Myths of the Rune Stone
Page 18
Several other people were helpful in transforming my dissertation into a book manuscript. Laura S. Levitt has been a terrific cheerleader and guide in writing a book proposal. Audra J. Wolfe was invaluable in helping me to navigate the process of securing a publishing contract. Karen Schnitker patiently and carefully edited countless versions of this manuscript. I am grateful to my Minnesota friends David W. Bauer, Travis Larson, Jon Larson, Edward Godfrey, Darwin Johnson, Pastor Craig Dahl, and others who provided helpful feedback at various points in my research and writing. I have been privileged to have had insightful conversations about my topic with other scholars who write about religion, history, and culture, including Nathan Wright, Kipp Gilmore-Clough, Christy Croxall, Brian McAdams, Beth Lawson, Kime Lawson, Omer Awass, Sean Sanford, Katie Oxx, Jennifer Graber, and, most recently, Arthur Remillard, Eric Ecklund, Mathew Sayers, Grant Julin, and Joseph Williams.
This book has been shaped by my recent teaching experience as an adjunct professor and church-based educator. My honors undergraduate students at Rutgers University–Camden and my graduate students at the Rutgers branch at the Joint Base McGuire–Dix–Lakehurst read an earlier draft of this book for my Religion and American Culture seminars. Thanks to Nema Buruschkin, John Dunbar, Adam Jadick, Jasmine King, Sarah Morris, Kimberly Nguyen, Jamila Pascal, Yekaterina Rasstrigina, Argenis Reyes, John Yosko, Tinisha Bass, Shuan Brock, Julie Hafeez, Brian Harriet, William Lanehart, Samuel Lewis, Douglas Paley, Margarita Urgiles, and Thomas Weaver. I am particularly grateful to students Alissa Valeriano, Julia Lehman, Madison Rogers, Ashley Lewis, and Michael Weldon, who wrote insightful book reviews posing helpful questions to clarify and enhance my arguments. Church study groups at Arch Street United Methodist and Germantown Mennonite in Philadelphia; Rochester Mennonite Church in Rochester, Minnesota; and Christ United Methodist’s Inquiring Spirits class have all been stimulating environments for my thinking about the ethical themes raised in this book.
A number of people and institutions have been of great assistance in my research. Thanks to Mel and Mary Conrad of the Kensington Area Heritage Society for their hospitality. They meticulously compiled hundreds, if not thousands, of articles related to the history of the Kensington Rune Stone. Their archives and museum center located in the town of Kensington should be a first stop for research. Thanks to Carol Keller, who escorted me on a visit to Our Lady of the Runestone Catholic Church, also located in Kensington. Thanks to the staff of the Douglas County Historical Society in Alexandria, Minnesota; executive director Rachel Bardson and research director Kim Dillon helpfully answered my questions and pointed me in the right direction for research. I appreciated my conversations with Julie Blank and Jim Bergquist of the Runestone Museum in Alexandria and with the staff at the Newport Historical Society in Rhode Island. Finally, I am particularly grateful for the superb research library and archives at the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul.
Notes
Introduction
1.The pageant depends a great deal on music from Wagner, whose music was banned in Israel during this time because of its association with the Nazis and notions of Aryan racial supremacy. The song “Ride of the Valkyries” was famously used in the climactic scene of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation to dramatize the charge of the Klu Klux Klan and the rescue of white captives from black soldiers. See Smith, “American Valkyries,” 221–42.
2.All quotations from Merling, The Runestone Pageant Play (1962).
3.Larry J. Zimmerman, an archaeologist from the Minnesota Historical Society, asks why many cultural groups do not believe what the scientific community tells them about their past: “Many will not accept the pasts that archaeologists construct for them are correct, no matter how well-reasoned the archaeological arguments or how solid the evidence.” Zimmerman argues that scientists need to make a distinction between “truth” and “validity.” Scientists are concerned with validity, which demands evidence and proof. Truth, however, may not. Zimmerman suggests that the truth has more to do with the centrality that cultural myths may have for a particular community. In this sense, the rune stone is experienced as true for its enthusiasts even if the evidence for it is not valid. See Zimmerman, “Unusual or ‘Extreme’ Beliefs about the Past, Community Identity, and Dealing with the Fringe,” 55.
4.The 1963 poll is cited in Hughey and Michlovic, “‘Making’ History,” 338.
5.Other names that were considered include Chippewas, Miners, and Voyageurs. The name “Vikings” was chosen in part to “to recognize the venturesome people who first populated the state” (Dick Cullum, “Minnesota Is Designation of Pro Grid Team,” Minneapolis Tribune, August 6, 1960, 21).
6.The term “collective memory” is best associated with French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. In translator Lewis Coser’s words, “For Halbwachs, the past is a social construction mainly, if not wholly, shaped by the concerns of the present” (in Halbwachs, On Colletive Memory, 25).
7.The book will interchangeably use the terms “Native American,” “Indian,” and “Native peoples” to refer to the first residents of North America. For a discussion of the usage of such terms, see King, The Inconvenient Indian, xii–xiii.
