In 1978, more than two decades after two Blue Hill residents dug up a strange-looking coin from a muddy embankment in Brooklin, media outlets across the world began proclaiming that the pair had discovered evidence that Norse explorers had visited what is now the United States, centuries before Christopher Columbus stumbled across the Caribbean.
The Maine penny, also known as the Goddard coin for the owner of the land where it was found, is an 11th century Norse silver coin dating to the reign of Olaf III of Norway, found by Guy Mellgren and Ed Runge on the Blue Hill peninsula in 1957. It’s less than an inch wide and part of it has corroded away.
Ever since the coin, which is believed to have been minted between 1067 and 1093, was identified as Norse, it’s confounded archaeologists and historians. Was it proof that the Vikings visited North America farther south than Newfoundland? Did it arrive in Hancock County by chance? Or was it all a big hoax?
When they found the coin in an established Wabanaki archaeological site at Naskeag Point in Brooklin, Mellgren and Runge didn’t quite know what it was they actually had. Mellgren kept the coin in his personal collection, thinking it was English. He occasionally showed it off to people, but otherwise it stayed out of the public eye for the next 17 years.
After Mellgren died in 1974, the coin was donated to the Maine State Museum, which still has it today. In 1978, an article about the coin — still believed to be English — was published in the bulletin of the Maine Archaeological Society, along with a photo. By chance, a coin dealer in London happened to see the photo and knew immediately that the coin was not English, but was instead of Norse origin, from the 11th century. The story was picked up by national media, and the legend of the Maine penny was born.
The idea that Norse explorers could have visited Maine doesn’t come out of nowhere. With the discovery of the L’Anse aux Meadows site in Newfoundland in 1960, there was definitive proof that sometime around 1020, Norse explorers settled in North America. There is also evidence that L’Anse aux Meadows served as a base camp for more exploration, and the Norse settlers may have traveled as far south as what is now New Brunswick.
It’s not a huge stretch to think those Norse people crossed over into what is now Maine. And with the discovery of a coin dating to roughly the same era only 100 nautical miles southwest of New Brunswick, there was tantalizing potential evidence that the Blue Hill peninsula was the site of the first known European trans-oceanic contact in what is now the United States.
While it’s easy to get swept up in the hope that such a thing is true, scientists and scholars have long cautioned that one tiny find is far from enough proof to hang such an important historical distinction on.
There’s a history of debunked claims of Viking visitation in North America, dating back to the 1890s, when a Swedish immigrant claimed to have found a 14th century runestone in a field in Kensington, Minnesota. The Kensington runestone has long been considered a hoax, as have other “runestones” purportedly discovered in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Oklahoma.
Closer to home, Maine had several claims of Viking visitation before the Maine penny was correctly identified as Norse in 1978. In 1965, human remains clad in leather and metal armor were found in Pemaquid, and some members of the Maine Archaeological Society claimed the remains were of a Viking man. An archaeologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York debunked that, stating the remains were almost certainly of an Indigenous person.
A few years later in 1971, a Bath man claimed to have unearthed three small carved stones at Spirit Pond in Phippsburg, each allegedly bearing runic inscriptions. A Harvard University scholar later translated the stones and found most of the text contained “a few Norse words in a sea of gibberish.” The Spirit Pond discovery later inspired writer Calvin Trillin’s debut novel, “Runestruck,” about a small Maine town that goes “agog with Viking enthusiasm” after runestones are supposedly found there.
So what, then, to make of the Maine penny, an artifact that scholars agree is an authentic Norse coin, but which has little other supporting evidence to suggest that it was left in Brooklin by actual Norse people? Mellgren and Runge were amateur archaeologists, so they not only did not keep records of the methods they used when excavating, they also incorrectly identified the coin as English — and didn’t keep records of the other Wabanaki items found alongside it.
There are three potential origin stories for the Maine penny. One is that it’s a hoax — a real Norse coin acquired by Mellgren and planted on Naskeag Point. Archaeologist Edmund Carpenter noted in a 2003 article that Mellgren was also an avid coin collector and worked part-time at an auction house, which could have given him the ability to purchase an authentic 11th century Norse coin.
The second is that it’s the real deal, and that the Maine penny is proof that Norse explorers visited what is now Maine more than 400 years before any other European. Huge, if true.
The third potential origin story, however, is the one many scholars agree is the most plausible one: that the coin is indeed sourced from Norse people in North America, but that it arrived in Maine via Indigenous trade networks, who passed it from person to person over many years before it was discarded or lost in Brooklin.
Scholars point to the fact that the coin was perforated, which meant that it may have been worn as a necklace. Indigenous people traded widely with Norse people in Newfoundland and Greenland, and then likely traded with other Indigenous folks farther south. In that scenario, the coin eventually made its way into the hands of Wabanaki people living along Maine’s coast. Chemical analysis of the coin indicated that it had laid horizontally in its watery deposit for a very long time, which supports the idea that it was buried in the ground in Brooklin for centuries.
One thing that’s for certain is that we’ll never definitively know exactly why a real Norse coin was found buried in the mud in Maine. It’s most likely that Norse people probably never visited this far south. But it’s a lot more fun to imagine that Viking longships once plied Penobscot Bay, and to think that the first Europeans to set foot in what is now the U.S. landed ashore in Maine.
