Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Vikings in Boston?

I’m in Boston, Massachusetts this week. Maybe I can satisfy my geo-weirdness fixation in between my all-day business meetings. Fortunately Boston has a compact core with several walkable neighborhoods and a great public transportation system.

I had an opportunity to spend a couple of hours wandering around the Back Bay yesterday. This area used to be tidal flats of the Charles River. Ironically, it became one of Boston’s more upscale neighborhoods filled with massive Victorian brownstone townhouses.

An Tribute to Leif Ericson

Leif Ericson Statue on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts. Photo by howderfamily.com; (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Then I encountered this oddly-situated statue of an unlikely subject as I strolled along Commonwealth Avenue. It’s Leif Ericson. You remember him from the history books, right? He’s the Icelandic explorer who sailed from Greenland to North America some five hundred years before Christopher Columbus. You know, the one immortalized in the old Viking sagas? I wondered if perhaps there might be a Boston – Iceland connection. That seemed entirely logical given the statue. However, that turned out to be completely wrong.

Maybe Boston had and Icelandic community, I thought. That’s not impossible. I know of other parts of the United States settled primarily by Icelandic immigrants. There does appear to be an active Icelandic Society in Boston with about 200 members. Nonetheless, they don’t seem to be erecting any statues anywhere. Perhaps then Boston has a sister city relationship with Reykjavík? Well, Boston has a bunch of those but none with any city in Iceland.

Unraveling the Mystery

What could possibly account for the Leif Ericson statue with its runic characters chiseled onto its base atop an old Norse longship. The answer presented itself on the Straight Dope website under “Did Leif Erikson once live in Cambridge, Massachusetts?” Apparently I’m not the first person to wonder about this conundrum. The experts have already weighed in.

The article goes on to explain that a Prof. Eben Norton Horsford became a wealthy man when he reformulated the ingredients for baking powder in the 1850’s. With his newfound fortunes he was able to turn his attention to various crackpot theories. As improbably as it sounds, he concluded that Leif Ericson sailed up the Charles River during his explorations and built a home in Cambridge.

Experts widely discredited his theories even at the time. Nonetheless, a lack of factual evidence didn’t stop him from placing various markers and plaques around town. His crowning glory took the form of the Leif Ericson statue erected in 1887 that still graces Boston to this day. It serves as a testament to a hair-brained idea posed by an amateur archeologist with more money than sense a hundred years ago. I wish I had that kind of cash. Think of all the odd geography tags I’d be leaving in my wake. I’m thinking the highpoint of the smallest county-equivalent unit in the United States really needs a monument. Anyone have a good formula for baking powder?

I will be in Boston for the remainder of the week and hope to post additional local geo-oddities at least one more time before I return.

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Comments

3 responses to “Vikings in Boston?”

  1. Jeanette Bennett Avatar
    Jeanette Bennett

    If the statue was erected in 1887, why does it appear in the 1883 King’s Handbook of Boston on page 109? I’m sure you didn’t just pull this date out of thin air. Don’t you just love it when historic records don’t agree?

    Reply
  2. Jeanette Bennett Avatar
    Jeanette Bennett

    Okay, on second reading–why is a wannabe statue listed with already built statues? Here is what the 1883 King’s Handbook of Boston says:

    “The Norsemen Statue and Fountain was to have been erected in Postoffice Square, to commemorate the supposed visit of the Norsemen to New England, about the year 1000. The enterprise contemplated a statue,
    of bronze, representing Leif. son of Eric, who first colonized Greenland, wearing the ancient armor of the Norsemen, — a shirt of mail, a two-edged sword, and the pointed helmet of that people. The pedestal was to have been of rough granite, richly incrusted in bronze, with grape vines, leaves, and clusters; and water was to fall from twisted vine-stems.”

    I wonder how many tourists in 1883 went looking for this thing?

    Reply
    1. Twelve Mile Circle Avatar
      Twelve Mile Circle

      It does seem rather unusual for a guidebook to feature something that didn’t yet exist at the time. There is an analogous situation today by the way. A memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is envisioned for the National Mall in Washington, DC. It doesn’t yet exist but it has a website — which is kind of the modern day equivalent of a guide book. If one were to look at it quickly it might seem as if the memorial actually existed, much like Leif Erikson in the 1883 Boston guidebook. Perhaps inclusion helped with fundraising?

      Reply

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