8.The term skræling in the Norse language has pejorative connotations meaning “wretches” or “people who screech.” See Kolodony, In Search of First Contact, 3.
9.Sawyer, The Viking-Age Rune-Stones, 16–18, and Gräslund, “Religion, Art, and Runes,” 69.
10.Blegen, The Kensington Rune Stone, 36–39.
11.Wahlgren, The Kensington Stone, 181.
12.McCloud, Divine Hierarchies, 14.
13.Mancini, “Discovering Viking America,” 877.
14.Hjalmar Holand wrote dozens of books and articles, most notably Westward from Vinland and Explorations in Minnesota before Columbus. The two most famous scholars to argue against the stone in book-length treatments are Wahlgren, The Kensington Stone, and Blegen, The Kensington Rune Stone. A recent defense of the rune stone is Nielson and Wolter, The Kensington Rune Stone. The Minnesota Historical Society has published articles that have summarized the history of the debates, including Gilman and Smith, “Vikings in Minnesota,” 1–34, and Gilman, “Kensington Runestone Revisited,” 61–65.
15.Dregni, Minnesota Marvels, 10.
16.See Michlovic and Hughey, “Norse Blood and Indian Character,” 79–94; Hughey and Michlovic, “‘Making’ History,” 338–60; Michlovic, “Folk Archaeology in Anthropological Perspective,” 103–7. David A. Sprunger wrote an article illuminating the divisions between Norwegian Americans in their endorsement and opposition to the rune stone: “Mystery and Obsession,” 140–54. Chris Susag and Peter Susag illustrate the close relationship between the commercialization of the rune stone and its ability to generate ethnic identity in the late twentieth century in “Scandinavian Group Identity,” 30–51. A graduate student from the University of Minnesota wrote an insightful thesis illustrating how the paucity of words in the rune stone inscription provided space for Minnesotans to project their own interpretations upon it. See Mealey, “Qualitative Research in Anthropology.”
17.The role of religion in the Kensington Rune Stone phenomenon has been briefly explored by Hughey and Michlovic, “‘Making’ History,” 338–60, and Mancini, “Discovering Viking America,” 868–907. However, theorizing rune stone enthusiasm as a cultural religion has been not been explored in depth.
18.Holand, “An Explorer’s Stone Record Which Antedates Columbus.”
19.Holand, “A Fourteenth Century Columbus.”
20.Holand did not identify himself as an adherent Christianity and was, in fact, quite critical of it. As a young, traveling book salesman for Seventh-Day Adventists in rural Wisconsin, he mocked religious people for what he described as their “indifference to the printed page.” As he observed, the only book in most homes was the family Bible, which was used primarily for decoration. Holand goes on to describe church members as legalistic, int
olerant, militant, and overly argumentative (Holand, My First Eighty Years, 48, 65–66).
21.Catherine L. Albanese illustrates how “cultural” and “civic” religions in the United States combine elements of traditional religion to form new religious hybrids that often exist alongside denominational religion (America, 275–301).
22.Historians in the United States have often assumed that religion is practiced in private and the public is secular. As Kathryn Lofton observes, the lack of an established faith in the United States does not preclude the emergence of religious discourse in realms assumed to be secular: “These forms are unfamiliar to students of history and religion, as they are without bounds, without permanent structure, and without imprinted creed.” The task of the present analysis is to render visible what Lofton calls this “ceaseless commingling” of religion and culture. See Lofton, Oprah, 10–12. As Danièle Hervieu-Léger argues, religion in the modern world often functions independently of traditional institutions. Religion continuously “re-emerges, revives, shifts ground, [and] becomes diffuse.” When religious beliefs are liberated from institutions of believing, “all symbols are interchangeable and capable of being combined and transposed. All syncretisms are possible, all retreads imaginable” (Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory, 24, 75).
23.“Dr. Tanquist’s Testimony: Why I Believe in the Runestone,” Park Region Echo (Alexandria, Minnesota), July 21, 1959.
24.“Holand to Autograph Books at Herbergers,” Park Region Echo, May 17, 1956.
25.“Hoax of the Century? Runestone Forgery Claimed,” Lake Region Press (Alexandria, Minnesota), August 9, 1974.
26.Brian Branston, “An Open Letter to Cliff Roiland, the Runestone Rambler,” Lake Region Press, November 22, 1974. Branston’s choice of inflammatory language likely helped him to generate publicity for his recently released film documentary Riddles of the Runestone.
27.Peter Berger writes that religion had suffered a “crisis of plausibility” (Sacred Canopy, 127). In later writings, Berger acknowledged that religious adherence had not declined as he had predicted (Berger, The Desecularization of the World).
28.Danièle Hervieu-Léger writes: “If science and technology have removed most of the mystery from the world, they clearly have not obliterated the human need for assurance, which is at the source of the search to make life intelligible and which constantly evokes the question of why” (Religion as a Chain of Memory, 73).
