In the summer of 1898, a Swedish immigrant named Olof Ohman uncovered on his Minnesota farm a stone tablet which appeared to have been carved with runic letters and the date 1362. Although the so-called Kensington Rune Stone was immediately dismissed by academics as a fake, the object soon gained fame not only in Minnesota but across the United States, as supposedly incontrovertible evidence that it was the Vikings, not Christopher Columbus, who were the true “discoverers” of America. David M. Krueger's brisk and lively study traces the peculiar career of the Rune Stone, exploring a century's worth of debates over its validity and significance in order to illuminate its role in controversies over race, region, and nation from the closing of the frontier through the Atomic Age and up to the present.

To the growing Scandinavian population of the early twentieth-century Upper Mid-west, and especially to its leading propagandist, the Norwegian immigrant and amateur historian Hjalmar Holand, the stone played a major part in their quest to simultaneously maintain their cultural ties to northern Europe and develop an unassailably American identity. To Holand and his supporters, the presence of the stone challenged the prevailing historiographical orthodoxy of the era, which depicted the East Coast as the true founding location of the nation, and the English Puritans as its original white settlers. That the runic inscription supposedly commemorated the peaceful and pious intent of these fourteenth-century Norse voyagers, some of whom were allegedly murdered in a Native American attack, allowed the Ohman farm to become “an American sacred space” at which “the nation's true founding fathers” (12) made their blood sacrifice. This tale of suffering and redemption among virile but pacific Vikings appealed to white American readers who thrilled to tales of heroism which portrayed white settlers as benevolent, and their claims to the land as justified. It also served as a sort of balm to Minnesotan settlers who retained terrifying memories of the 1862 Dakota War, and who wanted their children and grandchildren to appreciate the long history of frontier struggles. In the 1920s and 1930s, according to Krueger, the stone emerged as a “Midwestern Plymouth Rock” (69) which generated regional pride and attracted tourists at a time when the Upper Mid-west was suffering not only a prolonged economic downturn but, via Sinclair Lewis's novel Main Street, a cultural reappraisal which encouraged American urbanites to view Mid-western small towns not as repositories of virtue and community spirit but as dull, conformist, and intellectually limited. In the course of the Cold War, the stone became at least briefly not just a regional but also a national icon, due largely to the efforts of Catholic leaders such as John Ireland, the Bishop of St. Paul, who wanted to prove the deep patriotism of American Catholics and to emphasize the supposed godliness of American culture in contrast with the atheism of its Communist foes. Krueger ends his narrative in the present, when, despite the increasing ethnic, racial, and religious diversity of the population of Minnesota and its region, the stone continues not only to function as a tourist attraction and “to generate group pride, but also to demarcate who does and does not belong” (155) in the imagined community of Scandinavian Catholic Mid-westerners.

Krueger does a laudable job of placing the story of the stone in a variety of temporal and topical contexts, illuminating its significance to popular narratives of westward expansion, American Catholicism, and anxieties regarding Communism. A few points, however, call for more thorough analysis, rather than mere assertion: it would have benefited the book's readers had Krueger engaged more substantively with Lewis's “attack” (72) on Mid-western culture, as we never learn exactly why so many Americans found his works highly offensive, or precisely how Minnesotans in particular responded. He might also have explored in greater depth the figure of Christopher Columbus, specifically in relation to Mid-western Catholics’ apparent lack of interest in him, or even aversion to him, as a Catholic “discoverer” of America. Finally, Krueger might have engaged in a bit of ethnographic research, interviewing contemporary Minnesotans regarding their feelings (or lack thereof) about the stone and its historical and cultural significance. These caveats notwithstanding, Myths of the Rune Stone is an engaging and well-researched study which does an estimable job of illuminating a now little-known aspect of American historical memory and exploring its significance to a number of important historical moments and ongoing debates regarding national identity.