[image_credit]Wikimedia Commons[/image_credit][image_caption]The Leif Erikson memorial on the grounds of the Minnesota State Capitol, St. Paul.[/image_caption]
Leif Erikson has long served as a symbol for Minnesota’s Scandinavian American community. According to Icelandic sagas, Erikson led a Norse expedition to North America in 1000 CE and established a settlement likely in present-day Newfoundland, Canada. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Scandinavian Americans across the United States and in Minnesota claimed Erikson as the original “discoverer” of the Americas. As part of their long effort to claim the mantle of discovery from Christopher Columbus and Italian Americans, they often proposed building monuments to Erikson.
In 1891, a Leif Erikson Monument Association formed in Minneapolis with the dual purpose of erecting a monument to Erikson and establishing a holiday in his honor. The group was connected with a different Leif Erikson Monument Association in Chicago. Together, the two organizations influenced the decision to create an exhibition on the “Norse Discovery of America” at the 1893 World’s Fair—also known as the World’s Columbian Exposition—that celebrated Columbus’s discovery of the Americas. This association failed to erect a monument in Minnesota.
In March of 1931, only seven months before a Christopher Columbus memorial was dedicated on the Minnesota State Capitol grounds, a subsequent Leif Erikson Monument Association formed with the purpose of erecting a memorial to Leif Erikson on a nearby site. The organization was affiliated with the larger Leif Erikson Memorial Association of America and was formed partially in response to the Columbus memorial. The founding of the association coincided with the Minnesota State Legislature’s declaration of Leif Erikson Day on October 9 and Columbus Day on October 12 as official state holidays.
Beyond working to erect a statue, the Leif Erikson Monument Association was an active Scandinavian American cultural institution in Minnesota. Its members co-sponsored the Twin Cities’s celebrations of Leif Erikson Day, arranged Scandinavian American cultural events, and hosted Norwegian dignitaries traveling to Minnesota. They selected the Norwegian American sculptor John Karl Daniels to design the memorial.
After Daniels had created a model of the proposed statue, the Leif Erikson Monument Association began a fundraising campaign in April 1937 that accompanied a four-day institute at the University of Minnesota on Scandinavian cultures. The featured lecture series discussed Norse voyages to the Americas that predated Columbus. The association announced its primary fundraising effort in October 1939, with the goal of raising $25,000. Workers broke ground on the memorial site on May 27, 1947.
The dedication ceremony for the Leif Erikson Memorial was part of the Leif Erikson Day celebration held in St. Paul on October 9, 1949. An estimated 3,000 to 5,000 people attended the thirteen-foot-tall bronze statue’s unveiling on the State Capitol grounds. The event was a broad celebration of U.S.-Norwegian relations. Six months prior, both Norway and the United States had become two of the twelve original members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) — an international military alliance designed to protect member states from potential threats from the Soviet Union. As the only NATO member sharing a border with the Soviet Union, Norway was viewed as particularly vulnerable. A delegation of Norwegian diplomats — including the Norwegian Ambassador to the United States, Wilhelm Morgenstierne, and Norway’s Minister of Defense, Jens C. Hauge—traveled to Minnesota for the unveiling. Their comments at the unveiling and to the press stressed the importance of NATO and Norway’s dependence on American military strength.
The dedication proceedings identified Erikson’s purported discovery of North America and the role of Norwegian immigrants in Minnesota as precursors to the United States’s and Norway’s new alliance. To symbolize these connections, Ambassador Morgenstierne presented a Viking broadsword dated between 800 and 1000 C.E. to the president of the Minnesota Historical Society, Bergmann Richards. The sword remains on long-term loan to the Minnesota Historical Society from the people of Norway.
The memorial features Erikson facing westward atop a twelve-foot-tall pedestal. Inside the pedestal lies a copy of Voyage to Vineland, an account of Erikson’s journey to North America. The inscription gives Erikson the title “Discoverer of America,” which historians and lawmakers have since criticized as promoting an inaccurate myth that erases Indigenous people. In 2015, legislation was introduced in the Minnesota House of Representatives to change the engraving to read “Leif Erikson Landed in America, 1000 A.D..” The bill did not pass.
For more information on this topic, check out the original entry on MNopedia.
Erickson came to America long before Columbus, but also did not discover anything since there were already people living here.
Also, unlike Columbus, Erickson did not sell 9 and 10 year old girls into sex slavery. Or at least he never wrote about it like Columbus did.
https://www.vox.com/2014/10/13/6957875/christopher-columbus-murderer-tyrant-scoundrel
It seems more historically accurate to memorialize Leif Erickson as the first European known to have reached North America.
And that right there is the ideal, true, most accurate inscription to be used on the statue’s pedestal:
Leif Erickson, the first European known to have reached North America.
There is no evidence that Erikson did any serious harm when he was here. Columbus and those who followed stole the land, looted the wealth, raped, enslaved and murdered the occupants and destroyed the cultures. While Vikings may have been bad boys in Europe, the conquistadors were far, far worse in the “New World.” That they used Christianity to justify breaking many of the Ten Commandments is appalling.
There is also no evidence to the contrary, either. For all we know he could have been a bandit like Columbus.
The Norse settlement (or settlements – there may have been two) did not last long enough for any serious damage to be done. No one is sure why the settlements folded, but one theory is that the native population drove them out.
So this was sort of the Scandinavians telling the Italians that my Dad can beat up your Dad?
We Irish are not so insecure, we don’t feel the need to brag about our self-evident greatness.
Well like him or not, the voyages of Christopher Columbus resulted in continuous settlement of the North American Continent by European’s. The voyages of Leif Erickson did not (that we know of). History was full of ‘bad’ people, it doesn’t mean they didn’t create history.
It does mean we shouldn’t celebrate them.