lake for a swim or to take a bike ride down the adjacent recreational trail. If the tourists are paying attention, they may also notice, just across Lake Agnes, a replica of the Statue of Liberty standing next to an American flag. On the base of the statue is another prominent inscription with the words “One Nation, Under God.” Although the visitors and residents alike experience their visit to the museum and photo-op with the giant Viking as innocent fun, the symbols of triumphant militarism, divine national blessing, American national origins, and the glorified Nordic male body continue to evoke the enduring themes of the Kensington Rune Stone story.

  By now, it should be evident to the reader that the history of Kensington Rune Stone does not end with the academic critiques of Erik Wahlgren, Theodore Blegen, Tom Trow, Birgitta Wallace, and others. For many, the mystery of the rune stone has yet to be solved. A new crop of rune stone defenders has brought the artifact back to life. Many of these enthusiasts have continued the tradition of defending the honor of Olof Ohman against those who accuse him of being a forger.3 Others, such as anthropologist Alice Beck Kehoe, postulate that the Norsemen came to Minnesota to establish new fur-trading networks after the Black Death had weakened Sweden’s trade in Russian furs.4 Another enthusiast claimed that the Norsemen died not at the hands of violent Indians, but of the bubonic plague.5 One of the more influential rune stone defenders is Richard Nielson, an American-born engineer of Danish descent. Nielson is a self-taught researcher who has spent more than twenty years studying the runic inscription and once claimed that its language bears a similarity to dialects spoken on the Swedish island of Gotland during the fourteenth century.6

  Cultural expressi
ons regarding pre-Columbian explorations to the heart of North America have also continued to flourish. Don Coldsmith authored a novel called Runestone: A Novel of Adventure, which tells the story of a Viking expedition that traveled to the heart of modern-day Oklahoma to carve an inscription on a rock formation near the town of Heavener. Jack Selmela’s novel Of Vikings and Voyageurs tells the story of seventeenth-century French fur traders who found, and later lost, Viking treasure in the Minnesota wilderness. The Kensington Rune Stone was also the feature of a 2011 U-Haul promotional campaign called “Venture across America,” in which 2,300 moving vans were painted with a “SuperGraphic” depicting the Minnesota artifact towering over a Viking ship.7 At the 2014 Minnesota Fringe Festival, the artifact’s story was dramatized in a musical titled The Ohman Stone directed and written by rune stone enthusiast Sheridan O’Keefe.8

  No one has brought more attention to the rune stone in recent times than Scott Wolter, a forensic geologist who was featured in a 2009 History Channel documentary titled Holy Grail in America. In 2000, the Runestone Museum of Alexandria hired Wolter to study the physical features of the rune stone—particularly the engraved characters of the inscription.9 Although he found evidence of fresh scratches deep in the runic grooves, he also discovered what he claims to be evidence of weathering along the sides of grooves.10 Based on research, he concludes that the physical evidence indicates that the inscription is at least two hundred years old and, most likely, dates to 1362.11 Along with former collaborator Richard Nielson, Wolter coauthored The Kensington Rune Stone: Compelling New Evidence in 2006. Not long after the book was published, Nielson substantially revised his conclusions about the runic inscription and eventually challenged the integrity of Wolter’s research methods.12 Given the “rough handling” of the rune stone over the years, scholars have remarked on how difficult it is to accurately assess the physical condition of the stone.13 Nielson began to collaborate with a Swedish runic scholar, Henrik Williams, from the University of Uppsala. Williams concluded that the Kensington inscription bears no resemblance to known runic writings from the fourteenth century but instead shares similarities with recently discovered documents in Sweden dating to the 1880s.14 He claims that Swedish-American immigrants in the late nineteenth century could have been familiar with the particular runic characters used to create the Kensington Rune Stone inscription.

  Wolter is undaunted by the betrayal of his former research partner and holds firm to his own conclusions. However, he is not content to let his geological evidence stand alone.15 Like other rune stone enthusiasts, he embeds his research in a fantastic historical narrative. Although his expertise is in the physical science of stones, he now speaks as an authority for fields in which he has no formal training. He claims that the Goths and Norsemen who carved the inscription were members of the order of the Knights Templar, who had used the stone as a land claim to prove that they had been the first to discover the land.16 In Wolter’s view, the chiseled boulders that Holand had understood to be mooring stones for Viking ships were actually markers to guide future explorers to this Nordic land claim. Furthermore, Wolter claims that the Knights Templar had come to North America to establish their order and hide treasure (including the Holy Grail) acquired during the Crusades. Wolter is following the same strategy as Holand and many other rune stone enthusiasts who have long believed that sensationalism is the key to proving the artifact to be true. Not long after his first appearance on the History Channel in 2009, Wolter got his own television show, America Unearthed, in which he frequently speaks of his efforts to expose the conspiracies that have hidden the true history of North America. He takes advantage of the popular distrust of the academic establishment, as did Holand. Popular media outlets such as the History Channel often blur the lines between fact and myth and the public is often unable to discern the difference.17 Fantasies about Cistercian monks traveling to North America to find the Holy Grail are entertaining, but they ought to be relegated to the genre of mythic literature rather than history.

