Kensington Rune Stone

This subject used to fascinate me when I was 9 or 11. I read everything the late Hjalmar Holand ever wrote. It has fascinated many others, unfortunately mainly “professional Scandinavians” who have made their lives out of their ethnicity, especially as professors of that language or culture. Most have used it only as a way to get a cheap Ph.D. thesis by demolishing it once again, or by using its possible validity to back up some ulterior theory or hobby-horse they may have. Few if any mainstream observers of American antiquities have been willing to touch it.

Found in 1898 at the latest by a middle-aged Swedish-American farmer in west-central Minnesota, the stone’s validity was scathingly, even cruelly denounced by upper-class Scandinavian philologists who hated everything about working-class Scandinavians-- the way they spoke, the fact they fled to America seeking equality, the fact they resented the poisonous class system then existing in what were then the poorest countries in Europe.

It wasn’t written in the Queen’s Swedish. It wasn’t grammatical, it was slangy, illiterate, betrayed signs of being rounded off by someone living among non-speakers of the language: a “cheap hoax by a Swede with a chisel and a little familiarity with Runic characters and with English.” From that day to this, all sides agree that this was either a rough-and-ready crude hoax by a laboring-class Swede whiling away a long Minnesota winter-- or genuine. The circumstances forbid an erudite, knowledgeable hoax.

Among the many self-interested intervenors are the children of a man who lived a few miles away, who would have been about 9 years old at the latest possible date of the stone’s finding. Nevertheless, they claimed in 1974 that their father had alleged before he died that he had “had a hand in” the fabled K-stone. I consider this utterly impossible, though he may have been among local teens who were not above harassing the aging Ohman in the WWI era. A host of affidavits from the 1898-1911 period attest to the circumstances of its finding, and these would come out on top in any court of law.

1. It is dated 1362. I doubt there was a man alive in 1898 who knew that there was a royal expedition in America from 1355 to 1364, charged with finding the missing “Western Settlement” Greenlanders and Vinland colonists and returning them to Christianity and contact with the homeland. This was not even found in the archives until the WWI era. [The Paul Knutsson expedition ordered by King Magnus Erlandsson.]

2. It uses “daghrise”=“day’s travel” as a measure of distance, a medievalism. This was used even when difficult weather, sea conditions, OR LAND TERRAIN made the trip take much longer than that, or where excellent sailing conditions made progress much faster. This measured about 75 miles and represented average progress for a sailing vessel between dawn and dusk.

3. It says the expedition consisted of “22 Norrmen and 8 Goths.” In other words, it would have been recruited from the most experienced seamen then in the combined Norway/Sweden kingdom--those living between Goteborg and Oslo and trading across the North Sea with Britain, Hamburg, Netherlands, etc.

4. No one up to the stone’s finding had ever suggested that Scandinavians might have been in the interior of North America before Columbus. Now, despite the lack of acceptance of the Stone, only the ignorant still deny that Norsemen had been all over the interior of North America, New Mexico, Colorado, most of Canada, even Oklahoma, for centuries and even millennia prior to 1362.

5. There was no attempt to use archaic or even grammatical language. The poor wanderers had been on this freezing expedition for 7 years already-- young, poorly educated men: its Swedish author living with Norse sailors who were equally poor and had been trading across Hanseatic Europe. Also, no known single set of Runic characters was used, not even the one in Ohman’s Swedish dictionary! The writer mixes rune types and styles, as if remembering (or trying to) characters seen on tombstones back home. Several of the characters were completely unexampled for years or even generations after the Stone was found, though it could be told what letter they must represent, of course. Yet every one had been found in Europe by the 1ate 1960’s, together with examples in Greenland suggesting that this set may have been used together or coherently by some there about that date.

1. The 220-pound stone was found on an undistinguished knoll in the prairie-pothole region, far from any logical route that explorers would follow in trying to cross the continent. Worse still, it describes the place of its emplacement as “this island,” and no matter how wet Minnesota might have been that spring, I am not convinced that this word could describe any place within 50 to 100 miles of where the stone was found. Worse still, the wording is incomprehensible if the men were traveling on foot, overland. They would have needed a boat to get to any “island,” and just the day before they said they had “been out fishing” out of sight of their camp, again requiring a boat, and that 30 men had been in the boat, leaving only ten at camp. Even if the sense is stretched to the breaking point, at least ten men were in the boat just to fish, and twenty to forty had been in it when they arrived AT the fatal campsite.

