The Kensington Runestone: Norse Explorers in Minnesota?

In November 1898 Olof Öhman, a Swedish immigrant farmer near Kensington, Minnesota, was clearing trees on his land. According to his account, he pulled up an aspen and found a flat grey slab gripped in its roots. It weighed about 90 kg and was carved on its face and one edge with runes. Translated, they told of 8 Goths and 22 Norwegians on a journey of exploration from Vinland, of ten men found "red with blood and dead", a prayer to the Virgin, and a year: 1362. If genuine, Scandinavians had reached the middle of North America 130 years before Columbus.

What scholars concluded

• In 1899 the stone was examined by Olaus Breda at the University of Minnesota and by scholars at the university in Christiania (Oslo). They declared it a modern forgery.
• The objections were linguistic. The language is close to nineteenth-century Swedish, not fourteenth-century Norse. Some words and forms did not exist in 1362. Several runes are unusual or invented, and some match nineteenth-century runic alphabets in books a Swede of the period could own.
• Hjalmar Holand, a writer and local historian, bought the stone in 1907 and spent half a century defending it. It was exhibited at the Smithsonian in 1948–49.
• In 1967 two children of Öhman's neighbour John Gran said in a recorded interview that their father had made the stone with Öhman as a hoax. This is hearsay, and supporters reject it.

The modern debate

From the 1980s the geologist Scott Wolter and the researcher Richard Nielsen argued that the carving's weathering implied great age, and that some runic forms, such as a dotted R, appear in medieval Scandinavian sources, including a manuscript from Gotland. Runologists such as Henrik Williams have answered that weathering estimates are unreliable for a stone of unknown history and that the language as a whole, not single letters, points to the nineteenth century. The overwhelming scholarly consensus is that the stone is a nineteenth-century creation. It remains a proud local symbol, standing at the Runestone Museum in Alexandria beside a giant statue of a Viking.

Why include it here

The Vault includes objects whose claims are disproved as well as those that are proved or open. The Kensington stone is a clear case of how claims about ancient inscriptions are tested: by language, by script, by provenance and by weathering. It also shows how identity and pride keep a claim alive after the scholarly case has closed. Compare the Rök Runestone (V36), a genuine ninth-century inscription.

Symbology and sacred encoding

"AVM, save from evil." The stone's one religious line invokes the Virgin Mary (AVM = Ave Maria). This is plausible in form for a medieval Catholic party. Critics note that such formulas were well known in the nineteenth century as well.

Runes as heritage. For Scandinavian Americans in 1898, runes were a powerful symbol of ancestry. The late nineteenth century's romantic revival of the Viking past explains both why a forger might carve such a stone and why so many people wanted it to be true.

Connections

Norse Paganism (ch23) and Native North American (ch62), whose lands are the setting of the claim. Compare the Rök Runestone (V36) and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife (V17), another modern forgery tested by its language.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/kensington-runestone.html