I was turning right onto some busy road a couple weeks ago during rush hour. Meanwhile, a U-Haul was turning left off that busy road. During the few seconds of trying to sneak through their turn radius without side-swiping them or getting forcibly rear-ended by someone passing them coming from the other direction, I noticed that the little vignette on the side of the truck mentioned Alexandria, Minnesota. Obviously, I, a big fan of Fargo who lived in Minneapolis for two years, have driven through Alexandria a number of times, so I started reading the vignette, impending potential collision be damned.
The vignette mentioned something called the Kensington Runestone, so when I was next stopped, I typed ‘Kensington Runestone’ into my Safari search bar for later reference.
This is what I learned (from Wikipedia—in the future, I will most likely delve into a conspiracy theory that involves the Kensington Runestone, but that’s going to be another experience entirely).
What exactly the Kensington Runestone is is a matter still debated. The facts of the matter, though, are that Swedish immigrant Olof Ohman claimed to have found the stone in 1898 on his property near Kensington, Minnesota. It became the subject of debate in 1910, and made its way across the country over the next 100 years, coming in and out of prominence. Today, it’s housed in a museum in Alexandria. A museum which is likely not paying for what’s effectively a free advertisement on the side of that particular U-Haul.
The stone, marked with runes (hence the whole ‘Runestone’ thing), indicates a Scandinavian exploration reached Minnesota in 1362, leaving the stone as a record. Its veracity has been questioned—scholarly consensus leans toward it being a forgery (this is mostly based on linguistic analysis and archaeological context), though a small, ardent collection of folks supports its authenticity as a record of Scandinavian exploration in what is now the United States.
It makes sense for it to be a forgery. After all, Ohman and his neighbors were immigrants, and like all immigrants to the United States, were in the midst of a cultural transition marked by tension between their old identity and their new one (not to mention backlash against them from more established “Americans”). The idea of laying claim to their new land through ancient rights makes sense.
But, it’s technically possible Vikings did reach Minnesota in the 14th century. The truth of the matter is, we don’t know.
To begin all this, I should note that I’m misusing the term “Vikings.” The people historians actually label as “Vikings” were a seafaring subgroup of the Norse people based in Northern Europe from the late 700’s to the late 1000’s. They raided. They traded. They explored. Some historians extend the label to their relatives back home on the mainland.
Their explorations were impressive—within Europe alone, they reached as far as Greece and Spain, established settlements in what is now Southern Italy, and expanded into what is now Russia and the Ukraine. They also reached the Middle East, North Africa, Iceland, Greenland, and—notably for this post’s subject—Vinland, a vaguely defined area of North America named by Leif Erikson around the year 1000.
According to the Norse’ own historical records/legends, Vinland was at least at first a specific place, past “Helluland” and “Markland,” both also beyond Greenland to the West. Today, though, Vinland is used by some to define that specific place (Newfoundland, with Markland being what’s now Labrador and Helluland possibly being Baffin Island), and by others to define the general area of North America beyond Greenland with which Norse people were in contact.
What that area was is up for debate, as is how settled it was. There’s at least one site that’s (as of now) a confirmed Norse settlement—L’Anse aux Meadows, near the northern tip of Newfoundland—though it may have only been temporary in nature. Beyond it, much is unknown. Vikings certainly reached Newfoundland, meaning they also reached Labrador and almost certainly Baffin Island, but they may have also traveled as far South as New York, and there’s a good deal of history of New Englanders either finding evidence of Norse activity in their homeland or just claiming to find such evidence.
I’ll get on to the possibility of a more Midwestern exploration (consider these recent mentions of New York and New England the extent of our dealing with that region of the country), but Leif Erikson bears more than just a passing mention, as does the entire history of the Norse settlements in Greenland. What we know about Erikson wasn’t written down until a good while (at least a few decades) after Erikson was dead, so, for the sake of a disclaimer, keep in mind that details may have been lost, changed, or invented along the way, though historians seem confident that Erikson both existed and made it as far into North America as Newfoundland.
Leif Erikson’s grandpa, Thorvald Asvaldsson, was, as the Greenland saga puts it, banished from Norway “because of some killings” (what a time we live in, in which murder and war are at the very least unusual enough to be more, to us, than just ‘some killings’). He went to Iceland (which had been discovered by his great-great-uncle), bringing his ten-year-old son Erik with him. Erik, father of Leif (Erik’s son), kept the family tradition, killing Eyiolf the Foul in a 982 dispute (Erik’s slaves started a landside on his neighbor’s farm. Eyiolf the Foul was a friend of said neighbor, and killed Erik’s slaves in retribution for the landslide. In retribution for the killing of his slaves, Erik killed Eyiolf and another person.), at which point he was sentenced to exile.
Erik, likely knowing of Greenland’s existence thanks to earlier Viking attempts to settle it, traveled West from Iceland into what is technically North America, forming the first successful European settlement on the island of Greenland (which he named Greenland a few years later upon returning to Iceland in an attempt to woo future settlers to the colony). With him, he brought Leif.
