Original headline: Leif Ericson was never here, but we’ve still got a parade
Time and time again archeologist Emerson Baker has to burst people’s bubbles.
Sorry, the Vikings did not live in your backyard. Sorry, those marks are not runic inscriptions. Are you sure your grandson did not borrow the hammer?
"People who find it are really convinced it’s unique and it’s hard to break the news to them," said Baker, chair of the History Department at Salem State College in Salem, Mass.
For decades, archeologists in New England have been busy debunking theories of the Vikings’ whereabouts, leaving fans of Leif Ericson with a single sliver of hope, a Norse coin found in Brooklin, Maine.
But what science cannot prove, creative minds can.
The chief archeologist at the Maine State Museum, Bruce Bourque, even talks of subcultures of "romantic dreamers who don’t understand science and archeology."
He places the Viking fan clubs into the same category as those who are convinced ancient Romans colonized Arizona.
"I spend 5 to 10 percent of my time dealing with these people. Often they are people who otherwise are completely rational."
Everybody does, however, agree the Vikings made it to North America 500 years before Christopher Columbus in 1492. And few question the fur-clad Ericson and his crew of explorers dropped anchor from their open plank boats off the beach near what is now L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada, the site that would become the only authenticated Viking settlement in North America.
But what did the Arnold Schwarzeneggers of the 10th century do next?
According to popular belief, quite a lot.
A stone tower in Newport, RI., and rocks with strange markings all along the East Coast send to some people one jubilant message: Leif was here!
One rock now sits encased in a concrete well beneath a row of iron bars at Hampton’s Tuck Museum. It was rescued after mobs of tourists in the 1950s began to chip off pieces for souvenirs and a particularly fanatic fan from Massachusetts tried to take off with the rock on his truck.
The cryptic inscription on the rock, they believed, was a tribute to Leif Ericson’s brother Thorvald who Viking sagas say was shot with an arrow in the armpit during a battle with Indians.
In the mind of Hampton District Court Judge Charles Lamprey, the fight raged at no other place than Boar’s Head, not far from Hampton Beach. Runic expert, Olaf Strandwold, confirmed there indeed was a message on the rock in Lamprey’s yard.
But where Strandwold saw runes in 1948, scholars now see hogwash. The gouges in the rock may be manmade, but not by Leif and his gang. Locals also added a few runes of their own when they in the mid-1930s decided to do a little amateur excavation.
"It’s neat to look at a rock and think the markings must be a foreign language. It’s not fun to believe it’s the marks of a steam shovel," said J. Dennis Robinson, editor of Seacoastnh.com, who has investigated the rock and called it a hoax.
Over the years, one find after another has faced the test of science.
Bubbles have been burst, dreams crushed.
Mysterious rock formations have turned out to be the work of natural erosion, the Newport Tower the work of colonials, strange runes the work of modern steel chisels, and the famous Vinland Map of Viking exploration a first-class forgery.
"People have been looking hard for hundreds of years and there is no archeological evidence in this part — it’s certainly possible, the Vikings were incredible boat handlers — but there is no evidence," said Jeff Bolster, professor of history at the University of New Hampshire.
Here, Roslyn Strong must disagree. She is a member the New England Antiquities Research Association that for more than 30 years has fought with academia over the authenticity of the Spirit Pond rune stones in Maine.
On the nonprofit organization’s 40th anniversary, Oct 29., as many as 120 members will descend on the Maine State Museum to prove their case once and for all: The rune stones are as real as they come.
"We say enough already. We’re going to make a case the stones are not fakes. There is a lot of evidence," said Strong.
Used to being accused as disillusioned romantics, Strong emphasized NEARA tries to distance itself "from the lunatic fringe that says Vikings were here and Vikings were there."
"The established academia don’t look at anything so we have to show them. We’ll have several archeologists speaking," she said.
Someday, sooner or later, Strong believes more Viking remnants will be found in New England. Until then, a Norse coin unearthed with thousands of other artifacts during an excavation of the former trading center in Brooklin is considered the only legitimate evidence of Nordic warriors in the United States, but to the grave disappointment of some, it still does not necessarily mean they ever set foot in the country.
The Vikings, Bourque said, traded with natives who might have got their hands on the coin up north.
"If Newfoundland was your first introduction to the world, would you want to see more? Baker joked.
After some initial confusion about the significance of the tiny piece of metal, the Keeper of the Coin Collection in Oslo, Norway, confirmed it as — hallelujah — a Norse penny dating back to 1065- 1080.
One side of the coin shows a double cross while the other has triggered the imagination of many. The original design of a horse, a chariot and a man, has come apart, setting the stage for people to see something far more exotic, a dragon.
Robinson interprets the tireless search for a Viking past as a "chauvinistic, racial drive, tied into pseudo-archeology."
"In the 1930s it had a coolness to it. People were titillated by the idea of a powerful white race, an ancient tribe coming in on small boats," he said.
"Northeners are always looking for ways to talk about how the north was settled by Europeans first."
Today, the Vikings only reemerge for the annual Leif Ericson parade in Durham on Columbus Day weekend.
As usual, Mrs. Nobel K. Peterson is in charge and true to history she promptly asks all participants to remove the horns off their helmets.
The medieval warriors did not adorn their headgear with such props. Rather the horns are an invention of the German opera that wanted to make the bellowing Vikings appear frightening on stage.
The Vikings left Newfoundland only a few years after they spotted the rugged coastline for the first time, Bolster said. Some may have headed to Greenland, others may have succumbed to the forces of nature and, although the possibility remains, historians doubt there are any living descendents of the North American Vikings in New England.
Mrs. Nobel K. Peterson, for example, is three-quarters English and one-quarter Irish, Scotch, Dutch and French.
"My mom said ‘Oh, why don’t you have any Scandinavian blood’ and I said ‘The way those Vikings got around, who knows?’"
