Did Vikings “Discover” America before Columbus? The Maine Viking Penny

In 1957, an amazing discovery was made – it was a Viking Penny dating back to 11th Century Norway.  The find itself was rare, but not unheard of. The thing that made it so remarkable? It was found on the Eastern shore of Maine in the United States. Is this evidence that the Vikings beat Christopher Columbus to America by 400 years? In this episode, we discuss Norse exploration, L’Anse aux Meadows, Leif Erikkson, The Goddard Site and the Maine Viking Penny. Then we play the quiz game with award-winning Speaker and Author, Marissa F. Cohen!

Christopher Columbus wasn’t the first European to discover America. Despite the fact that America was already inhabited by its early people, when Christopher Columbus landed on San Salvador Island in the Bahamas on October 12th, 1492, he had already been beaten to the punch by somewhere between 400-500 years. The real first Europeans to land on American soil were the Norse – sometimes called Vikings. Now technically, the term Viking is reserved for Norsemen who were involved in raids and exploration. So for the purpose of this episode, we’ll use both terms interchangeably.

The best evidence of early Norse activity in the Americas is a settlement that was discovered and excavated in 1960. It was found by a husband and wife team, Helga and Anne Ingstad and is known as L’anse aux Meadows. It’s a French-English name meaning “Grassland Bay” and it’s located on the very Northern tip of Newfoundland in Eastern Canada. Vikings led by Leif Erikson around 1,000 CE established a small settlement they called Vinland and many speculate that the L’Anse aux Meadows site is the that very settlement. Vikings traveling across the oceans were in search for timber as the barren frozen land they left didn’t have the rich amount of trees found elsewhere. The archeological site has shown evidence of Norse items like a bone knitting needle, a spindle, a bronze pin, stone oil lamp and a whetstone. They even found food remains like butternuts. Something interesting about this is that they didn’t grow native to that area, but a bit further South. This suggests the Viking settlers either traveled or traded to obtain them. L’Anse aux Meadows became North America’s very first UNESCO World Heritage Site. It’s currently the only undisputed site of Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact with the Americas by Europeans. And the “undisputed” part of this is important, because three years prior to its discovery, there was another interesting find. 

So we’re backing up to August 18th of 1957. A couple amateur archeologists, Guy Mellgren and his friend Ed Runge were digging an area on the coast of Maine. They had chosen that area because it was a shell midden – which is a term for a bunch of shells that were basically waste from prehistoric people. They found out about it by a guy named Goddard the previous fall and Goddard invited them to come dig the site any time they wanted. So that next August, they dug around Goddard’s shoreline there in the tiny town of Brooklin, Maine. Lots of artifacts have been found at the site – worked copper, pieces of clay, large stone works, even the grave of two small children. In total – something like 30,000 artifacts have come out of that site. Most of them are of  Native American origin, pointing to the possibility that this was an early Native American settlement. Some of the artifacts have been proven to have European origin. But the one thing that has piqued the interest of archeologists around the world was Mellgren and Runge’s discovery of a coin.

These two guys were just amateurs and didn’t really know much about the coin, but Mellgren kept it and assumed it was a British coin minted sometime in the 12th century. It was a small silver coin, around the size of a modern dime with a cross on one side and some sort of relief or image of a dragon’s head on the other side, but the coin was so worn, it was difficult to make out what it was. It was corroded and dark in color and in such poor shape that nearly a quarter of the coin was completely eroded away. Mellgren occasionally showed the coin off to friends and to his son to show off at school, but for the most part, didn’t think much more about its origin. He died in 1978 and donated his collection to the Maine State Museum. But just before he died, a photo of the coin was included in an obscure newsletter by the Maine Archeological Society, speculating about its origin. The title of the article was “Were the English the First to Discover America?” Somehow – this tiny little regional newsletter found its way into the hands of a London coin dealer who was familiar enough with early British coinage to know that it wasn’t British in origin. Sadly, Mellgren never lived to hear the truth – that the tiny coin he had discovered on Maine’s Blue Hill peninsula – wasn’t British at all – but it was thought to be a Norse coin brought to what is now The United States of America by the Vikings in the 11th century. 

The coin that Guy Mellgren and Ed Runge found at the Goddard site had been noticed and identified as an 11th Century Norse coin and was now being talked about by numismatists around the world who all had their own theories about the coin. 

First – a little more about the coin. As I stated earlier, it was about the size of a modern dime, made of silver with a dark patina from the years – how many years? Well the experts were now saying that the coin dated to Olaf Kyrre – meaning “Olaf the Peaceful” – who reigned from 1067-1093 CE. This was confirmed when one of the world’s foremost experts on Norse coinage, a man named Kolbjørn Skaare, visited the Maine State Museum in person and examined the coin in 1979. He had published his doctoral thesis, “Coins and Coinage in Viking-Age Norway,” and reported to the world what he saw in the museum in Maine. In his expert opinion, the coin was definitely a Norwegian Penny from the second half of the 11th century. He put the minting of the coin somewhere between 1065 and 1080, and thought it would have been circulated in the 12th and 13th centuries. The Goddard site where it was found had other artifacts – not Norse, but other artifacts dating from 1180 to 1235, so it’s very possible that this coin fits within that time period at that site.