  Despite their dubious conclusions, there is perhaps one thing to be celebrated in the arguments of contemporary rune stone enthusiasts. They have by and large refrained from resurrecting Holand’s debunked thesis that the United States was birthed by the sacrifices of Nordic Christian missionaries who died at the hands of bloodthirsty savages. Yet, they expend a great deal of energy speculating on who might have been in North America prior to Columbus rather than on the people who were known to be here. In Wolter’s television series America Unearthed, the majority of episodes deal with found artifacts and rock formations that he claims indicate the presence of non-Indian people in North America prior to the exploration of Columbus. In the spirit of Carl Christian Rafn, Caleb Atwater, and Hjalmar Holand, Wolter has found an audience tantalized by the notion of an imagined ancient America populated by more than just Indians.18

  The American fascination with a pre-Columbian presence of Europeans has often functioned to render invisible, or at least marginal, the region’s first inhabitants. Indian history is evoked in Alexandria’s Runestone Museum by a collection of Indian artifacts situated next to a wildlife exhibit filled with stuffed deer, bears, and raccoons. Following a visit by members of Minnesota’s White Earth Ojibwe tribe, the museum announced plans for changes to make the Indian exhibit “more accurate and sensitive to Native American cultures,” including the construction of an “authentic” diorama of an Ojibwe village.19 One wonders if this same cultural sensitivity will extend to other areas of the museum where Indian history is mentioned. In a space dedicated to the early history of Alexandria is a small television that plays a looping video about Clara Kinkaid, one of the first pioneer settlers of Alexandria. In 1862, Kinkaid recorded a detailed account in a diary of her experiences during the Dakota War. She conveyed her fears and frustrations about having to abandon the home she and her husband had recently built to seek refuge at the fort in St. Cloud. The film’s narrator interprets the events by stating that in 1862, the Indians were trespassers on land that no longer belonged to them. They had ceded their land and were paid fairly for it.20 Rather than acknowledge the moral complexities of the events of 1862, this simplistic rendition serves to reify the notion that the white settlement of Minnesota was a purely innocent endeavor.21 A small placard located near the television heightens the rhetoric of white victimhood by proclaiming that the word Sioux was a synonym for terror in the days of the pioneers.22

  As the rune stone story exemplifies, the controversial artifact has been used to generate group pride, but also to demarcate who does and who does not belong. Rune stone enthusiasts have been creative and entrepreneurial in their efforts to portray their region of Minnesota as significant in the larger American story. Yet, these proclamations of exceptionalism have been wedded to assertions of victimhood. Norwegian immigrants, small-town Midwesterners, Catholic leaders, and others have used the Kensington Rune Stone story to advance persecution narratives. In doing so, these groups have often ignored (whether consciously or unconsciously) their own privileged status as white, Christian Americans.

  Minnesota has become an increasingly diverse place in recent decades. New immigrants from Somalia, Laos, and Latin America have changed the racial and ethnic makeup of the state. Even rural communities now have sizable populations of Mexican Americans and other immigrant groups. The religious landscape of Minnesota is also more diverse than ever. Protestant and Catholic Christians still dominate the culture of the state, but there are now Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and a growing segment of the population that identifies as nonreligious. In light of the history of the Kensington Rune Stone in the twentieth century, it is appropriate to inquire whether the specter of the savage skræling will be revived to confront the anxieties aroused by the presence of a new “other.”

  Acknowledgments

  This project could not have been completed without the support, love, and encouragement of many people. First, my wife has been an anchor for me throughout my years at graduat
e school and writing this book. I am grateful to our children’s grandparents, aunts, and uncles who have stepped up to watch the kids whenever I needed to “make just one more revision to my manuscript.” Writing a book is a lot like farming. They both require the ability to be self-motivated and work independently. I am grateful to my dad, a lifelong farmer, for modeling these strengths for me. My mother likes to think that I chose to write about my hometown so that I could visit her more often; I have enjoyed numerous trips to Minnesota over the past several years that combined research and treasured family time. I am indebted to my sister and brother-in-law, who have been consistently present with my parents while I have lived far away.

  I trace the genesis of this book to the classroom of Richard K. Fenn’s Religion and Society course at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2003. Dr. Fenn is an inspiring teacher and was a big encouragement to me as I wrote my first paper about the civic myths of my hometown. This book first took shape as I researched and wrote my dissertation during my graduate studies at Temple University’s Department of Religion. I am enormously grateful to the members of my dissertation committee. Terry Rey is the most generous and kind graduate studies chair a student could ask for: he read every word of my dissertation in at least three different iterations and nurtured creativity in my writing. Jon Pahl’s research on religion and violence has made an important impact on this project; I have relished my conversations with Jon over the years and I appreciate the opportunities he provided me to deliver lectures in his classes at Lutheran Theological Seminary and Princeton University. Rebecca Alpert has been very encouraging to me throughout my graduate-school experience and beyond; she is a reliable source of pragmatic advice and helped me to establish a discipline of writing. I am grateful to Andrew Isenberg of Temple University’s Department of History, who read my dissertation and served as a valuable resource on the history of the American West. David Watt played a critical role in introducing me to many of the scholars to whom I refer in this book. His practical advice and bibliographic brilliance were invaluable to my graduate studies experience. Finally, I am indebted to John Raines, who chaired my graduate exam committee. As a fellow Minnesota native who spent his childhood summers on Alexandria’s Lake L’Homme Dieu, he brought a unique perspective to this project. Dr. Raines has been an inspiration to my scholarship and church-based activism. His prophetic challenge still echoes in my mind and heart: to reveal the arbitrary nature of exploitative systems that appear natural or ordained by God.