[URBAN NOTE] "Historicist: An Authentic Viking Hoax"
Torontoist's Kevin Plummer looks at the strange history of the Beardmore Relics, an alleged cache of Viking artifacts found in the middle of Ontario. That the cache seems to have been a hoax seems established. The interesting question is how it came about.
Tucked in the European galleries on the third floor of the Royal Ontario Museum, there is a display of Viking weapons containing the head of a battle axe, and a sword, broken in two. There’s nothing particularly attention-grabbing about the items compared to some of the grander specimens nearby. And the accompanying captions offer only the barest of facts-their age, 900-1025 and 775-900 respectively, and their Norwegian origin. They look like any number of similar Norse antiquities you’d see in any other museum around the world.
But this particular axe head and sword-as well as a third artifact, a rattle-once occupied a place of pride in the ROM. Unearthed in northern Ontario, near Beardmore, the relics represented perhaps the province’s greatest historical discovery, offering tantalizing proof that at least one Viking, perhaps many more, had travelled into the heart of the continent 400 years before Columbus.
For nearly 20 years, the Beardmore Relics, were displayed prominently, in a glass case in a main gallery, where no visitor could miss them. Then, in late 1956, under a cloud of controversy, suddenly they were gone, removed to storage and rarely spoken of for decades. Were the ROM’s greatest treasures a deliberate hoax?
Everyone could agree the relics were authentic Norse artifacts. But had they really been discovered in Ontario? Or had they been planted? Could Dr. Charles Trick Currelly, the ROM’s founding curator and a man of sterling scholarly reputation, have been duped? Or had he, with a wink and a nod, embraced the dubious relics as a sure-fire way to gin attendance figures?
Tucked in the European galleries on the third floor of the Royal Ontario Museum, there is a display of Viking weapons containing the head of a battle axe, and a sword, broken in two. There’s nothing particularly attention-grabbing about the items compared to some of the grander specimens nearby. And the accompanying captions offer only the barest of facts-their age, 900-1025 and 775-900 respectively, and their Norwegian origin. They look like any number of similar Norse antiquities you’d see in any other museum around the world.
But this particular axe head and sword-as well as a third artifact, a rattle-once occupied a place of pride in the ROM. Unearthed in northern Ontario, near Beardmore, the relics represented perhaps the province’s greatest historical discovery, offering tantalizing proof that at least one Viking, perhaps many more, had travelled into the heart of the continent 400 years before Columbus.
For nearly 20 years, the Beardmore Relics, were displayed prominently, in a glass case in a main gallery, where no visitor could miss them. Then, in late 1956, under a cloud of controversy, suddenly they were gone, removed to storage and rarely spoken of for decades. Were the ROM’s greatest treasures a deliberate hoax?
Everyone could agree the relics were authentic Norse artifacts. But had they really been discovered in Ontario? Or had they been planted? Could Dr. Charles Trick Currelly, the ROM’s founding curator and a man of sterling scholarly reputation, have been duped? Or had he, with a wink and a nod, embraced the dubious relics as a sure-fire way to gin attendance figures?