The Kensington Runestone is a slab of greywacke stone covered in runes that was discovered in Western Minnesota, United States, in 1898. Olof Ohman, a Swedish immigrant, reported that he unearthed it from a field in the largely rural township of Solem in Douglas County. It was later named after the nearest settlement, Kensington.
The inscription purports to be a record left behind by Scandinavian explorers in the 14th century (internally dated to 1362). There has been a drawn-out debate regarding the stone's authenticity, but since the first scientific examination in 1910, the scholarly consensus has classified it as a 19th-century hoax, with some critics directly charging Ohman with fabrication.- - - - Nevertheless, there remains a community fueled by "natural scientists with no knowledge of linguistics" convinced of the stone's authenticity.
Provenance A Swedish immigrant, Olof Ohman, said that he found the stone late in 1898 while clearing his recently acquired land of trees and stumps before plowing.- The stone was said to be near the crest of a small knoll rising above the wetlands, lying face down and tangled in the root system of a stunted poplar tree estimated to be from less than 10 to about 40 years old. The artifact is about 30 × 16 × 6 inches (76 × 41 × 15 cm) in size and weighs . Ohman's 10-year-old son Edward noticed some markings,Hall Jr., Robert A.: The Kensington Rune-Stone Authentic and Important, p. 3. Jupiter Press, 1994. and the farmer later said that he thought they had found an "Indian almanac".
During this period, the journey of Leif Ericson to Vinland (North America) was being widely discussed and there was renewed interest in the Vikings throughout Scandinavia, stirred by the National Romanticism movement. Five years earlier, Norway had participated in the World's Columbian Exposition by sending the Viking, a replica of the Gokstad ship, to Chicago. There was also friction between Sweden and Norway (which ultimately led to Norway's independence from Sweden in 1905). Some Norwegians claimed that the stone was a Swedish hoax, and there were similar Swedish accusations because the stone references a joint expedition of Norwegians and Swedes. It is thought to be more than coincidental that the stone was found among Scandinavian newcomers in Minnesota, still struggling for acceptance and quite proud of their Nordic heritage.Michael G. Michlovic, "Folk Archaeology in Anthropological Perspective", Current Anthropology 31.1 (February 1990:103–107) pp. 105ff. A copy of the inscription made its way to the University of Minnesota. Olaus J. Breda (1853–1916), professor of Scandinavian Languages and Literature in the Scandinavian Department, declared the stone to be a forgery and published a discrediting article which appeared in Symra in 1910.Olaus J. Breda. Rundt Kensington-stenen (Symra. 1910, pp. 65–80) Breda also forwarded copies of the inscription to fellow linguists and historians in Scandinavia, such as Oluf Rygh, Sophus Bugge, Gustav Storm, Magnus Olsen and Adolf Noreen. They "unanimously pronounced the Kensington inscription a fraud and forgery of recent date".
The stone was then sent to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Scholars either dismissed it as a prank or felt unable to identify a sustainable historical context, and the stone was returned to Ohman. Hjalmar Holand, a Norwegian-American historian and author, claimed Ohman gave him the stone. However, the Minnesota Historical Society has a bill of sale showing Ohman sold them the stone for $10 in 1911. Holand renewed public interest with an articleHoland, "First authoritative investigation of oldest document in America", Journal of American History 3 (1910:165–184); Michlovic noted Holand's contrast of the Scandinavians as undaunted, brave, daring, faithful and intrepid contrasted with the Indians as savages, wild heathens, pillagers, vengeful, like wild beasts: an interpretation that "placed it squarely within the framework of Indian-white relations in Minnesota at the time of its discovery" (Michlovic 1990:106). enthusiastically summarizing studies that were made by geologist Newton Horace Winchell (Minnesota Historical Society) and linguist George T. Flom (Philological Society of the University of Illinois), who both published opinions in 1910.
According to Winchell, the tree under which the stone was found had been destroyed before 1910. Several nearby poplars that witnesses estimated as being about the same size were cut down and, by counting their rings, it was determined they were around 30 to 40 years old. One member of the team who had excavated at the find site in 1899, county school superintendent Cleve Van Dyke, later recalled the trees being only 10 or 12 years old.Milo M. Quaife, "The myth of the Kensington runestone: The Norse discovery of Minnesota 1362", in The New England Quarterly, December 1934 The surrounding county had not been settled until 1858, and settlement was severely restricted for a time by the Dakota War of 1862 (although it was reported that, by 1867, the best land in the township adjacent to Solem, Holmes City, was already taken by a mixture of Swedish, Norwegian and "Yankee" settlers).
Winchell estimated that the inscription was roughly 500 years old, by comparing its weathering with the weathering on the backside, which he assumed was glacial and 8,000 years old. He also stated that the chisel marks were fresh. More recently geologist Harold Edwards has also noted that "The inscription is about as sharp as the day it was carved ... The letters are smooth showing virtually no weathering." Winchell also mentions in the same report that Prof. William O. Hotchkiss, the state geologist of Wisconsin, estimated that the runes were at least 50 to 100 years old. Meanwhile, Flom found a strong apparent divergence between the runes used in the Kensington inscription and those in use during the 14th century. Similarly, the language of the inscription was modern compared to the Nordic languages of the 14th century.