Now remember, we now know that Vikings reached Newfoundland before Columbus, but this coin was being used to prove that perhaps the Vikings had contact with what is now the United States several hundred years prior to Columbus. But that’s an iffy claim. And we’ll get into that. 

Occasionally, people around the world would find hoards of ancient Viking coins. And most of these hoards were very well-recorded. For instance, in 1879, a huge hoard of pennies that match very closely the penny found in Maine were discovered in a field in Gressli, Norway. Something like 2,300 of these pennies were discovered and despite being 800 years old at that time, they all looked brand new. The penny found at the Goddard site in Maine didn’t match exactly, but was very close. And it was much more worn that those coins found in Norway in 1879. 

Not everyone agreed with the idea that this was an authentic Norse coin found in Maine. Two of the most vocal opponents were Edmund Carpenter and Robert Hogue. Edmund Carpenter is a well-respected Anthropologist and Archeologist from the University of Toronto and his main concern was that the year the Maine Viking Penny was discovered – 1957 – was a “bumper year for Viking fakes.” There had been a fake rune stone and, separately, a fake Vinland map, that had been debunked. So hearing about a Viking coin that was found in 1957 was just a little bit too incredible for Carpenter. He also pointed out something that I read for the first time in his writings. Mellgren – one of the men who discovered the coin, worked part-time at an auction house in Maine. He may have had access to a Norse coin. He also was known to have an interest in Pre-Columbian contact and had Scandinavian roots. So for Carpenter, these sent off his hoax detectors. 

The other man I mentioned, Robert Hogue, is a past President of the American Numismatic Association. In the Spring of 2003, he wrote a blurb about the coin in response to a member who had inquired about it. The American Numismatic Association had seen a number of the Norse Coins similar to the Maine Penny, and all of those coins had been attributed to the 1879 hoard I mentioned earlier – the Gressli Norway Hoard of coins. Hogue said not all of those coins had been together before they were authenticated and it’s possible some of them had been dispersed and not accounted for. For Hogue, he thinks there’s not enough reliable documentation on the Goddard Maine Penny and too much evidence that “someone was deliberately trying to manipulate or obfuscate the situation.” He concludes, “The Norse coin from Maine should probably be considered a hoax.” 

Keep in mind, these men aren’t debating that it’s a real Norse coin from the 11th century. They’re debating that the coin really came out of the ground in Maine.

I’m not a numismatic expert. My father-in-law was and my dad has always been very knowledgeable about coins, so I have a fair amount of interest, but I’m not an expert. But I find it hard to agree with these two men. And lots of Anthropologists did too. 

First of all, if Guy Mellgren was going to fake this discovery, why would he carry on a 17 year old ruse of not knowing what he had first? Remember, he thought the coin was a 12th century British coin for many years, and showed it off as such. This doesn’t jive with the idea that he was trying to fake a Viking discovery.

In 2016, a renowned Numismatist from Oslo, Svein Gullbekk, reexamined the Goddard Maine Penny. Gullbekk was one of the students of Skaar, the Norwegian coin expert. He was trying to determine if this coin indeed came from that 1879 hoard of coins from Gressli, Norway. He determined that all of the coins that would have matched this description from that hoard had been accounted for. He concluded that “the Norse penny cannot have originated from any recorded Norwegian hoard or single find,” and that, in his opinion, the circumstantial evidence points to it being a genuine find. 

And perhaps the most compelling piece of evidence comes from a Raman Spectroscopy. I don’t know what that is, so I googled it and it’s complicated – but we’ll just say that it’s an imaging technology to look at how molecules are structured. The Maine Viking Penny was looked at with this technology and it was determined that the coin had laid in a horizontal position for a very long time. The wear on the coin was consistent with what would happen if water were to trickle around its edges over centuries. There’s no way to fake that sort of weathering pattern. 

These things combined seem to have convinced most modern archeologists and numismatists that the find is real. But the question is – does this point toward the Vikings inhabiting or even visiting the East coast of America that far South? Well the answer is probably not. We know that they were 1,100 miles North of there, in the tip of Newfoundland, but there’s not much evidence that they traveled further South at that time. The Goddard site is full of relics, but this was the only one that’s attributed to the Vikings. 

The most likely explanation is that this coin is evidence of an active trade route. Whether it be from early Native Americans or whoever occupied the Goddard site, it’s likely that this coin made it’s way down from L’Anse Aux Meadows in Newfoundland and was traded. The Viking Penny shows evidence of a drilled hole, which could mean it was worn around the neck of someone. Maybe it was traded as a pendant. By the time it reached Maine, maybe even the person who had it there didn’t know what they had. 

In any case – the Maine Viking Penny has fascinated and stumped archeologists for decades and continues to be a point of fascination. The Internet Says it’s True.

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