29.Hervieu-Léger observes that cultural religions or religious hybrids often emerge in response to rapid social change, dislocation, or experiences of group trauma. These conditions can evoke appeals to collective memory and the construction of new “sacred canopies” and collective identities (ibid., 141).
30.Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” 3, 18.
31.In a 1985 essay, N .J. Demerath and Rhys Williams called on scholars to address “the contexts and uses of civil religious language and symbols, noting how specific groups and subcultures use versions of civil religion to frame, articulate, and legitimate their own particular political or moral visions” (“Civil Religions in an Uncivil Society,” 166). Although the scholarly conversation about civil religion dissipated in the 1980s, recent scholars have responded to Demerath and Williams’s challenge. See Remillard, Southern Civil Religions; Walker “Liberators for Colonial Anáhuac,” 183–203.
32.Rather than think of American civil religion as a static, well-defined national religion, this analysis sees it as a fluid cultural repertoire from which civic and cultural leaders can select, adapt, and apply in order to advance their own particular agendas. As a local sect, it both affirms and challenges many of the popular assertions of American civil religion. It should be noted that civil religion is not necessarily a substitute for traditional Christian expressions, but often exists alongside of them. Kensington Rune Stone enthusiasts have frequently been practicing Lutherans, Catholics, and Evangelicals. This analysis demonstrates how civil religions and traditional religions often coexist in a symbiotic relationship.
33.For an excellent overview of American myths and the historical contexts from which they emerged, see Hughes, Myths Americans Live By. As Bruce Lincoln observes, myths are really “ideology in narrative form” (Theorizing Myth, 147).
34.Pahl, Empire of Sacrifice, 2.
35.Conservative Christian activist and pseudohistorian David Barton has been a tireless advocate for the notion the United States was founded as a Christian nation (http://www.npr.org/2012/08/08/157754542/the-most-influential-evangeslist-youve-never-heard-of).
36.Gunn, Spiritual Weapons, 9.
37.The U.S. Supreme Court declared teacher-led prayer and Bible readings in public schools to be unconstitutional in Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963). Additionally, the popular 1960 film Elmer Gantry portrayed Christian leaders as hucksters.
38.As some scholars have observed, sacrifices are necessary for enduring groups to cohere. See Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, 1. The present analysis shows that even imagined sacrifices can forge collective identity.
39.Øverland, Immigrant Minds, American Identities, 150.
40.Protestant Christians are often depicted as concerning themselves with the spiritual rather than the material dimension of religion. This analysis shows that the typically austere and iconoclastic Swedish and Norwegian Lutherans found in Kensington Rune Stone enthusiasm an outlet to express their religious impulses in material and spatial forms. Colleen McDannell observes that Protestants have often freely incorporated material culture into their religious expressions (Material Christianity, 6).
41.Writing in the early twentieth century, Durkheim researched the religious beliefs and rituals of several indigenous ethnic groups in Australia and noted that various clans within the tribe identified themselves with an image of a particular plant or animal. Durkheim referred to this image as a totem, which was used as a marking on all persons and things belonging to the clan. In modern societies, the totem can be understood to be a flag or coat of arms that represents a particular group or nation. See Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, 29–40.
42.Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 208. Durkheim’s totemic theory and observation of the importance of public rituals in the maintenance of social/religious cohesion are utilized in this analysis with an important revision: Durkheim does not ask the question of who controls the collective rituals and whose interests are served by them. See Cristi, From Civil to Political Religion, 40. Durkheim portrays totemic symbols as given; he plays little attention to the process by which totems come to be accepted. The present analysis illustrates the process by which civic boosters appropriated the rune stone as a sacred totem to represent the identity and aspirations of western Minnesotans.
43.Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 216.
44.For some, the stone discovered in Ohman’s field functioned as a land claim to prove that white Minnesotans were destined to be there. Their presence on the landscape was a “justified” and a “natural” progression of the Norse expedition in the fourteenth century.
45.Jonathan Z. Smith reminds us that sacred spaces are not ordained as such by divine decree; they are actively constructed by human agents who have the power to do so (“The Wobbling Pivot,” 141). Thomas Tweed’s theory of religion is helpful in gaining perspective on the ways that rune stone enthusiasts fashioned the fields, forests, and waterways of Minnesota into a sacred landscape or “sacroscape.” Tweed understands homemaking, or “dwelling,” to signify the ways that religious people map, build, and inhabit physical and imagined spaces (Crossing and Dwelling, 74). However, it is clear that claims to landscapes are not benign. The production of sacred space is an operation of naturalization. What is in reality a completely arbitrary claim to a landscape is made to appear as natural or determined by God. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would refer to this process of naturalization as an act of symbolic
violence. See Rey, Bourdieu on Religion, 53–55.
46.Karen Fields, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, xli.
47.Historian David Glassberg sees historical pageantry of the early twentieth century as being based on “the belief that history could be made into a dramatic public ritual through which the residents of a town, by acting out the right version of their past, could bring about some kind of future social and political transformation” (American Historical Pageantry, 1).