The Lure of Vikings, The Lure of Home

by KARL STEEL

(we're in the midst of a series at ITM about diversity and (medieval) academia! First post is below, by Michelle Warren on "Diversity and #medievaltwitter." Definitely read that first, and please keep coming back to see how the series develops. Consider what follows a bit of ancillary programming, part II of my recent post on Vikings and Heritage)

A couple of days ago, World News Daily gave us this: “USA: Viking Ship Discovered Near Mississippi River.” While they admit that “all news articles contained within worldnewsdailyreport.com are fiction, and presumably fake news,” there’s nothing in the article that smells of satire. It’s just a lie, or just Tabloid journalism, without any of the winking that would make it a joke, illustrated with mislabeled images of an eleventh-century Danish longship, a sword from the Port an Eilean Mhòir ship burial, and, lending gravitas, a photo of Professor Nicolò Marchetti from the University of Bologna (billed here as the invented James Milbury of the University of Memphis). For what it’s worth, Marchetti is, in fact, an archaeologist, although not one much concerned with Nordic boats, imaginary or otherwise.

World News Daily’s “presumably fake news” is presumably just looking for web traffic. It’s succeeded, outrageously. When I last checked, the article reports 1402 retweets and 283,621 Facebook interactions. Assuming that’s true, that’s a lot, even for World Net News: by comparison, “Pakistan: Cannabis Discovered in Prehistoric Tomb” got only 201 retweets and 17,719 Facebook interactions. People love Vikings. The question is why?

Searching for quotations of the article gives one, obvious answer: I found the article reprinted on “occidentalenclave,” “a community for Ethnic Westerners,” on Stormfront, a (the?) preeminent white supremacist website, and on what, if Google translate may be trusted, is an anti-immigration, anti-gay rights blog from Sweden.

The comments on World News Daily itself give a more nuanced answer: the first praises Odin and trashes newfangled religions like “Christianity,” and unlike “Jews, Muslims, Hindus, [and] Buddhists.” Conversation heats up fast, with the community ensuring that our Odinist understand that Christianity predates Islam. Fair point, but they miss why the claim was made at all. One commentor below suggests why: “Well, being able to trace my ancestors back all the way to the Vikings, and knowing many others around here who can do the same, I can testify to the fact, there`s nothing we would like more then fight the muslims out of our country! They are the scourge of our time.”

What’s at stake is heritage: a sense of home, of belonging, of feeling the present isn’t enough in itself, and that the past offers a purity to cure the ills of the present. If the present is one where the left forces diversity on otherwise pure nations – or so goes the fear – then the white supremacist cure is to discover the originary, lost purity, before the imposition of a weak, Semitic faith and before mixture of any type (hence, perhaps, the praise of Viking rape in the deep comments: what’s so vulnerable as desire mixed with love instead of violence? next day edit: this is a point that will need to be leaned on a bit, but what's suggested here is that the fantasists think of sex as a way to impose their will, violently, indifferent to or against the consent of the person they're having sex with). What they want is autonomy and the barbarian freedom that goes with it, while they bind themselves to race fantasies and their demand for purity and their nervousness about disorder. What they want, in America especially, this land thronged with immigrants, is to feel at home. And they want to feel that they got here on purpose. They want to feel that their home is under assault, which explains the love in these legends of Norse discovery for "Indian massacres" (like the one "recorded" on the Kensington Runestone, or "reported" in the World New Daily site). Vikings in America, rather than, say, the Vikings in the Orkneys, give these people the simultaneous mastery of violence and sense of victimhood that they crave, with results whose nasty effects we can witness, most recently, in Ferguson, Missouri.

Now, I’m not being entirely fair to all the commentators at World News Daily. The site is only accidentally, I think, in cahoots with the homesickness of the white supremacists; and some of its commentators thankfully point out that “we’re all from Africa. So wish what you may.” Nonetheless, the site’s picked up eagerly by the white supremacists and by people who may not be aware of their own alliances. My goal is to go deep into why, for an audience of nonmedievalists.

My secondary goal: Annette Kolodny and Geraldine Barnes have both produced very fine work on the cultural afterlife of the Norse in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglophone writing. However, I find them both too optimistic. Towards the end of In Search of First Contact, Kolodny writes that “in contrast to the celebratory effusions of the nineteenth century, most Americans today read the sagas as the tacit preamble to a tragic and very American tale.” Meanwhile, the Viking missions to Mars displace “the old paradigm of race with a prideful image of national technological supremacy.” Barnes’ contribution to the “Medievalism of Nostalgia” special issue of postmedieval, "Nostalgia, Medievalism and the Vínland Voyages,” similarly observes that “the darker side of the story – the consequences of European expansionism…preoccupy contemporary writers” on the sagas.