Leif Erikson, in the year 999, traveled back to Norway, where he was converted to Christianity by King Olaf Tryggvason, and charged with bringing Norway’s new religion back to Greenland. Leif, who may have heard about lands West of Greenland through word of mouth (after they were seen by a trader, Bjarni Herjolfsson, who was blown far off course on his way to Greenland, saw the lands, but didn’t make landfall himself), gathered men and mounted his own expedition into what would, half a millennium later, be known as the New World. This, then, would have been the expedition responsible for the settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows.
Based on my readings of these Wikipedia articles, it seems plausible that everything happened as described. It also seems plausible that the situation was more complicated (there may have been others involved besides Herjolfsson and Erikson, it may have simply seemed logical that there were other lands beyond Greenland given that Greenland and Iceland existed beyond Norway, etc.). But this is the story we’re given by the Norse.
Within a century or so of Erikson’s adventures, Europe had been changed so dramatically by the spread of Christianity that the Viking Age ended. The Norse became a more integrated part of European culture thanks to sharing the common religion, and with slavery discouraged (at least slavery of fellow Christians), there wasn’t much of a point in raiding. The settlement on Greenland remained, and remained connected to Norway, which claimed it as part of its kingdom beginning in 1261, but broad colonization attempts seem to have ceased, and any contact between Europeans living on Greenland and the lands of what is now Canada was likely only for the sake of gathering resources—specifically, lumber. What happened to the Greenlanders is its own story—their settlement died off by the mid-1400’s due to a variety of factors, including climate change (what’s known as the Little Ice Age made farming more difficult, as was travel between Iceland and Greenland), and it wasn’t until the 1700’s that Norway, by now a joint kingdom with Denmark, sent someone back to Greenland. That someone, missionary Hans Egede, was sent to convert the Greenlanders from Catholicism to Protestantism, as the Danish/Norwegians realized the Reformation had missed their relatives to the West, but when he arrived, he found the colonies extinct.
While the Norse colony at Greenland was dying, or at least becoming disconnected from their relatives back in Europe, Norway was going through its own tumult. It was the mid-1300’s, and the Plague was rampaging across Europe, causing collateral chaos everywhere it touched.
In the midst of this chaos, King Magnus Eriksson (a joint king of Sweden and Norway, and no, he wasn’t descended from Leif Erikson, that’s not how Norse names worked) appointed Paul Knutson to lead an expedition to Greenland to make sure the Europeans living there weren’t turning away from Christianity. No evidence suggests the expedition ever took place (see: aforementioned tumult), but supporters of the Kensington Runestone’s authenticity name Knutson as a possible source. Similarly, a 16th-century Dutch cartographer named Gerardus Mercator (you may have heard of his Mercator projection, the rectangular map of the world that makes the polar regions look much larger than they are but was really useful for nautical navigation) mentioned in a 1577 letter that a man named Jacob Cnoyen had learned of eight men who’d returned to Norway in 1364 from the Arctic islands, one of whom had given the king quite a bit of geographical information. And a 19th-century Danish historian named Carl Christian Rafn made mention of a priest named Ivar Bardarsson who came from Greenland to Norway, thus appearing in Norwegian records beginning in 1364.
It’s certainly geographically possible that someone made their way from Greenland to Minnesota in the 1300’s. All they’d have to do would be sail through the Hudson Bay to waterways leading, in turn, to the Red River of the North, which separates North Dakota and Minnesota on its way from its headwaters in Western Minnesota/Eastern North Dakota to Lake Winnipeg, which in turn drains into Hudson Bay.
There’s no archaeological evidence for such journeys, though, and there’s a lot of land between Greenland and Minnesota in which evidence could have been found. Also, the Kensington Stone itself cites its authors as being from Sweden and Norway and mentions the year 1362, suggesting either that Knutson’s expedition happened and produced the stone, or that the stone is a forgery that was indeed based on Knutson’s ordered expedition. Either way, it was not an artifact from Greenlanders attempting to resettle in a more favorable climate.
Also taken as support for the stone’s authenticity is the phenomenon of lighter-skinned, fairer-haired, lighter-eyed members of the Mandans, a Native American tribe local to the Upper Midwest. Again, though, this theory doesn’t seem to be taken seriously by historians and scientists (neither does the theory that the Mandans are part Welsh, descended from Prince Madoc, but that’s too far off the subject of Vikings to be included here, and personally, I’m guessing DNA testing would have told us by now if people we think of as Native Americans are of European descent).
In short, it seems the extent of Viking exploration into what is now the United States was likely confined to the Northeastern reaches of the country, if it happened at all. But for some reason I don’t quite understand, it’s sure fun to imagine otherwise.
Wikipedia Articles Used:
Kensington Runestone
Vikings
Norsemen
Viking expansion
Norse colonization of North America
Timeline of Norse colonization of the Americas
Vinland
Helluland
Markland
L’Anse aux Meadows
Leif Erikson
Erik the Red
History of Greenland
Paul Knutson
History of Norway
Gerardus Mercator
Carl Christian Rafn
Red River of the North
Mandan
