(Double) Crossings: Vikings, Christianity, and the Skraelings of North America

JAMES POSTEMA First (Double) Crossings: Vikings, Christianity, and the Skraelings of North America The town of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, typifies one of the most ingrained American traits—beyond, that is, its iconic identity as "the" American small town portrayed in Sinclair Lewis's novel Main Street. In a much lesser-known way, Sauk Centre epitomizes the construction of a European-American identity on a vast scale, reaching back a thousand years but still very much with us. The physical site of this constmction is just a little ways out of town, in a clearing to the north, where lies a boul- der that once served, it is said, as an altar for a Christian mass conducted by Viking explorers in the 14th century. In 1975 three clergymen, includ- ing George Speltz, presiding bishop of the local Catholic diocese, per- formed a religious ceremony in which the rock was "rededicated"; the Sauk Centre Lions, in a mixture of religious and civic commitment, still maintain the site (Gilman "Viking Trail" 4-5). This ptirported altar stone is one of many pieces of "evidence" used to assert that Vikings explored the region several hundred years ago, and although hotly debated, the idea of such ancient Viking visits was and to this day still is taken seriously in Minnesota. ' But while many inhabitants of Sauk Centre know the stories of a supposed Viking presence in their region, few would know the history of the Sauk, or Sac, or O-zauk-ee Indians, a handful of whom, the history books say, had only a temporary and fugitive presence in the area (Upham 51, Hildebrand 20).^ So on Main Street, USA, at the falsely pro- claimed "Centre" of Sauk country, the Sauks themselves are dismissed from the town's history, while inhabitants of European descent cherish the notion of an early, and specifically Christian, Viking presence. The displacement of Native Americans by (Christian) Viking explorers in written histories is nothing new. The 13th-century Grcenlendinga saga or The Greenlanders ' Saga, arguably the first European text about America, narrates Viking explorations of what we now call Newfoundland and Labrador, asserting a Christian Norse presence in 112 America even as it displaces and belittles Native peoples. This narrative, and the closely related Eiriks saga rauba, or Eirik the Red's Saga, have received much attention within Scandinavian studies, especially after the discovery of authenticated Viking artifacts at L'anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland in 1967, as well as subsequent other finds in Greenland.'^ Even before these archaeological discoveries, many scholars assumed that the sagas were fairly straightforward narrations of historical fact, and since that time a number of articles have celebrated the apparent vindication of the sagas' historicity. But examining Sauk Centre's "altar" and The Greenlanders' Saga from an American Studies perspective, I would argue that they both illus- trate an important American phenomenon: they are part of what Annette Kolodny calls "a signifying system . almost obsessively concerned either with isolating Indians outside of history (and, hence, apart from human progress) or with displacing Indian priority as historical fact" ("Fictions" 715). By removing Native Americans and their claims from the land and from history, the narratives of Viking exploration in Minnesota and in the North Atlantic provided a rationale for European- Americans to inhabit and take possession of the country. This is nothing less than the original seed of "manifest destiny." The subtext of the Minnesota exploration myth is clear: in a land where many people identify deeply with Scandinavian heritage, it implic- itly asserts that their Norse ancestors were here first. The Greenlanders ' Saga also has a "we-were-here-first" quality, which has contributed extensively to the ideological displacement of indigenous peoples. The sagas' basic story has been quite infiuential in European-American con- ceptions of the early history of the continent, often in rather unfortunate ways. It is one of the "fictions that get told over and over again," in Kolodny's words, frequently serving as a vehicle for both ethnic and religious prejudice ("Fictions" 715). While the targets of prejudice have var- ied, the effects of this myth have been most costly for Native Americans. Kolodny takes her cue from Dakota scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., who told the Society for American Archaeology "that unless and until we are in some way connected with world history as early peoples .. [Native peoples] will never be accorded ftill humanity. We cannot be primitive peoples who were suddenly discovered half a millennium ago" (Deloria "Indians" 597).