2. It gives no evident codes or signature blocks, no names at all, not of their king, their captain, the engraver himself, nor of any of the ten dead men!

3. It says they are just exploring, virtually skylarking, on an “opdagelsefard” from VINLAND, “round about the west.” It is as if Vinland were their home, not Sweden or Norway. Yet: maybe they had been away from home for so long (7 years) that they thought of themselves as Americans: in just five years they could have been naturalized here.

4. It says they left ten other men with their ship “by the sea 14 days-journey (north) from this island.” with the strong implication that they were, and had been, headed virtually due south all this while, especially of late. Could ten men really operate the (ocean-going) ship, in case the land party never returned? --And this would mean that the “sea” is Hudson’s Bay, and the route is south along the Nelson River and then the whole length of Canada’s Lake Winnepeg waterways. Fine: doubt the dumb Swede hoaxer would have thought of that. Not so fine: no way to cover this in 14 days, so we need faith that this is just a way of expressing a distance, ie some 1050 miles. Oddly, that would be about correct. Surely they would have to be traveling in the pinnace, a good-sized wooden boat complete with sail. That could speed things up, but how could they have got it further south than Winnepeg? Surely even thirty men couldn’t have carried it more than a few hundred yards, virtually unportageable. Certainly not 350 miles south from Winnepeg. Claims that it might have floated in the Red River don’t much impress me, and the Kensington site is some 60 miles away even from that.

Decision: 1. It says that just two nights before, they had camped “by two skerries one day’s journey north of this island.” A skerry is a rocky islet, just a few yards in diameter, too small to camp on or live on. The writer is clearly traveling along some fixed or obvious shore of a body of water, going due south without much error E/W, and thinks the reader could find the site of the massacre without much trouble. The fatal camp would have been on the mainland with both skerries in view. If the travel was along a major river such as the Missouri or Mississippi, “skerries” rather than mud islands are unlikely...and those waters could only have been entered by impossible portages anyway.

2. Therefore: To accept the stone requires that it has been moved some hundreds of miles south from its original emplacement as a monument, almost certainly overland from a fairly sizable island in the big Manitoba lakes, probably Lake Winnepeg. Indians might have done this if they viewed it as a tribal totem or power object from their old home, taken with them when they headed south--then left behind when they themselves met disaster or it just became too heavy to continue. They would have had to lug it-- no canoe of theirs would have been much help. Alternatively, a white explorer such as the Frenchman--la Verendrye in the 1760‘s, might have found it and lugged it this far in his famous winter sortie into the prairies. He says he found such a stone, but his journal seems to imply that he got back to Montreal with it. Might he have found more than one, and decided to just copy off this one since it was so heavy? ...But his description makes it appear that he found it along the Missouri in North Dakota. The Kensington site might be where he gave up and abandoned it, but that is not in their log, nor would any of this explain how the original writers got into the Missouri from the northern “sea.”

3. Claims that the “sea” might be Lake Superior run into two problems. First, it is not salt, and Sweden’s large Vannern Lake would have been familiar to them. Second, it would not be possible to get a large, built-in-Europe wooden ship into Lake Superior, certainly not up Niagara Falls and I don’t think from Hudson’s Bay either. A third is the required portage then to get them OUT of that system and out to where the stone was found, unless we could think the stone was originally placed on ITS shores, which again is nonsensical grammatically, and absurd anyway.

Therefore, my judgment is that the Lake Winnepeg route should be examined along with reports of earlier explorers and surveyors along that route, to see if there is any mound, tumulus, or barrow especially on an island reasonably encounterable along the lake’s (presumably) east shore, especially if some 75 miles south of a pair of self-evident skerries along the same shore. Find contemporary Scandinavian artifacts or evidence, and the Stone could move to validity overnight.

