Deadly colonialist fables: what dueling origin myths from the 19th century tell us about ourselves.

• Author: Sturgis, Amy H.
• Position: In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery - Book review

In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery, by Annette Kolodny, Duke University Press, 448 pages, $27.95

IN THE EARLIEST years of the second millennium, Norsemen sailed from Greenland to North America in several waves. They explored the fertile coastline and some of its inland rivers, harvested lumber and grapes, and built camps. They also met, traded with, killed, were killed by, and on the whole failed spectacularly to communicate with Native Americans. We don't know the specific identity of the native population(s) with whom the explorers made contact or the exact location of the Norse landings and settlement--including the place they named Vinland, which likely was somewhere in present-day Canada and not the United States. But one thing is certain: Christopher Columbus "discovered" nothing when he came ashore in the so-called New World, except that he was lost.

In her thought-provoking new study, In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery, literary critic Annette Kolodny looks beyond Christopher Columbus and 1492 to wrestle with the question of the earliest immigrants to North America and what they found. Her search leads her to "contact texts"--including medieval Iceland's The Greenlanders' Saga and Eirik the Red's Saga as well as folklore and related evidence from members of the Wabanaki Confederacy (Eastern Algonquian-speaking Native Americans located in Canada and northern New England)--for what they tell us about Norse contact with Native America half a millennium prior to the Columbian encounter.

If Kolodny's work did nothing but set the Norse and native texts into conversation with each other, summarize the previous scholarship on them, and confirm what now is accepted and what remains in question, it would be an achievement for which historians, archeologists, anthropologists, and ethnologists, as well as her fellow literary critics, should thank her. But that is barely the tip of the book's all-too-chilling iceberg.

Kolodny's primary undertaking tracing the way in which the idea of a "Viking past" in the United States has informed U.S. politics and policies. The result is a nuanced, compelling, and frankly disturbing case study of how the national origin stories we tell ourselves can inspire and then justify the worst impulses of human nature, often assisted by the...