I don’t doubt that that’s true, in that limited milieu in which the Viking Missions feel contemporary and for that group, comprising Thomas Pynchon, Jane Smiley, and William Vollmann, graced with the label of “contemporary writers." They’re certainly better than, say, Ottilie Adeline Liljencrantz, but I’m not convinced that Liljencrantz is all that much better than the many, many fans of that World New Daily fraud. 283,621 Facebook interactions! We need to pay more attention, and as wonderful as queer asynchrony can be, and as foundational as asynchrony is to any considered experience of time, we need renewed attention to the desire to heal the sense of displacement.

With that in mind, here’s part two of my paper on Vikings and heritage, which is, confusedly, the paper’s very opening. Thank you, thank you a million times to Michael Collins for sharing Historic Newfoundland with me at Kalamazoo 2014:

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The very first lines of Historic Newfoundland, a tourist brochure first printed in 1955, are “Come to Newfoundland! It is the cradle of white civilization in North America.” I quote from the second printing of its 1968 revised edition, published in 1969; still more recent printings exist, running into the late 1980s, though as yet I don't know if they also begin this way. The brochure’s author has the unlikely name of Leo English, a former Newfoundland school inspector, deeply interested in the discoveries of Jon Cabot; from 1947 to 1960, he ran the Newfoundland museum. Writing in a Newfoundland that had been, in 1949, recently absorbed into Canada, English obviously aims to argue that Canadian history proper and indeed that of North America began in Canada's newest acquisition. Come to the east, the brochure cries out; come east and meet your ancestors!

Or, rather, meet them in the middle, as they sail west. Here's the brochure's cover: a Viking ship, complete with a dragon-headed prow and warriors outfitted in horned helmets. As soon as we pick it up, we’re in the world of fantasy, with the wrong helmets and the wrong boat, a warship instead of the mercantile knorr more likely used by Newfoundland’s Norse arrivals. Most charitably, this is just good marketing: Vikings are exciting. It's the same logic that justifies calling a recent textbook on Old Norse Viking Language and decorating it with its own dragon ship.

But starting Historic Newfoundland this way also tells a story about where and how "history" starts: with the freedom of the open sea, and with a violence that can count as historical. We have been called upon to identify with the Norse not just as settlers or fishers, but as Vikings, which means identifying with them raiders, thieves, and killers, and then to erase these deeds as crimes by calling them the founding acts of “white civilization.” This is what Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" called a "constituting violence," because this violence constitutes itself after the fact as legal. Law and civilization and history all start here, in a violence that retroactively erases its foundational illegitimacy.

As in many accounts of America, what this violence erases is nothing, as the erasure has happened already by the time the brochure’s opened. Notably, its second section, not its first, concerns the Newfoundlanders already present when the Norse showed up. English describes these people, perhaps the Beothuk, as "strange," "remain[ing] in their primitive barbarism," that is, without any possibility of entering historical time, and as decorated in "trinkets," worthless trash, abased rather than beautified by their culture. The Beothuk are in Newfoundland only because they have been "pursued [there] by other warlike hordes across the American plains." Losers as soon as we meet them, having run as far as they could, Newfoundland is their end, just as it is the beginning of North American white civilization. Out of time, the Beothuk “vanish,” victims to famine, to Mohawks, disease, and the “white man,” whose arrival seals what English calls their “fate.” Fate, you’ll remember, is one of the most distinguishing concepts of the Norse sagas: characters feel their doom coming, and know there is nothing they can do to avoid it, as if they were conscious of being bound into a story bound to be told repeatedly. In Historic Newfoundland, though, fate is what the first Americans suffer, while the Vikings, their first European enemies, the masters of fate, full of life and warrior vigor, inaugurate history.

This is one way that heritage starts. According to English and his ilk, when the Norse arrive in Newfoundland, they bring with them a heritage worth the name. The brochure tries to stir up attachment to a place and to a race, inviting Canada to return to its “cradle” to find what it really is. Like all heritage sites, this one’s embattled – a baby is a fragile thing, after all – and connected to the present, since the child, as the cliché goes, is the father of the man, still present in the father so long as the father – “white civilization,” in this case – still lives and still keeps up his family obligations. What Historic Newfoundland offers, then, is attachment, whiteness, and, with its Vikings, freedom, three points I’ll consider in turn for my contribution to this conference on “heritage.”

Bad Heritage, Immediacy, and Vikings

by KARL STEEL

Please read this beautiful post below, on collaboration, death, and beauty, first, if you haven't yet.

