Scandinavian Archives, Transatlantic Historical Culture, and Carl Christian Rafn’s Attempt to Rewrite American History in the Antebellum U.S

Abstract

In the 1837 publication of Antiquitates Americanae by the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries in Copenhagen, Carl Christian Rafn argued that indisputable evidence proved that Norse mariners had arrived in North America around the turn of the 11th century, making them—not Columbus and his crew—the first white people to colonize the hemisphere. For historical societies and intrigued readers in the U.S., evidence about Norse settlement around the turn of the millennium could stretch the chronological, geographical, and dramatic scale of the national history that was being actively archived and narrated in this period. Americans eager to be seen as trans-Atlantic intellectual peers seriously analyzed the evidence and narrative promoted by Rafn, but their ambivalence about both the precision of the evidence and the implications of the narrative ultimately led them to marginalize the theory of Norse discovery by the time of the Civil War. In constructing their archives and historical narratives, Americans were drawn into such trans-Atlantic intellectual currents and foreign nationalist historical projects as the theory of Norse discovery, but they also navigated and redirected these currents according to their own conceptions of what belonged within the nation’s archival record and what their nation’s historical narrative should be.