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Annette Kolodny In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery . Annette Kolodny. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Pp. xvii+426.

2014; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 111; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/674580

1545-6951

Gordon M. Sayre,

Archaeology and Natural History

Previous articleNext article FreeAnnette Kolodny In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery. Annette Kolodny. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Pp. xvii+426.Gordon M. SayreGordon M. SayreUniversity of Oregon Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAnnette Kolodny is a distinguished scholar of Early American literature, known for her pioneering feminist and eco-critical studies The Lay of the Land (1975) and The Land before Her (1984). More recently, she has edited and republished The Life and Traditions of the Red Man (2007), a book of Penobscot tribal history, by Joseph Nicolar, originally published in 1893. This Nicolar edition, together with Kolodny’s study in Norway dating back to her time as an undergraduate, has inspired this new book, In Search of First Contact. In US English departments, medievalists may seem to have little in common with specialists in American literature, but Kolodny has set out to bridge this gap by studying the Vinland sagas, two narratives of Norse voyages southward from Greenland, in or about the year 1000, to a land that got its name due to the wild grapes found growing there.In 1960, the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and his archaeologist wife, Anne Stine Ingstad, uncovered evidence of a Norse outpost near the northern tip of Newfoundland at a site called L’Anse aux Meadows. Excavations during the 1960s revealed that during the eleventh century, groups of a dozen or more Norse men and women had spent several winters there, living in stone and sod dwellings along with their domestic animals and fashioning wood and stone parts to maintain and repair the ships in which they had sailed from Greenland. The Norse Greenland colony survived for hundreds of years before it was abandoned, most likely due to the harsh climate and attacks by native Inuit peoples.Erik the Red’s Saga and The Greenlanders’ Saga, recorded in fourteenth-century manuscripts, tell of the voyages from Greenland and Iceland of the recently Christianized Norsemen. The Norsemen had no compasses or sextants, and the sagas include no maps and are frustratingly sparse in geographical details. The reference to grapes and to grasslands free of snow in the winter are the tantalizing details of Vinland’s location. The anthropologist Birgitta Linderoth Wallace, who directed excavations at L’Anse aux Meadows, concludes that Vinland was “northeastern New Brunswick, the Chaleur Bay, and Mirimichi area” (95). However, perhaps due to rising sea levels over the past thousand years, no archaeological evidence has been found there. More recently, excavations on Baffin Island have uncovered solid evidence of trade and interactions between the Norsemen and the Inuit in the Arctic, but Kolodny focuses on the Algonquian Mi’kmaq and rarely mentions the Inuit or Eskimo.The challenge Kolodny’s book sets for itself is one of historical archaeology, to bring textual historical evidence from the sagas into corroboration with physical archaeological evidence. The goal of this effort would be to show that the Anse aux Meadows site is one of the several outposts described in the sagas as having been established by Leif Eriksson, Bjarni Herjolfsson, and Thorfinn Karlsefni and to explore archaeological or oral-history evidence that might verify hints in the sagas that when the Vikings reached Vinland they had voyaged farther south than Anse aux Meadows, to the Canadian Maritimes or even to New England. Kolodny admits in her book’s preface that as she began her project, by studying the Vinland sagas and the ethnohistory of the Penobscot of Maine, she had formed a specific hypothesis: “Because the sagas described the Skraelings in ‘skin boats’ (or hide canoes), I was leaning toward identifying the Mi’kmaq (who had used moose-hide canoes in earlier periods) as one possible candidate for the Skraelings encountered by the Norse in Vinland” (6).The book breaks into three parts. The first two chapters provide a careful exposition and analysis of the sagas, and in this section Kolodny appears to be searching for hints that the Norse did visit the lands inhabited by the Mi’kmaq (or eastern Abenaki peoples). The middle three chapters offer a study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American historians, poets, and folklorists who promoted the idea of a Viking landing, particularly in the Boston or Rhode Island region. These literati often worked with an ethnic or religious agenda of displacing the Catholic Italian Christopher Columbus from the honor of discoverer of America, but the agenda was not so straightfoward as one might assume: “For U.S. Catholics, tenth-century converted Northmen predated the pious seventeenth-century Pilgrim Congregationalists.…Different figurations of Vikings and Northmen…could be employed both in Catholic-inflected and in Protestant-inflected versions of American history” (225). Carl Christian Rafn, Henry Wheaton, Eben Norton Horsford, and North Ludlow Beamish are among the obscure nineteenth-century authors who promoted the idea of a Norse landing in the United States, and William Gilmore Simms, George Perkins Marsh, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John Greenleaf Whittier among the better-known literary figures who wrote novels, poems, and histories on the theme.The last two chapters are a study of Native American oral history in search of tales that might record encounters with the Norse nearly a thousand years ago. Kolodny is admirably honest in not clinging to her hypothesis after she fails to find evidence to confirm it. She reveals how several pieces of evidence once used to prove a Viking landing—such as the petroglyphs on Dighton Rock, alongside the Taunton River in Berkley, Massachusetts; a stone tower in Newport, Rhode Island, that was in fact built in the seventeenth century; a skeleton unearthed in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1832; and the rune stones dug up near Alexandria, Minnesota, in 1898 and at Spirit Pond, Maine, in the 1970s—all proved to be willful misinterpretations or hoaxes.Among the Mi’kmaq tales Kolodny explores the most suggestive is “The Dream of the White Robe and the Floating Island,” told by Josiah Jeremy and recorded by the Baptist missionary Charles Godfrey Leland in 1869. Kolodny shows how Leland tried to find “a pre-Columbian nordic influence” in the tales of the Mi’kmaq culture hero Glooskap. Leland also sought to dispel the influence of earlier Catholic missionaries such as Chrestien LeClercq. This particular tale, like other first-contact prophecy tales among Native Americans, suggests that the Natives foretold the coming of European invaders yet were unable to turn them away as the Skraelings did the Norse. Hence, as Kolodny points out, these tales are “not easily dated, nor do we even know when they were most widely circulated[:]…prophecy tales are not merely the representations of cultural continuity; they are themselves the carriers of that continuity” (294).Ultimately, the tales told by Algonquian peoples and the sagas of the Norsemen are revealed not to be contrasting accounts of a single violent confrontation between two cultures. Instead, they are snapshot versions of evolving oral histories. The Norse did not seek to subjugate or even trade profitably with the “Skraelings” they encountered. The Algonquian do not clearly distinguish among different Europeans they may have met in different times and places. The notion of a first contact, of a mythopoeic landfall such as that of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, is a modern desire that comports poorly with the sources that have endured from ancient storytellers. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 111, Number 4May 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/674580 Views: 703Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.