Gordon Campbell - Norse America: The Story of a Founding Myth

My first academic post was at Aarhus University in Denmark, where I studied Danish and began to explore the Nordic world. In the intervening decades I have been able to travel in the Nordic homelands, settlement areas, and trading centres: in the east, Novgorod and Kiev, the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Caliphate; in the south, the British and Irish settlements, Normandy, and Brittany; in the north, Svalbard (where no indisputable evidence of a Norse presence has been found); and in the west, the Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland, and Canadaand always visiting museums as I travelled. Sometimes evidence of a Norse presence is thin: in St Kilda, for example, Old Norse place names have not so far been supported by archaeology, and in Maine, the historic significance of a solitary Norse coin is debated. The Maine State Museum that holds this coin is also the home of the Spirit Pond Runestones, which have roused strong emotions. In the case of other American runestones, such the Heavener Runestone in Oklahoma and the Kensington Runestone in Minnesota, I have had to be diplomatic in the face of entrenched local beliefs about the circumstances of their composition. The most important remote site supported by solid archaeological evidence is LAnse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland, and the discovery of that site in the 1960s planted the seed that eventually grew into a central narrative of this book. Research continues apace. Sites on Baffin Island and in Labrador are full of promise, but they have not yet been fully investigated. Other sites (Ungava Bay, southwest Newfoundland) hove into view only to be discredited, but fresh discoveries may in due course add new pieces to the jigsaw.

Debate on the subject of the Norse in North America is often fraught, because gaps in the evidence are quickly filled with ingenious narratives, some of which are redolent of the imaginary worlds created by Dan Brown, the Indiana Jones films, and an array of conspiracy theorists. Autodidacts square off against academics, and accusations of insufficient competence and intellectual inflexibility abound. Professionals in the fields of academic enquiry that impinge on the subject rightly grumble about self-appointed experts who have no professional expertise in archaeology, Scandinavian languages and history, manuscripts, cartography, epigraphy, navigation, and science. The public standing of these disciplines, especially those with a scientific dimension, means that amateurs often appropriate the language and deploy the equipment of science without feeling bound by the standards of evidence required by these disciplineshence the 3D imaging of American runestones and the grid markers on archaeological sites being dug by amateurs. The miming of scientific procedure is not designed to facilitate understanding, as is the case with real science, but to confer scientific credibility on a belief, rather like creation science. Such purposeful endeavours also necessitate a determined amnesia with respect to the accumulated knowledge of a discipline.

In this context it is important that researchers in the field be honest about their expertise and limitations, and I should like to be open about mine. I have some knowledge of the ancient and modern Nordic languages, but am wholly innocent of Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic) and other Inuit languages, of Innu-aimun (Montagnais) and other Algonquian languages, and of Cherokee (Tsalagi) and other Iroquoian languages. In this book I have translated Norse, Danish, Latin, and Spanish as need arose, but included the originals to allow readers the pleasure of detecting shortcomings in my translations. I have hands-on experience of the palaeographical and codicological examination of Latin and vernacular manuscripts. My principal employment in the past decade has been in the museum sector, so I have considerable experience of interpreting genuine artefacts and dealing with fake artefacts and forged manuscripts. My work on classical art and architecture means that I have long been a reader of site reports; I have read many such reports on real and imagined Norse sites, but I am not an archaeologist. I have a working knowledge of the Greek, Hebrew, palaeo-Hebrew, and Coptic scripts sometimes said to appear on American inscriptions, but I am not an epigrapher, and so can comment competently but not authoritatively. My limited command of runes is not based on undergraduate lessons, which I have long forgotten, but rather like that of forgers, derives from a book, in my case my former colleague Martin Findells excellent little book entitled