MDDM Ch. 66 Stig's Tale

[Dave Monroe]

"'The Sea roars against the Land, the Sea-Wind bears
away the cries of the Wounded, Blood leaps, Men fall,
most of those slain are Skraellings, their Bodies
splay'd and vaporous in the Cold.  None but Gudrid
ever saw the woman whose visit announc'd this first
Act of American murder, and the collapse of Vineland
the Good,--'" (M&D, Ch. 66, pp. 633-4)

>From J.M. Mancini, "Discovering Viking America,"
Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Summer 2002), pp.
868-907 ...

   "The mainstreaming of Viking discovery in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century served a similar
purpose as that served by the larger trend toward
racialized history.  At a moment of increasing fear
that the nation was committing race suicide, the
thought of Viking ghosts roaming the streets of a city
increasingly filled with Irish, Italian, and Jewish
hordes must have been comforting to an Anglo-Saxon
elite whose political power, at least, was decidedly
on the wane....  Native-stock writers, however, were
not the only ones to employ the Vikings for political
purposes.  Significantly, at the same time that
native-stock writers, however, were not only ones to
employ the Vikings for political purposes. 
Significantly, at teh same time that native-stock
writers were using Viking discovery to cope with the
massive social and political transformations of the
late nineteenth century, immigrants, who themselves
comprised a major force behind these changes, also
began to see that the Vikings could serve their
interests.
   "The first volume by an American of immigarnt stock
to turn to these themes was Rasmus B. Anderson's
provocatively titled America Not Discovered by
Columbus, first published in 1874 .... argued that a
series of Norse adventurers, from 986 until the
fourteenth century, had seen, touched, and settled
America...." (p. 877)

   'Anderson's text also employed more specific
strategies for insinuating the Norsemen into the heart
of American national history.  In particular, Anderson
appealed to historical connections among race,
geography, and religion, constructing the Vikings'
forays into New England as preparation for the Puritan
arrival....  Anderson also suggested that the Vikings
had prepared New England for the Puritans by bringing
Christianity to its shores.  Despite a nod to the
'flower of Teutonic heathendom' (and despite the fact
that Christianity had at best only partially
penetrated Viking culture by the time of the Vinland
voyages), Andseron repetaedly emphasized the
Christianity of the Vikings.  More than that, Anderson
implied that the Vikings had been the right kind of
Christians to bring religion to America by
distinguishing them from Columbus, who 'talked of
himself as chosen by Heaven to make this discovery'
but was 'subservient to the dominion of inquisition.' 
What Andseron avoided saying, of course, was that the
Vikings were as Catholic as Columbus ... even if their
descendants had turned away from teh Church of Rome to
a religion semmingly more appropriate for aspiring
Americans.
   "Although the mere presence of Christian Norsemen
in Anderson's narrative would have served to connect
the Vikings and the Puritans, Anderson strengthened
this association by representing Viking New England as
a place steeped in sanctifying Christian blood.  The
death of Leif Erikson's brother Thorvald, he
suggested, had been one of the most significant
episodes in the Vikings' New World history because it
had consecrated America as a Christian land and, by
implication, set the stage for the arrival of later
Christians.  Thorvald, he axclaimed, 'was buried in
Vinland, and two crosses were erected on his
grave,--one at his head and one at his feet.  Hallowed
ground this, beneath whose sod rests the dust of teh
first Christian and the first European who died in
America!' ....  In describing the Viking
Christianization of New England in these terms,
Anderson provided an additional incentive for
native-stock Americans to accept the Vikings a s the
'dsicoverers' of New England; his account of this
icident sidestepped the increasingly sensitive issue
of anti-Native violence on the part of the European
colonists.  In direct contrast to known accounts of
the post-Columbian Christianization of the New World,
in Anderson's tract the event that enabled the
sacralization of teh American landscape was not the
brutal conversion and death of American Indians, but
the European Thorvald's murder at the hands of
marauding Natives, the Skarellings of the sagas.... 
Anderson suggested that New World Christianity had
been born not in the brutal conversion and decimation
of Aboriginal peoples but in blood spilled by European
Vikings upon the shores of Massachusetts ....  In
offering victimized Vikings as the true colonizers of
new England, Anderson offered a salve to Americans'
... increasingly guilty conscience ....
   "This imaginative refiguring of discovery provided
the basis for an intersting bargain ... for its
uggested that by accepting the Norsemen as ancestors
and brethren, Americans could rid themselves of one of
the most troubling aspects of their collective past."
(pp. 885-7)

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