Unfortunately, much of the nineteenth-century debate centered not on Leif but on the location of Vinland (which always seemed to be more or less in the author’s backyard, usually in New England) and on the authenticity of such spurious monuments as the Newport Tower, built not by Vikings but by a colonial governor of Rhode Island in about 1670.20 The Tower figured in Longfellow’s 1841 poem “The Skeleton in Armour,” mainly inspired by another spurious Viking artifact, the skeleton (of an Indian, actually) unearthed in 1832 in Fall River, Massachusetts.21 The poem, mainly spoken by the skeleton itself, tells how a Viking abducted a princess but was blown off course (to America) by a hurricane:
As with his wings aslant,
Sails the fierce cormorant,
Seeking some rocky haunt,
With his prey laden,
So toward the open main,
Beating to sea again,
Through the wild hurricane Bore I the maiden. (39)
This Viking erected the tower “for [his] lady’s bower,” but she dies in childbirth, so he buries her under the tower, then wanders off (to Fall River, presumably) and kills himself by falling on his spear. He ascends, apparently to Valhalla:
Thus, seamed with many scars Bursting these prison bars,
Up to its native stars
My soul ascended!
There from the flowing bowl Deep drinks the warrior’s soul,
Skoal! to the Northland! skoal!
—Thus the tale ended. (41)
The poem was illustrated in a wall painting by Walter Crane as part of the decoration for a Newport mansion called Vinland, which also included stained-glass windows designed by the William Morris firm (see below).22
Similarly, John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem called “The Norsemen” (1841), which took its cue from “the Bradford statue,” a chunk of stone that had in fact been chiseled in colonial times.23 It was found along the Merrimack River in Massachusetts. Whittier asks in Blakean mode:
Who from its bed of primal rock First wrenched thy dark, unshapely block? Whose hand, of curious skill untaught, Thy rude and savage outline wrought?
The poet is transported in a dream to the Viking times of its purported making:
But hard!—from wood and rock flung back,
What sound come up the Merrimac?
What sea-worn barks are those which throw The light spray from each rushing prow?
Have they not in the North Sea’s blast Bowed to the waves the straining mast?
Their frozen sails the low, pale sun Of Thule’s night has shone upon;
Flapped by the sea-wind’s gusty sweep Round icy drift, and headland steep.
A sound of smitten shields I hear,
Keeping a harsh and fitting time To Saga’s chant, and Runic rhyme;
Such lays as Zetland’s [Shetland’s] Scald has sung.
Whittier shows at least that not only British Victorians were inspired by the skaldic muse (on which, see Wawn’s The Vikings and the Victorians).
The Vinland voyages themselves (rather than their dubious artifacts) had given rise to verse as early as 1819, when Scottish poet James Montgomery in “Greenland: A Poem, in Five Cantos” spurns the heroic and monkish muses:
Rather the muse would stretch a mightier wing,
Of a new world the earliest dawn to sing How,—long ere Science, in a dream of thought,
Earth’s younger daughter to Columbus brought,
And sent him, like the Faerie Prince, in quest Of that “bright vestal thron’d in the west.”
—Greenland’s bold sons, by instinct, sallied forth On barks, like icebergs drifting from the north,
Cross’d without magnet undiscover’d seas. (4.145-53)
Of these Viking adventurers, only Leif Eriksson’s German crewman Tyrker is mentioned by name; just before he finds grapes, he crosses a river “Swarming with alligator-shoals” (4.169). Montgomery thus imagines Leif and company as discovering in effect all of North and South America.24
The New Englander James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) wrote a poem called “The Voyage to Vinland” (1850-1868), which however mostly passes over Leif to muse on Bjarni Herjolfsson as a figure of lost opportunity and Gudrid as prophetess for the New Land.25 Gudrid’s stanzas are alliterative and echo the Eddic cosmological poem Voluspa, finding the Twilight of the
Gods and the rebirth of the White Christ (as he was called by Scandinavian missionaries) in the New World:
Looms there the New Land:
Locked in the shadow Long the gods shut it,
Niggards of newness They, the o’er-old.26
Sidney Lanier, a native of Georgia, drew on the Vinland voyages for his compendious historical poem “Psalm of the West,” completed in 1876 in time for the nation’s centennial:
Then Leif, bold son of Eric the Red,
To the South of the West doth flee—
Past slaty Helluland is sped,
Past Markland’s woody lea,
Till round about fair Vinland’s head,
Where Taunton helps the sea.
The Norseman calls, the anchor falls,
The mariners hurry a-strand,
They wassail with fore-drunken skals Where prophet wild grapes stand,
They lift the Leifsbooth’s hasty walls,
They stride about the land—
New England, thee! (p. 121)
The mention of the Taunton River (in Massachusetts) is no doubt due to the Dighton Picture Rock located nearby, another of the (spurious) New England Viking antiquities mentioned by Rafn.27 Leif’s booths are the temporary homes he built, mentioned in the Vinland sagas, and now sometimes identified with the buildings excavated in L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland.
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