In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery by Annette Kolodny (review)

Annette Kolodny's In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery presents a detailed and varied account of the supposed "precontact" period in North America. Relying on an impressive methodology that attends to scholarship in archaeology, anthropology, American history, and ethnology, Kolodny carefully argues that the "first written narratives about Europe's encounter with the North American landscape and with its Native peoples" are two medieval Icelandic tales, The Greenlanders' Saga and Eirik the Red's Saga (49). These two tales, more commonly known as the Vinland Sagas, require us to revise how we approach North American literary history. Rather than begin with the contact narratives of Christopher Columbus and Bartholomé de las Casas, we would be better served, and more accurate in our accounts, if we turned to the Vinland Sagas and—one of Kolodny's more significant claims—to the petroglyphs and orally transmitted tales of Native peoples.

In Search of First Contact thus challenges the "old belief that Native peoples in North America were isolates" (22) and suggests instead that by the time Europeans visited in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the people they encountered were in fact savvy traders, a far cry from the "Native wonder" described in European accounts (263). Yet it is with this discrepancy that In Search of First Contact finds its focus. Announcing in her prologue that "this book is overwhelmingly about stories" (11), Kolodny clearly articulates her book's stakes: "how we shape and reshape our stories about discovery and first contact reveal how we are simultaneously shaping and reshaping our understanding of who we think we are as Americans" (11).

In Search of First Contact indeed focuses on the stories Anglo-Americans told throughout the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries about "first contact." While scholarship about the Norse circulated in American newspapers and magazines in the 1790s (113), the Vinland Sagas gained cultural relevancy with the publication of Carl Christian Rafn's Antiquitates Americanoe (1837) and its shorter companion piece America Discovered in the Tenth Century (1838). Each work not only included an extensive summary of the Vinland Sagas, they also identified the Massachusetts Bay and the Narragansett region of Rhode Island to be the geographic locations of Norse landfalls (107). Positively reviewed by American presses, Rafn's work was embraced by an American public already eager to discover a "historical narrative in which British origins were only one among many other origins" (28) as well as a "rationale for removing Indians from their traditional lands" (31). As Kolodny concisely states, "In the face of multiple pre-Columbian contacts and arrivals, the continent had never solely belonged to the Indians in the first place" (31).

Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, Anglo-Americans consistently returned to the Vinland Sagas as a way of producing an "American national narrative" (102). The sagas were particularly popular with New England poets like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell; these authors, among others, represented the "Northmen" as New England's "kindred ancestors and historical precursors" (150). By the late nineteenth century a "Viking Revival" was well underway: "newly self-made Gilded Age multimillionaires" sought out Celtic styled "heirlooms" to demonstrate their "pedigree and old wealth" (210). These avowals of Nordic or Viking heritage revealed the main draw of the Vinland Sagas—what Kolodny describes as a type of plasticity that allowed Anglo-Americans to write and rewrite their prehistory as they argued over "who really belongs here" (14).

In its masterful account of the Vinland Saga's circulation throughout North American literary history, In Search of First Contact offers one lesson, among many, that particularly resonates. Our failure to recognize the importance of the Vinland Sagas as potential first contact texts is...