PS. The thing that seemed most to drive the Ph.D. philologists mad, make them apoplectic, was the alleged presence of three “English” words on the Stone, to wit: a. “rise,” in the compounds “daghrise” and its derivatives. But this word means a trip or journey, same as H.G. “reise,” and does not seem English except that there is an English word of that spelling, but of unrelated meaning;

b. the use on the stone of “mans” as the plural of “man,” after a numeral. But this is not good English, either, and the carver could have saved a letter of hard chiseling by writing “men,” then, which would have been correct. More likely he was trying to avoid writing “manner” or the like on the stone, and such a plural as “mans” has been documented now for the 1362 era in Hanseatic trade records and some Swedish dialects as well.

c. the use of “ded” in “found ten of our men red with blood and DED.” Like the other two, this is not good English either, and has been found in letters of Swedish princesses of the day and others who ought to know better. An Icelandic idiom of the day used the term “ded” to mean “hacked to death, bloodily tortured to death.”

...The PhD’s seem to have supposed some such Anglo/Scandian patois or dialect to have been in use on the farm in Minnesota, but such just did not happen. For example, Ohman spoke good Swedish, was fairly well-educated for the time and place, and also could speak and write English well and grammatically as Holand went to such trouble to document in business letters from the farmer, etc. His son, aged ten and present when the Stone was found, spoke only English and deposed that his father spoke that language to him and at home in all usual cases, and more correctly than most of their neighbors and friends. Not one of the philologues, it seems, ever troubled himself to learn that no such mix was ever used in Minnesota, but it WAS used in North Sea ports and aboard trading ships on such waters in the fourteenth century.

In the last 20 or 25 years, it has been finally suggested by philologists that the entire Stone is just written in the Bohuslan dialect of coastal border area Norway/Sweden anyway.

At a recent conference speakers argued that the Stone is written in the dialect of Gotland, a large Swedish island in the Baltic, and this would explain the otherwise archaic use of the term “Goths,” which if it meant “Swedes” rather than “inhabitants of Gotland,” seems a few centuries out of date. The other “news” was that local museum staff at Alexandria, Minn., who have the Stone in their possession, excavated down to 36” at the stated site of the Stone’s finding, and found numerous flakes and pieces chipped off the stone, which was not of locally occurring rock at all, at a depth of 23 inches below the present surface of the ground, scientifically just right for 1362 according to testimony presented! Curiouser and curiouser, Alice! Lugged a likely-looking raw tombstone to a remote prairie site, and then worked on it out there, calling the place an island and then referring to an Indian massacre somewhere ELSE? Go figure, as they say.

Yes, there was a whole panel on an interior mural at Chichen Itza that showed the Maya engaged in a naval battle with Vikings, but it was too politically incorrect, so it was sent to Mexico City to go into hiding.

I respectfully doubt that. The Maya didn't build boats, and couldn't have fought a naval battle to save their lives. Not to mention that no Mayan cities - none whatever - had a harbor.

When the Aztec ran Cortez' boys out of Tenochtitlan the Spaniards were nearly overcome on the causeways by the Aztec Navy(hundreds of canoes).The Spanish built 13 brigantines,dug a canal to float them to the lake,and placed them under sail to gain naval superiority.When the Spanish ran short on cannon powder,they built a catapult that didn't work out quite as well.After threatening the Aztec with destruction by use of the catapult for several days,their first shot went up and landed back on the catapult.Cortez was not pleased and had the catapult torn apart.

The article "An Ancient North African Treasure-Trove in Southern Illinois" was amazing. Apparently fleeing Roman oppression, a bunch of first century AD Jews, Christians, and Mauritanian sailors made it all the way to Illinois, leaving artifacts behind.

Sounds a little bit like an SF/fantasy novel I read quite a few years ago.

I just checked the Topo map and it resembles Southwestern Illinois which was entirely swamp. The drainage channels are an accurate indication of a water problem. It is very likely that the soil in this area became saturated in late fall and when the snowpack melted, flooded.
We have hemmed in our rivers and deepened them over the last two hundred years and they don't resenble their state that long ago. It is very likely that this area was subjected to wide area floods that were not particularly deep, but lasted for some time each year. The current would be quite slow, perhaps imperceptible over large areas and would definitely be traversible.
We tend to associate floods with damage these days but a seafaring people would see a flood as an opportunity to explore, a new eight lane highway taking them into the interior. I don't doubt that the island was exactly that.
The boat used could be rather large, perhaps 30-40 feet, draughng 2 feet at the keel. It would definitely handle the number of men claiimed. If two boats, two of twenty feet would do the trick. A twenty footer could draught as little as 18 to 20 inches.

