Charles Trick Currelly, the renowned ROM archeology director, paid $500 in 1936 for relics supposedly found a few years earlier by prospector Eddy Dodd. At the time, the discovery in Beardmore, Ont., satisfied a thirst to confirm that the Viking voyages described in legends did indeed extend to Canada, and went deep inside the country. But did Norse adventurers of 1,000 years ago really make it inland from Hudson Bay? In Beardmore: The Viking Hoax That Rewrote History, author Douglas Hunter looks at the origins and lasting power of the Beardmore hoax.

On Sept. 7, 1936, a small Canadian Press story that related the news out of Fort William of Viking relics caught the eye of an unknown Henry Morgan executive in Montreal. He glued the clipping “Historic Armor Stirs Interest” to a sheet of letterhead, jotted beside it “Can these things be?” and mailed it to C.T. Currelly. The director of the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology responded on Sept. 9. Although no reply is preserved, the clipping indicates that Teddy Elliott’s subsequent letter of Nov. 5, 1936, revealing Dodd’s weapons cache, could not have come as a complete surprise.

The contents of Elliott’s letter electrified Currelly. The enclosed drawings of Dodd’s relics, he would recall, “sent me right up into the air.” They suggested to Currelly that Dodd possessed “one of the early types of the Norse sword, 10th to 11th century. The axe could very well also be Norse, and the pick-like piece might be a good many things.” Currelly wondered if Elliott would write Dodd “to beg him to send the things down here,” if only for the sake of preservation. But instead of mailing the letter, Currelly, like T.L. Tanton before him, decided to set aside his reply to the schoolteacher and to write Eddy Dodd directly on Nov. 12.

From the beginning of his collecting activities, Currelly had struggled with two opposing tensions. One was the fear of missing out on opportunities by not acting quickly and decisively, which caused much personal and financial anxiety in his early acquisition years. Currelly routinely encountered what he considered once-in-a-lifetime chances in a market dominated by major institutions and private collectors with far larger budgets than what was available to him. The other tension was the fear of being duped by fakes.

Throughout his career, Currelly had to make snap decisions on acquisition opportunities. There was no time for prolonged investigations of provenance, and all museum directors of his generation had to contend with the ephemeral if not nonexistent archeological documentation for many of the objects they collected. Currelly had been fortunate to work under Flinders Petrie, a pioneering figure in scientific archeology in Egypt and Palestine.

But most of Currelly’s collecting from the beginning of his career involved dealers as well as ordinary people who appeared at excavations with purportedly ancient items to sell. His archeology experience ended in 1907; thereafter, he was exclusively a buyer, not an excavator, of relics. Currelly could not know for certain the origins of items, and his memories of collecting in Egypt and the Mediterranean were animated by an ever-present and understandable concern that he would be duped.

The rise of public museums along with private collectors in the late 19th century created a ravenous market for relics, which could only encourage fakes. As Currelly advised Sir Byron Edmund Walker at the start of his 1903-04 season with Petrie, forgeries outnumbered authentic items on the market by a margin of 10 to one.

Currelly considered Petrie to be one of the best at spotting fakes, and he learned everything he could from him. After Currelly’s first season in Egypt, he passed a key test with Sir William Ridgeway, Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge, by correctly identifying some Egyptians scarabs as exquisite fakes because he saw that they were made from labradorite. The Ridgeway test was one of Currelly’s stories, and the wealthy philanthropists who funded Currelly’s museum acquisitions must have been comforted by the idea that his exceptional eye spared them from underwriting worthless acquisitions.

However, there was a difference between items that were forgeries and items that were authentic but had been planted in a sensational location to increase their significance and value. New World archeology had a long history of both authentic and fraudulent items that people claimed to have dug up and that proved the presence of ancient Romans, Phoenicians and other Old World peoples.

Discoveries of authentic ancient coins were easy to fake, their being readily available from numismatists. Other items, like the weapons Hjalmar Holand presented as evidence of Norsemen, could be brought to North America by immigrants as heirlooms and then proclaimed as remarkable discoveries.

Currelly explained to Dodd that Elliott had sent “some quite good drawings of a sword, an axe and a couple of other things that he saw in your house. They are intensely interesting, because if his drawings are right, they may very well be Norse.” He asked Dodd to send the items to the museum at the ROM’s expense so that, at the very least, they could be preserved.

“If you can give or obtain proof that these were not planted there by some Norwegian or Swede in recent years, we will be willing to give you a very good price for them.”

Despite his caution about the possibility of fraud, Currelly volunteered circumstantial evidence to support Dodd’s find, including the Kensington stone. “It is known that the Norsemen came down into Minnesota and left an inscription, and of course Indians may have brought the pieces long ago down into the Long Lac, or Norsemen themselves may have come down there. The last is rather unlikely, I think, though Mr. Stefansson [Currelly’s friend, Vilhjalmur Stefansson] told me that he had every reason to feel sure the Norsemen had landed in the Hudson Bay and had not come up from the east coast of America.”

