More Pseudoarchaeology: Revisiting Kensington Runestone

In these here parts, most folks know about the Kensington Runestone. Olof Öhman, a Swedish farmer, discovered the stone near Alexandria, Minnesota in 1898. It appears to be a chunk of blue-grey granite inscribed with a text describing the massacre of 10 members of a Scandinavian party who were exploring the region in 1362.

Most people scholars and experts believe the stone to be fake, but it continues to attract attention and appears in many of the standard works that seek either to debunk, ridicule, or condemn this inscription. Some archaeologists and historians, however, have also sought to contextualize it and reflect on the stone as a way to critique epistemological basis for how we understand our past.

As I read through some of the work on the stone and its history, I’m struck by how clearly the stone fits into a number of contemporary conversations. My little blog post today thinks about how I might situate an object like the Kensington Runestone amid the larger (and obviously overlapping) discussions at the core of the modern experience. 

1. Midwestern Modernism. I’ve been very much interested in contemporary “movement” sometimes called “Midwestern” (or more condescendingly “Middling”) Modernism. Characterized by the work of authors such as Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis (and my personal favorite Robert McAlmon), Midwestern Modernists sought to critique the parochialism of small towns and to introduce a more streamlined, plain, and “modern” style to their writing. This style and critical position situated their work in opposition to traditional views of the Midwest that centered on folksy language and a tendency to celebrate small time and rural life as morally upstanding and pure. The Midwestern communities where these authors grew up and set their work, often braced their local pride with a certain amount of ambivalence regarding the characterization of their region. Nevertheless, these authors managed to bridge the gap between rapidly urbanizing America and the rural communities where many of these new urbanites were born. Indeed, these authors (and an emerging crop of Midwestern literary magazines) demonstrated that despite their cynicism, the region could serve as an incubator for modern literature and significant contributor to early 20th century attitudes toward cosmopolitanism.

The Kensington Runestone fits into this discourse not only because it works to challenge the view that the urbanized east coast could claim the historical priority in the founding of the US, but also because it challenged these claims using scientific methods grounded in archaeology, linguistics, and geology. Efforts to defend and to dispute the authenticity of the Kensington Runestone took place at the intersection of academic writing and popular literature. More than that, debates over the Runestone’s authenticity took place on a global stage involving scholars from Scandinavia and appearances of the Runestone in Europe and eventually at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. 

In short, the Runestone represented a material manifestation of the tension between modern life — as embodied in both east coast claims to priority in founding the US and the region’s emerging academic voices — and small town society with its mix of local pride and the subtle cosmopolitanism produced through its immigrant community and the growing connections to the urban world. 

2. Migrant Materiality. The role of immigrants in the discovery (let’s say) and promotion of the Kensington Runestone makes this object a monument to immigrant archaeology. Recently, archaeologists have focused considerable attention on the ways in which migrants communities construct identities in new environments. In most recent cases, archaeologists have emphasized the ephemeral techniques used my migrants to preserve forms of social and personal identity.

Of course, not all material representations of migrant identity are ephemeral and the Kensington Runestone represents an effort to link Scandinavian immigrants to their countries of origins by representing their journey in the late 19th century as part of a historical tradition of migration that left marks on their landscape. In this way, immigrants sought to transform the rugged and unfamiliar landscape of central Minnesota into a more meaningful place.

This also involved both overwriting and vilifying the Native American inhabitants of central Minnesota. Not only does the Kensington Runestone position the Native American population as hostile to the Scandinavian explorers, but positions the Christian Vikings as innocent martyrs. In other words, this object authorizes the current residents of the landscape by creating a landscape that is both historical and moral.  

3. Making the Modern. Finally, the early 20th century saw certain profound transformations in the world. Communities found themselves navigating new relationships and identities as the emergence of global capitalism unleashed expansive networks of political, economic, and social forces. These forces created a sense of displacement. This was sometimes literal displacement in the case of European migrants to the Northern Plains or the movement from rural to urban centers. In other cases, this displacement was more social, economic, or even psychological as traditional ways of life, social relationships, and views of the world became complicated by technological innovation and the first way of a globalized economy. 

In many ways, the interest in the Kensington Runestone emergence alongside the growing interest in new forms of religious life including a growing interest in spiritualism and other ways of attempting to transcend the impersonal forces and mundane drudgeries that characterized modern life. While the growth of Mormonism in the 19th century forms a natural parallel with certain elements of the Kensington Runestone discovery, I’d contend (gently) that the Kensington Runestone represents a different branch of the modernist tree which sought to challenge views of the past advanced by modern institutions (especially universities and museums) in order to create the possibility of socially-meaningful alternative narratives. By advancing the claims of non-experts in opposition to individuals with institutionally validated expertise, the Kensington Runestone represented the persistent power of local knowledge and authority. In some ways, it made manifest a hopeful form of agency in a rapidly changing world.

To be fair, I recognize that objects like the Kensington Runestone can easily become touchstones (as it were) for not simply anti-modern effort to negotiate very real anxieties associated with a changing world, but also as objects around which regressive and even racist could consolidate. At the same time, objects like the Kensington Runestone are not exclusively expressions of the colonial imagination, but also manifestations of migrant mentalities and efforts to create meaningful landscapes amid the alienation and displacement of the modern world.