THORE ERECTED THIS STONE TO HIS FATHER GUNNER.
After you have contemplated the homeliness and innocence of such epitaphs you are even less apt to be persuaded by that wild Minnesota drama. Still, one wants to believe. THORE ERECTED THIS STONE TO HIS FATHER GUNNER. All right, but who cares? A fight between Vikings and Indians does more for the imagination.
Now, along with that Minnesota runestone, and no less celebrated, we have Rhode Island’s Newport tower—alleged to have been built by Knudsson’s party either before or after they visited the Midwest, or by some earlier Viking expedition. Or it was built by sixteenth-century Portuguese explorers. Or perhaps by the governor of Rhode Island, Benedict Arnold—not the Benedict Arnold—shortly before 1677, the date it first appears in historical records. Those who believe in the authenticity of the Kensington runestone almost without exception believe in the Viking origin of the tower. And, naturally, vice versa.
Here is what we know for certain: it is a cylindrical stone structure approximately twenty-five feet high, with eight arches supported by columns. The walls are about two feet thick with traces of stucco coating. Only the shell of the tower remains, the interior wooden components having disintegrated. It became a proper subject for argument in 1839 after a Danish antiquarian said he thought it was a Norse church or baptistery, and that it had been built by Vinlanders of the eleventh or twelfth century.
True believers point to architectural similarities between the tower and medieval Scandinavian structures: segmental arches, double-splayed casement windows, et cetera. They mention a unit of measurement known as the “Rhineland foot” which they say was used in the design of the tower, whereas all Colonial buildings used the English foot.
Skeptics reply that because of the tower’s condition the unit of measurement cannot be determined. Besides, the Rhineland foot was still in use as late as the nineteenth century. Then, too, carefully supervised digging around the foundation has brought up such items as a gunflint and a seventeenth-century clay pipe.
“This is fourteenth-century architecture,” said a European archaeologist. “There would be no question as to its age if this were in Europe.”
So the dispute continues.
Excluding various knickknacks from L’Anse aux Meadows, there is only one batch of indisputably Norse objects to have surfaced on the American continent. This is the Beardmore find, which consists of a broken sword, an axhead, a horse rattle, and three scraps of iron. In the judgment of almost every authority who has studied these relics, they date from the latter part of the Viking Age: the sword from the tenth century, the axhead and rattle from the eleventh. They were found, according to one report, while dynamiting on a mining claim near Beardmore, Ontario. But another report says they were retrieved from the basement of a home in Port Arthur and that they were brought to Canada about fifty years ago. Both reports are substantiated by witnesses and by circumstantial evidence. Once again, therefore, you have an option.
All in all there are perhaps 100 objects, a couple dozen inscriptions, and at least fifty sites which purport to show that Vikings reached America. By far the most engaging souvenirs are some rusty crescent-shaped little axes from the Great Lakes region, home of the embattled Kensington runestone. Because they are too light to be weapons they have been described as ceremonial halberds. But medieval halberds did not look exactly like that. Furthermore, these specimens apparently were manufactured by the American Tobacco Company in the late nineteenth century for use as plug tobacco cutters—the business end of the hatchet being attached to a cutting board by a hinge. They were given away during an advertising campaign to promote the sale of Battle-Axe Plug and quite a few midwestern housewives probably used them to chop cabbage.
Nevertheless, Hjalmar Holand submitted one tobacco cutter and two of the halberds that he thought were medieval Norse to the department of chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin. Professor R. A. Ragatz, chairman of the department, examined all three and wrote to Holand: “The metal [of the tobacco cutter] is a rather poor quality of gray cast iron, showing the following micro-constituents: graphite plates, ferrite, pearlite, steadite. The structure is totally different from the frames of the two genuine halberds. . . . I can state positively that the two halberds sent me last fall were not of the same origin as the tobacco cutter recently submitted.”
Other disputed evidence of Viking tourists includes “mooring holes,” found on Cape Cod and quite plentifully around the Minnesota lakes. These holes, about an inch in diameter and six or seven inches deep, have been drilled into boulders on the shores of past or present waterways. They are said to have been used for mooring a boat temporarily, a line from the boat being tied to an iron pin inserted in the hole. A sequence of such holes should indicate the route traveled; and it so happens that they often appear beside northern rivers and lakes that feed the Mississippi. Now, what this suggests is that Vikings may have traveled up the Saint Lawrence to the Great Lakes, or south from Hudson Bay via the Nelson River into the Wisconsin-Minnesota area. From there they could have gone south with almost no trouble, as far as they cared to float, drifting at last into the Gulf of Mexico below New Orleans. And what a dramatic voyage that would be.
Regrettably we must deal with Birgitta Wallace, archenemy of romantics: “. . . the method is unknown in Norse seamanship, medieval or modern.” Ms. Wallace goes on to say that other stones with identical drillings in the vicinity of these so-called mooring holes provide a clue as to what they really are: they are blasting holes drilled by early settlers. It seems that during the latter half of the nineteenth century these settlers obtained foundation stones for their houses by blowing boulders apart. Occasionally the dynamite didn’t go off, or the prospective home builder changed his mind, or for some other reason all that endured was the hole, somewhat like the smile of the Cheshire cat.
If Birgitta Wallace & Co. are correct we find ourselves restricted to L’Anse aux Meadows, which is either a grave disappointment or an exciting discovery, depending on your outlook. The name could mean the cove or bay with grass around it, or possibly Meadows is a corruption of Medusa—for the shoals of jellyfish found there during summer. Old sailing charts call it Méduse Bay, Jellyfish Bay. It is on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, about the latitude of London, within sight of the Canadian mainland, and near this bay are the ruins of a Norse settlement. Carbon 14 tests give a date of approximately A.D. 1000.
Not much is left. There is the ground plan of a big turf-walled house—fifty by seventy feet, with five or six rooms—and the outlines of various smaller structures including a smithy, a bathhouse, five boat sheds, a kiln, and two cooking pits.
Very little handiwork has survived, partly because there is so much acid in the soil. Almost everything made of bone or wood has disintegrated, whatever was not carried off by Eskimos, Indians, and early Newfoundland settlers. There are rusty traces that once were nails, a piece of copper with cross stripings that might have come from a belt, a whetstone, a bone needle, a bit of jasper, a stone lamp of the old Icelandic type, a steatite spindle whorl—meaning there were women in the house—and a bronze ring-headed pin. Pins of this type were used by Vikings to fasten their capes. And in the smithy was a large cracked flat-topped stone—the anvil—together with scraps of bog iron, clumps of slag, and patches of soot.
The great house burned, says Dr. Helge Ingstad, who supervised the excavation, although it is impossible to say whether this happened by accident or design.
L’Anse aux Meadows must have been an agreeable place to live. There were fields of berries and flowers, salmon in the lake, herds of caribou—many more animals and birds than there are now. The sea was alive with cod, seals, and whales, and the weather probably was mild.
Then why was Paradise abandoned? And why is there no sign of other settlements?
The answer seems to be that these people arrived too soon. Europe was not ready to support them, and with only spears, axes, knives, and swords these few colonists could not hold out against the skraelings. Whether they were killed in one overwhelming raid, whether they intermarried with the natives, or perhaps moved farther south, or at last gave up and retreated to Greenland—neither the ruins