Initially, then, Currelly doubted Norsemen had been anywhere near Beardmore; rather, he suspected the relics had some relation to the Kensington stone. [The Kensington stone, which contained ancient writings, was found in Minnesota in 1898, but decades later came to be considered a fake.]

Currelly’s remarks call to mind an exchange of letters the previous year with Knute Haddeland of the League of Norsemen in Canada. Haddeland had sent Currelly a clipping of an article he had published in the Winnipeg Tribune Magazine on Nov. 16, 1935, “Viking Colonies Predated Columbus,” which endorsed Holand’s Kensington stone theorizing and included a map showing the route the Knutson party took deep into the continent via Hudson Bay — a route that in Haddeland’s interpretation employed the Albany River, which empties into James Bay in northern Ontario.

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“The explorations of the intrepid early Norsemen were primarily within the border of what is now Canada and, therefore, should be of particular interest to Canadians,” Haddeland had lectured Currelly. In reply, Currelly noted: “My friend Stefansson has been very much interested in the matter of the Norsemen in America, and has talked a good deal about the Minnesota inscribed stone, which he found most interesting.”

Currelly informed Haddeland that the museum had just acquired another Viking sword. It was from a private collection in Paris and was said to have been found in the Seine. Currelly presumed that it had been lost in the great Viking siege of the city in the late 10th century. A year after buying the Paris sword, Currelly had the opportunity to acquire relics that would endorse the view of Norse explorations that Stefansson propounded and that was otherwise contentiously supported by the Kensington stone.

Currelly’s interest in the Beardmore weapons tapped several undercurrents of historical interest, museum policy and cultural framing.

The archeology division placed a strong emphasis on European history, which Currelly believed could be taught through its wars. In an object-based educational setting there was no better way to teach wars than with weapons. Currelly knew that a key audience for his museum’s collection was schoolboys — perhaps more than schoolgirls — and that weaponry sparked imaginations with a glorious if violent past across the Atlantic. Norse weapons carried deep ethnohistorical connotations.

The letter from Knute Haddeland of the League of Norsemen in Canada was a reminder of the continued strength of the home-making myth in Scandinavian communities, which the museum’s sword purchases fed, even if they were not North American relics. But Currelly was more interested in what Norse artefacts said to most museum goers, who had a British heritage.

Since the 19th century, Norse fascinations in North America, especially among Anglo-Americans in New England, had been buoyed by a view of race, culture, and history that scholars call Gothicism. Gothicism embodies a mélange of paganism, a hardy warrior ethos, freedom-loving republicanism, chivalry, Protestant morality and white racial superiority.

It constantly shifts shape to suit the needs of its advocates, but in its essential form it contends that white people from northern Europe are the finest human race, descended from Japheth, a son of Noah favoured by God. These northern European whites hailed from the wellspring of modern civilization and overthrew the southern tyrannies of the imperial Romans and Roman Catholicism. Gothicism encoded and legitimized powerful notions of race-based entitlement and privilege where colonization in the Americas was concerned …

In Canada, Gothicism fused the lore of Vikings with the British heritage and allegiance of the country’s dominant class. The Gothicist sentiment within the rom in the 1930s was such that Viking relics were more important than anything that survived from the ancien régime of French Canada, and Indigenous materials were a low acquisition and display priority. The distinction between the British as a biological race and as a culture and nation was as ephemeral as were the distinctions applied to other peoples in the Western worldview, and racial fitness was a bedrock notion of immigration policies in Canada and the United States.

“White racism … was a universal feature of Britannic nationalism in the settlement colonies,” John Herd Thompson writes of Canada in the first decades of the 20th century. C.T. Currelly, to his credit, never stooped to the Aryanist racism of Hjalmar Holand in extolling the superior nature of Norse adventurers (especially where Indigenous peoples were concerned).

Currelly’s claims of ancient Italian roots defied the blatant racism that infected the most virulent strain of Gothicism and its intertwined sentiments of British Imperialism, and his respect for craftsmanship inoculated him against a blindered devotion to Britishness at the expense of other cultures.

Still, Currelly’s public discussions of the Beardmore relics would have an undeniable if lightly wielded Gothicist edge. Norse weapons of any origin were freighted with connotations of a deep cultural heritage claimed by the British and their Imperial descendants in Canada through the Norman invasion of England.

In January 1938, Currelly would state that the Vikings “to a certain degree are our own ancestors (because we must all have a bit of Norse blood in us if we are British).” The Beardmore relics were an unparalleled opportunity to bridge the old and new worlds through weaponry, one of Currelly’s favourite instructive tools, within a complex ethnic and imperialist context. The relics placed the Vikings in the landscape with a sword, which was always treated with the greatest priority by anyone discussing Eddy Dodd’s find.

A sword conveyed power, authority and daring. It conjured the sweep of a Norseman’s arm in claiming a new land for the Gothicist descendants who ultimately would settle it.