^ Kolodny agrees with Deloria, saying that "stories about the pre-Columbian accessibility or isolation of the continent ineluctably also became stories about the history and identity of its Native peoples" ("Fictions" 715). Deloria thinks that there must have been contact between indigenous peoples in America and others from both east and west, well before 113 Columbus. Pursuing his belief, Kolodny has worked with Native writer Joseph Bruchac to help bring forward indigenous accounts of meetings between tribes of the northeastem continent and visitors from the east, thus linking Native history to world history (Kolodny "Who"). To under- stand justly the history of Native Americans and European contact, it is also important to examine the other aspect of this issue, to deconstmct the European narratives of discovery. In particular, I will argue that the Grœnlendinga saga already is asserting fictions about North America that cut two different ways: the Saga pits Europeans against indigenous Americans, but it also sets Christianity against Norse values—even as it co-opts and celebrates the Norse patriarchs' vanquishing of the Native peoples. Rather than being a stable basis for historical claims, as some have used and some do still use it, the Grœnlendinga saga is a very con- flicted text. Influence There is no question of the sagas' influence in European-American con- ceptions of history. Many claims have been made about early relations between Europeans and Native peoples in America, most of them wildly distorted. Only the claim that Vikings sailed from Greenland to this continent could call upon any extant written documents as evidence in the form of the sagas themselves. These narratives were first introduced to American colonists indirect- ly: in 1773, Benjamin Franklin wrote that "a leamed Swede" had con- vinced him "that America was discovered by their Northem People long before the Time of Columbus" (qtd. in Kolodny "Fictions" 699). Both the Grœnlendinga saga and Eiriks saga rauda became known more widely in Britain and America after 1841 when North Ludlow Beamish translated them into English, using Carl Christian Rafn's 1837 Danish translation in Antiquitates Americance (Fry 18-19, 33-34). Just a year after Beamish's translation, in 1842, the sagas' basic migration narrative was popularized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in "The Skeleton in Armor," which was inspired by the notion of a 12th-century Viking presence in New England. In this poem, a Viking warrior takes a Norse maiden to the new land (Rhode Island), where she promptly dies with various romantic omamen- tations. In "The Norsemen," John Greenleaf Whittier imagines Viking crews sailing up the Merrimac River as he contemplates a stone supposed- ly left by early Norse visitors. Several reprints of Beamish's text, and later translations of the Norse sagas, were published in America throughout the 19th and 20th centuries (Fry 18-22, 33-37). These texts were read so widely that in his preface to "The Norsemen" Whittier could confidently observe, "The fact that the ancient Northmen visited the northeast coast of 114 North America and probably New England, some centuries before the discovery of the westem world by Columbus, is now very generally admit- ted" (37). Because the sagas were persistently accepted as authentic, their narratives enjoyed a great deal of cultural influence. But the sagas' influence operated in a colonialist and racialized con- text. On one hand this influence has given a sense of empowerment to Scandinavian immigrants who sometimes felt overcooked in the melting pot of America. For example, in 1925 at a Minnesota celebration of Norse immigration to America, a crowd of more than eighty thousand responded with wild enthusiasm when President Calvin Coolidge "acknowledged their claim that a Norwegian explorer actually discovered America long before Christopher Columbus." A joumalist present at this event immedi- ately expressed the anachronistic and racialized manner in which Coolidge, the crowd, and the reporter himself had appropriated traditional Norse identity and values: "The great roar that rose from Nordic throats to Thor and Odin above the lowering gray clouds told that the pride of the race had been touched" (Schultz 1265). Similarly, Canadians of Icelandic ancestry also used the Viking exploration myths to form their own identity as Norse-Canadian (Wolf). As Jerold Frakes notes, "Via the Vinland sagas, Norse participation in the discourse on the 'discovery of America' could be legitimized, and contemporary Scandinavians who were so moved could in fact derive some pride from that participation" (159). These affirmations of Scandinavian heritage and ethnicity of course embody the Eurocentric view that the "discovery" and occupation ("set- tlement") of America by Europeans was something to be proud of But (also of course) things are not that simple: the sagas are, in Kolodny's words, "narrative sites of an enduring conflict over claims to the same liv- ing space by radically different cultures" ("Fictions" 716).^ Scandinavian-Americans were not the only ones to use the Viking sagas in the ideological conflict conceming European relations to the peoples of America: for some, the sagas were the main weapons in a passion- ately racial cmsade. For example, in the late 19th century Eben Horsford, a wealthy industrialist and retired Harvard chemistry professor, went to great lengths to assert that Leif Eriksson had come to America in his voy- ages.

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