Maybe you saw an article recently about renewed attempts to change the unpleasant name of a clutch of two houses and a farm in the Loire Valley: here in French, and here in English. The name? "La mort aux juifs," that is, "Death to the Jews." The mayor of Courtemaux, to whose jurisdiction La mort aux Juifs belongs, refuses, saying that it was already tried 20 years ago ("Un conseil municipal précédent, il y a au moins vingt ans, avait déjà refusé de débaptiser ce lieu-dit"), and, anyway, the name has aura of heritage:

C'est ridicule, ce nom a toujours existé. Personne n'en veut aux juifs, bien sûr....Pourquoi changer un nom qui remonte au Moyen Age, ou à plus loin encore ? Il faut respecter ces vieux noms.

It's ridiculous! This name has always existed. No one has anything against the Jews, of course ....Why change a name that dates back to the Middle Ages, or even further? We have to respect these old names.

One of these claims may be true: for what it’s worth, the name does appear on an eighteenth-century Cassini map (pictured), and it’s recorded as early as the seventeenth century. The hunch that Jean le Bon may be responsible for the name strikes me as probably correct.

The story caught my eye because of the matter of heritage. Next month, I'll be speaking at a symposium on Heritage in Transcultural Contexts. I'll be talking about the North American afterlife of the Norse encounter with the Americas. I've read (Brooklyn College alum!) Annette Kolodny's In Search of First Contact, and some other good work (Frakes; Mancini; and our own Jonathan Hsy's Kzoo14 paper on disability and the sagas).

Why the love for these people, generally, and disturbingly, called "Vikings" (despite their being on what was, clearly, a trading rather than raiding mission)? Why the frequent references to them as "blue-eyed" (here or here or here or here) or "yellow-haired" (here)? Why the emphasis on the Nordic freedom in the democratic Thing, and why the argument that the Norse were free of the despotism of Catholicism? Why the sense that North American history, proper, begins with the arrival of the Northmen? And why the emphasis on Leif Erikson, far from the most important figure in the Icelandic family sagas?

The answers may all be obvious, but remember that I'm speaking to a crowd of nonmedievalists. My interest will be in the more negative aspects of "heritage," in part my own (given my own family roots in midwest Scandinaviana: whatever the other lines, my mother tended to identify as Swedish, and my father Norwegian), and in part that of White America, especially in the North. I'll be complicating questions of time, belonging, and, I hope, whose violence gets to count as "historical," and who gets to count as a victim.

With that, here are my initial efforts to frame the question:

The only unarguably authentic archaeological remains of the Norse in the Americas is on a Northern tip of Newfoundland, at L’anse aux Meadows, discovered in 1960, and now designated as one of 1007 UNESCO World Heritage Sites (but also see). It is one of 17 in Canada, 7 of which, including this one, memorialize a specifically human activity or culture. UNESCO's designation guidelines explain how heritage officially works: primarily, items must have an "outstanding universal value," "so exceptional as to transcend national boundaries and to be of common importance for present and future generations of all humanity." I am, however, interested in the local rather than the universal qualities of heritage. While heritage sites may need to claim a universal interest, a heritage designation requires a choice and a boundary, a separation from universal generality: heritage sites exist and indeed justify themselves first only through particularity. I'll offer four working proposals on this point.

First, marking a particular moment and location as having heritage at least implicitly excludes inauthentic elements that might contaminate that heritage. Heritage identification therefore requires purification. A heritage requires identifying some groups or development as invasive, whether invasive species or bad migrants or nonnative architecture. I'll just note here the irony of a heritage designation for the Norse, the great invaders, and perhaps the most fearsome of Northern Europe's "bad migrants."

Second, heritage identifies a particular segment in time as the antique moment worth preservation. Generally, antiqueness provides its own justification. What counts as “antique” depends on the historical consciousness of the defenders or even the generators of heritage. It may be sufficient that the site or practice seems “old,” and that it be thought to have just emerged organically or communally, without any particular choice being made to get it started.

Here's two examples of how this works, selected as representative, universal examples rather than for their particularity. The first is from a case in Florida of a mother accused of kidnapping her own daughter: she's a neo-Confederate and gun nut, fond of taking pictures of her two-year-old with boxes of ammunition. When a Family Court judge challenged her on this, she explained "We have a heritage; we have a tradition." The language comes from images like these (FLAG IMAGE), which I poached from, of all places, americanheritagecommittee.com.

To say something has heritage is to place it outside argument. It can't be reasoned with; it must be respected. Its existence is its own argument. And its existence is an existence across time that erases time as a succession of differences.

Second example: recently, in the Loire valley, efforts are being made again to change the name of a clutch of two houses and a farm to something less objectionable than La Mort aux Juifs, “Kill the Jews.” The responsible party, the mayor of Courtemaux, refuses, saying that it was already tried 20 years ago, and, anyway, the name has the aura of heritage: "It's ridiculous! This name has always existed. No one has anything against the Jews, of course ....Why change a name that dates back to the Middle Ages, or even further? We have to respect these old names." So far as the mayor's concerned, no one can be responsible; rather, the blame is laid on the Middle Ages, which is to say, the case has been passed on to another judge, that of Time Immemorial, and Time Immemorial has judged the case as one might expect.

