Books: Holand’s Crusade

AMERICA: 1355-1364 (272 pp.)—Hjalmar R. Holand—Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($4).

U.S. soil is not so rich as Europe’s in buried clues to the great treasure hunt of history, but it has had its moments. In 1827, Joseph Smith told of finding near Palmyra, N.Y., the cache of inscribed golden tablets* later translated into the Book of Mormon. Some years later another Mormon named James Jesse Strang found another cache of engraved tablets (brass this time) in Walworth County, Wis. In 1869 diggers near Cardiff, N.Y. unearthed what was thought to be petrified proof positive of a vanished race of American supermen—until it developed that the 2,966-lb. “giant” had been carved (out of Iowa gypsum) by a joker in Chicago.

And in 1898 a farmer near Kensington, Minn. dug up a 202-lb. engraved chunk of rock now known as the Kensington Stone. It may be seen to this day in an office window on Broadway Avenue, Alexandria, Minn. The farmer found it, so the story goes, embraced by the roots of an aspen tree. Bewildered by its cryptic angular markings, he carted it to Kensington and showed it off. A young Norwegian-born University of Wisconsin graduate named Hjalmar Holand heard of the stone, came to look it over. Then & there began the one-man crusade of which America: 1355-1364 is the latest token.

Runes & Ruins. One of the unusual facts about Holand’s crusade is that the ideas involved are by no means out-&-out moonshine. Some of them may be sound, at least in substance, and reputable U.S. scholars (e.g., the late archaeologist Philip Ainsworth Means) have said as much publicly. Holand is fighting a case for history, not mythology or revelation. His firm belief: 1) Norse explorers repeatedly visited America before Columbus; 2) the Kensington Stone proves that some of them got as far west as Minnesota.

The rune stone—so called because the inscription is in one of the ancient Scandinavian runic alphabets—is not the only tangible evidence. Holand has tried to show in earlier works (notably Westward from Vinland, 1940) that Norse “mooring stones” have also been found in the Kensington region, to say nothing of a few “medieval Norse” swords and halberds. America: 1355-1364 attempts to pinpoint the American headquarters of the rune-stone party.

The explorers who reached what is now Minnesota, Holand believes, were members of a long-range patrol dispatched from a semi-permanent settlement somewhere to the east. This settlement, he concludes, was on the present site of Newport, R.I. Its citadel was none other than the eight-columned, cylindrical ruin commonly known as the Old Stone Mill, still standing in Newport’s Touro Park.

Vinland Story. Reviewing the story (itself as much legend as history) of Leif Ericson’s trip from Greenland to “Vinland” about 1000 A.D., he decides that Vinland must have been somewhere in the vicinity of Narragansett Bay. Three centuries later, he notes, a certain Paul Knutson was ordered by the King of Norway and Sweden to lead an expedition in search of Greenland colonists who were reported to have forsaken Christianity and moved away. Where would they go? Vinland, naturally. So off Knutson and his men sailed for Narragansett Bay; they arrived there in 1355.

There was no one in sight. Holand’s theory is that Knutson detached members of his party to investigate. This was the band, according to Holand, that reached Minnesota—after a boat trip calculated to make even a Viking tremble. Assumes Holand: the searchers would first search the Atlantic seaboard north of Vinland, then keep on going; hence their route ran up the Atlantic coast into Hudson Bay, down Hudson Bay to the Nelson River, Lake Winnipeg and the Red River into Minnesota’s lake country. There, while looking for an overland route back to Vinland, the party was attacked by Indians. The Kensington runes purport to tell the story:

[We are] 8 Goths and 22 Norwegians on [an] exploration journey from Vinland round about the West. . . . .We were [out] and fished one day. After we came home [we] found 10 [of our] men red with blood and dead AV[E] M[ARIA] Save [us] from evil . . . year 1362

“Priceless Heirloom.” Knutson’s headquarters detachment, meanwhile, had been busy with that “priceless heirloom: the only building in America that brings us in contact with the Middle Ages.” Holand reviews the several theories on the origin of the Newport landmark, including the widely accepted one that it was erected as a windmill by a Rhode Island colonial governor. Following Philip Ainsworth Means and others, and citing copious structural details, Holand concludes that the windmill theory is unsound—that the building was originally a “round, fortified stone church” of a type common in medieval Scandinavia. The builders: obviously, Knutson’s party.

Crusader Holand’s case is largely a concatenation of guesses intended to account for the Minnesota relics. As for the relics themselves, it is possible that they are as bogus as the Cardiff Giant, for whether or not there were Scandinavians in the Middle West in the latter, half of the 14th Century, there certainly have been plenty of them there since the latter half of the 19th Century. If it is hard to believe that any learned wag would bother to cut a long runic inscription as a practical joke, it is also hard to believe that a lost and frightened traveler would take the time to do so in grim earnest.

Crusader Holand, now 74, has been building up his fascinating, flabbergasting case for 40 years. It has been scouted and scoffed at, but no one yet has been able to knock the props from under it.

*Smith sternly refused to show the tablets, warned that a mere peep would cause instant death, himself examined them through “magic spectacles.”