The Kensington Runestone is on display at the Runestone Museum in Alexandria, Minnesota.
Text and translation
The text consists of nine lines on the face of the stone, and three lines on the edge, read as follows:- -
Front: 8 : göter : ok : 22 : norrmen : po : ...o : opdagelsefärd : fro : vinland : of : vest : vi : hade : läger : ved : 2 : skjär : en : dags : rise : norr : fro : deno : sten : vi : var : ok : fiske : en : dagh : äptir : vi : kom : hem : fan : 10 : man : röde : af : blod : og : ded : AVM : frälse : äf : illü. Side: här : (10) : mans : ve : havet : at : se : äptir : vore : skip : 14 : dagh : rise : from : deno : öh : ahr : 1362 :
The sequences rr, ll and gh represent actual digraphs. The AVM is written in Latin capitals. The numbers given in Arabic numerals in the above transcription are given in pentadic numerals. At least seven of the runes, including those transcribed a, d, v, j, ä, ö above, are not in any standard known from the medieval period (see below for details).Aslak Liestöl, "The Bergen Runes and the Kensington Inscription Minnesota History 40 (1966), p. 59 "To Scandinavian scholars this will not be startling news, for they are agreed that the Kensington inscription is modern. [...] The myth of the Kensington stone lives on, I am sorry to say, partly because scholarship has failed in making its views known in a form suitable to convince the public." The language of the inscription is close to modern Swedish, the transliterated text being quite easily comprehensible to any speaker of a modern Scandinavian language. The language, being closer to the Swedish of the 19th than of the 14th century, is one of the main reasons for the scholarly consensus dismissing it as a hoax.
The text translates to:
"Eight Geats and twenty-two Norwegians on an exploration journey from Vinland to the west. We had camp by two skerries one day's journey north from this stone. We were [out] to fish one day. After we came home [we] found ten men red of blood and dead. AVM (Ave Virgo Maria) save [us] from evil."
"[We] have ten men by the sea to look after our ships, fourteen days' travel from this island. [In the] year 1362."
Linguistic analysis Holand took the stone to Europe and, while newspapers in Minnesota carried articles hotly debating its authenticity, the stone was quickly dismissed by Swedish linguists.
For the next 40 years, Holand struggled to sway public and scholarly opinion about the Runestone, writing articles and several books. He achieved brief success in 1949, when the stone was put on display at the Smithsonian Institution, and scholars such as William Thalbitzer and S. N. Hagen published papers supporting its authenticity. At nearly the same time, Scandinavian linguists Sven Jansson, Erik Moltke, Harry Andersen and K. M. Nielsen, along with a popular book by Erik Wahlgren, again questioned the Runestone's authenticity.
Along with Wahlgren, historian Theodore C. Blegen flatly asserted that Ohman had carved the artifact as a prank, possibly with help from others in the Kensington area. Further resolution seemed to come with the 1976 published transcript of an interview of Frank Walter Gran, conducted by Paul Carson, Jr. on August 13, 1967, that had been recorded on audio tape."The Case of the Gran Tapes", Minnesota History pages 152–156 (Winter 1976) In it, Gran said that his father John confessed in 1927 that Ohman made the inscription. John Gran's story, however, was based on second-hand anecdotes that he had heard about Ohman, and, although it was presented as a dying declaration, Gran lived for several more years, saying nothing more about the stone.
The possibility that the Runestone was an authentic 14th-century artifact was raised again, in 1982, by Robert Hall, an emeritus professor of the Italian language and Italian literature at Cornell University, who published a book (and a follow-up in 1994) questioning the methods of its critics. Hall asserted that the odd philological problems in the Runestone could be the result of normal dialectal variances in Old Swedish of the period. He contended that critics had not considered the physical evidence, which he found leaned heavily toward authenticity. Hall was not a runologist; his errors in reading the runes have been described by two runologists, and R. I. Page.
In The Vikings and America (1986), Wahlgren again stated that the text bore linguistic abnormalities and spellings that he thought suggested that the Runestone was a forgery.
Lexical evidence One of the main linguistic arguments for the rejection of the text as genuine Old Swedish is the term () 'journey of discovery'. This lexeme is unattested in either Scandinavian, Low Franconian or Low German before the 16th century. Similar terms exist in modern Scandinavian (Norwegian or , Swedish ). is a loan from Low German , Dutch , which is in turn from High German , ultimately loan-translated from French 'to discover' in the 16th century.
The Norwegian historian Gustav Storm often used the modern Norwegian lexeme in late 19th-century articles on Viking exploration, creating a plausible incentive for the manufacturer of the inscription to use this word.
Grammatical evidence Another characteristic pointed out by skeptics is the text's lack of cases. Early Old Swedish (14th century) still retained the four cases of Old Norse, but Late Old Swedish (15th century) reduced its case structure to two cases, so that the absence of inflection in a Swedish text of the 14th century would be an irregularity. Similarly, the inscription text does not use the plural verb forms that were common in the 14th century and have only recently disappeared: for example, (plural forms in parentheses) (), (), (), (), () and ().