?Making? history: The Vikings in the American Heartland

Abstract

In a field near Sauk Centre, Minnesota rests a large, concentric shaped boulder measuring roughly 27 feet long by 17 feet wide.* The rock bears two sets of holes, a pair drilled horizontally into one end of the rounded interior of the crescent and two more drilled vertically into the top at the other end. When the rock was first found in 1943, many local residents naturally wondered at the origin and purpose of the holes. They finally decided that the horizontal holes were intended to hold sticks to support an altar shelf and that sticks were inserted into the vertical holes to support a protective canopy extending over the altar. In this fashion, they concluded, the rock was used as a place of worship by 14th Century Viking explorers. Such a conjecture is not nearly as fanciful as it might at first appear, for the Sauk Centre Altar Rock (as it is now known) fits neatly into the taken-for-granted assumptions about regional pre? history that are held by many contemporary residents of Minnesota and the eastern Dakotas. Disputing the conventional scholarly view that the Viking presence in North America was limited to the coast of Newfoundland in Canada, many people in the region are con? vinced that Vikings explored and even settled widely throughout the area as early as the mid-1300s. This is a regionally pervasive and often intensely held belief that sometimes borders on religious commitment. For example, in a 1963 poll taken by the Minneapolis Tribune, some 60% of those contacted indicated their belief that Vikings were Minnesota's first European visitors. Although no subsequent polls have been taken, the level of popular belief certainly remains quite high. Local newspaper stories and letters to the editor routinely offer favorable accounts of the Viking presence;1 a considerable number of books and articles have