Viewing the stone as a ballast stone got me thinking.

Say, once the longboat was moored in Lake Winnipeg, the Norse fabricated smaller ships on site to explore the outlying areas. Those responsible for the Kensington stone were one such group.

Hypothetically, these smaller ships had a capacity of say ten to twelve, were shallow draft for navigating streams, but had a sail and mast for navigating the lake itself. Thus, ballast stones would be in order.

Such a craft could easily proceed south to the mouth of the Red, then work its way upriver for a considerable distance. Now, remember the topography between the Red and Runestone Hill -- extremely flat and poorly drained, as demonstrated by the number of artificial drainage ditches.

It is conceivable to me that, during the Spring flood, after snow melt, the entire landscape might be under water. It would be possible for a shallow draft boat to sail across a couple of counties to reach Runestone Hill.

Then, having beached at this location, it is also conceivable that the water began to recede. Once their boat wouldn't float, the crew was stuck -- unable to move. Because, now being surrounded by miles of marsh, they couldn't walk out, either!

This theory would seem to explain a number of otherwise inexplicable items:

1. The 14-day interval. If they were afloat the entire period, 14 days is a reasonable span to make the trip.

2. How the 220 lb stone got to the hill from wherever it came.

3. Why the reference to islands (hills above the flood) and why the group was stranded where they were and compelled to record their experience.

I suspect that expeditions were sent out each year at flood time, sometimes for serious purposes many times for fun, possibly a casual rite of passage for young men, something to brag about in the presence of the young ladies.
Up until the mid 1800s most boats had very shallow draughts and were ballasted with stone. The mediterranean and the coasts of Europe are littered with stones that came from somewhere else. If you dig underneath them you can sometimes find a keel, as it is a marker for a ship that went down.

Front: "8 Goths and 22 Norrmen on a discovery-voyage from Vinland around the West. We had camp by 2 skerries one day-trip north from this stone. We were out fishing one day. After we came home we found 10 men red with blood and dead. AVM (ie Virgin Mary), save us from evil!"

Side: "Have 10 Men of ours to look after our ships 14 day-trips north from this island. Year 1362."

A few words on the flooding that might have occurred in this area. The most recent example of wide area flooding that would float a viking boat or ship was relatively recent. It occurred along the Mississippi in 1993 and affected Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin. At one point, in August or July one could have launched a viking ship just east of Des Moines, Iowa and sailed it into Illinois without touching bottom. So the idea that thousands of square miles of prairie could be flooded is not at all far fetched.

The skerries are not much of a problem if you think of them as small knolls scattered throughout the flooded. Can they be identified? Possibly, but it is also likely that they were destroyed by farmers as they cleared the land of rock and first broke the soil. They could have camped on another knoll.

Where did they come from? Probably from a settlement that was south of their entry point. This allow for the carving of traveling "round the West". It could also be a idiomatic expression for anything other than a coastal area, which is quite likely.

Was this part of Erlindsson's mission to find the lost Norsemen? Probably not. The lack of reference to a King or reign would lead me to the conclusion that the trip was a single month long lark, a simple trip to learn more about Vinland.

The absence of thirty men from a settlement is somewhat difficult to understand. If the area of settlement was extremely rich in food resources (which is quite possible considering the stunning salmon runs up Canadian rivers at the time) it would certainly be possible. The other possiblity is that the settlement was large enough to be relatively unaffected by the absence of this many men. Although a large settlement has not been found that would be this size, it may exist in some protected place that has not been found. My own opinion is that the area required substantially less work for survival and that the men's absence would not be missed for a fairly long period of time. Perhaps that was why it was called Vinland.

Could ten men sail an ocean going ship? Yes, indeed. Because of the simplicity of the rigging, it could probably be sailed by 4 people. 1 forward watch, 1 on the lee board (steering) and 2 on the mains'l.

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