I’ll propose that few times are more Immemorial than the medieval. This era, whenever it was, tends to function as paradoxically older than both the modern and classical eras, since, at least for Western Europe, it's the oldest time that could conceivably still be attached to the present. Other times might be forgotten, but the Middle Ages still offers a connection. The Middle Ages, after all, is where the moderns like to imagine their national, religious, and linguistic boundaries arose (here; here; and, without any endorsement, here). And, at least to nonmedievalists, it's a time that is less known than both the modern and the classical eras: who knows what people were up to in those dark ages? Generated in particular sites, without the universal claims of the classics and the moderns, the medieval tends to stand for low rather than high culture, local rather than international tastes, organic rather than cultivated habits, tradition rather than choice, and at once as a point of origin and a sign of a forgotten foundations. And it's all the more sure for that, as the forgotten origin has the ontological reality of things that are “just there.” It's where people, some people, find their roots.

Third, a “heritage site” is a site it is at once distant, as a foundational moment in the past, and also here, in the present, identifiably connected with this past point to such an extent that it can barely be separated from it. This is the key temporal paradox of “heritage”: not only that the heritage point has to be selected arbitrarily -- frozen, purified, and walled off -- but also that the heritage has to have existed at some point in the past, but that it still has to be here, having repeated itself with minimal change across time and space. A heritage site offers immediacy. Connection. A heritage site offers an origin without a difference, or even an origin without an origin. If an origin requires a break, it requires some relation to what had been there before, which in turn might be offered up just as legitimately as a heritage site. The ideal heritage must emerge without this marked break, organically, naturally, and inevitably. What had been there before must just vanish or give way, like the Native Americans before the white man (note: not a position I'm endorsing! this is a reference to an earlier part of the paper, not included in the blog yet), while the heritage itself is, again, ideally, not so much selected as just felt.

My final point in this abstract tour of the problem of "heritage" is that a heritage site purports to offer immediate and authentic access to the uniquenesss of a particular heritage. That is, a heritage site is a non-reproducible, originary site, distinct from the mass-produced simulacra of transnational capitalism. The heritage site, being singular, cannot be exchanged. A heritage designation protects ways of life against lifestyles, enjoyment against exploitation. Visitors to a heritage site are able, for a time, to actually be somewhere by being in a place and time that cannot be found anywhere else, one that the modern world has “passed by.” By getting out of sync with the present, visitors to a heritage site can feel more connected. In this sense, heritage is about marketing, scarcity, and nostalgia, and also about the preservation or generation of community in the face of the increasing obsolescence of small communities.

Consider the Kensington Runestone, discovered in 1898, a hoax (for example) witnessing to Nordic, Christian exploration of Minnesota in 1362, and to the massacre these Norsemen suffered at the hands of the natives, a point whose obvious implications I'll come around to in more detail later. I can briefly mention the equally obvious matters of ethnic pride: the stone was turned up, and maybe produced, by a Swedish stonemason during a period of particularly intense Scandinavian immigration into the American Midwest, so the stone’s discovery is a kind of beacon to Scandinavians that they, more than any American immigrant group, belong in the Midwest and by extension to America. The continued pride -- or performance of pride -- gives the small Minnesota towns associated with the runestone a continued reason for existence in an era of intensified small-town poverty (cf 1; 2): thus Kensington Minnesota, population 292, features an Our Lady of the Runestone Catholic Church, located on Runestone Drive, while nearby Alexandria, Minnesota, population 11,000, devotes a museum to the runestone itself, and greets visitors with Big Ole, an outsized statue of a Viking.

[so! roadmap: what happens before this is a discussion of a Newfoundland Tourist brochure that calls Newfoundland the "cradle of white civilization in the Americas." The brochure, produced shortly after Newfoundland was absorbed into Canada, and printed at least into the late 1960s, makes a claim that Canadian civilization proper begins in Newfoundland. This leads to the question of heritage. What follows the above is a discussion of how the Ice/Greenlanders in Eric the Red's Saga and the Greenland Saga would have thought of themselves (spoiler: not as "white"!), and then, finally, a discussion of the weird time of Viking Heritage, which is at once an obligation to foster "white America" and also a promise of liberty, freedom, and openness to the future. This point will finally intersect with the weird question of "agency." My enemy here, and I'll make this as obvious as possible, is white supremacism. Current reading? Dinshaw How Soon is Now. About 60 pages in.]