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.

>"A large man" would lean and help himself and a canoe to balance, jump out and help push or bail in emergencies,

I see your point, but I've been in canoes where the load of tents and supplies was more than 220lbs, and even though it didn't help balance or jump out and help push it made the trip OK. ha. I would classify the argument that it couldn't have been moved by a canoe (or otherwise) a pretty weak one.

I just recalled that my wife has a metate in her garden I found years ago.It's about 100-110 pounds and nearly cubic sandstone.It was about to fall in the river from a cut bank.The only way I could find to get it out before it would fall in was on a small raft.About a three mile float was easy.Getting it up a steep muddy bank was the hard part.If I was worried about the weight of a stone on a bark canoe some willow branches underneath would distribute the weight.I was 16 when I found the metate and got it out alone but a canoe sure would have helped.

I was born in the wrong millenium. The way another poster put it, "to see what's over the next hill" made me want to quit my job, leave the wife and kids with ample provisions, and just start walking. If my son were a little older he'd be good to take along, too. Although if we were gone for five years, he'd be ten by the time we got back and would have character and strength to last a lifetime, so maybe I'll take him. I'm definitely going to need a dog, too.

If you do, you might try retracing the Kensington expedition from Hudson's Bay down into Minnesota. (Upstream on the Nelson R. (Ugh.))

They tell me these vast areas of Canada are little changed since 1362, and then see if you can really get a boat to float in the Red River to come southward to Fargo or so from Winnepeg.

Something tells me mosquitoes would be horrendous, though. Lots and lots of "Backwoods Off" will be required.

Are you familiar with Go Devils?Try godevil.com if not.Oldtown makes metal motor mounts and Osage makes wood or make your own.The different mounts will fit different types of canoes.I've used 2-10 horse but you want low weight motors.Older Tecumseh head outboards work best for me but any are fine if you balance the weight.A second motor on the right side will balance the weight and give you a spare,or if you lock it down straight forward and steer with the left you might want to get a pilots license.

I'll support the notion that the stone, if it weighs only 220 lb, could readily be transported in a canoe.

Is there any history, though, of canoe "skin-and-frame" technology among the Vikings? Might they have travelled by dugout, instead. Or actually hewed logs and constructed a plank boat? A raft doesn't seem feasible, since the trip would be upstream.

In any case, transporting the stone via water from Lake Winnipeg up the Red to within fifty-or-so miles of Kensington doesn't seem insuperable.

Lugging it on a sled those last fifty miles would've been the hard part.

If you think that is bad, a caller has suggested that not only did their wooden plank pinnace float in the Red River (which I have never seen, I live in Florida)...but that it was taken up the Buffalo River east of Fargo, then brought down a chain of lakes to Kensington and/in the Pomme de Terre (ie Potato?) River.

I would hate to have had to carry it, these sound like little more than prairie wet spots to me, but some are saying that the water table was a lot higher before the farms broke the land, and this was all just awash in those days.

Go figure.

")...but that it was taken up the Buffalo River east of Fargo, then brought down a chain of lakes to Kensington and/in the Pomme de Terre (ie Potato?) River."

The Ottertail would've gotten it closer than the Buffalo.

But, putting myself in their place, one would stick with the main stem until it became impassable. That would always afford the route of least overland travel. The main stem of the Red is the Bois de Sioux, which forms the Minnesota-Dakota border south of Fargo.

The Bois de Sioux heads in a swamp that it shares with the headwaters of the Minnesota River, just north of Traverse Lake on the Minnesota-South Dakota border. But I don't believe our voyageurs (or the Norse equivalent) would have followed the Bois de Sioux this far.

About 15 miles north of the swamp, the river forks. To a traveler headed upstream, the Rabbit River would be coming in from the left (east)while the Bois de Sioux continued south into the swamp. At this point, based on a topographical map, it appears that the Bois de Sioux turns turbid and boggy. But the Rabbit seems to have a clearly defined channel to the east.

Bois de Sioux-Rabbit River junction.

The channel doesn't last long, maybe ten miles, until the stream peters out somewhere southeast of Campbell, MN. But the Rabbit has pointed them straight for Kensington and, from there, it's 40 miles overland to the stone's resting spot.

If you'll take a look at the topo above and the adjacent quads to the east and south, you'll see that the area is criss-crossed with drainage ditches. Meaning a.) that it's very flat and b.) poorly drained. Consequently, in 1362, winter snowmelt and Spring floods would have left vast portions of this terrain under water, I betcha.

Accordingly, our intrepid venturers might've been able to float further than we thought...

And maybe the spot where the stone was placed WAS an "island" of sorts, in a maze of land and water?...Curioser and curioser, said Alice.

But they were quite sure the Buffalo had been used, because of artifacts found around Cormorant Lake north of the stone's place of finding, and that if one headed due south from said Cormorant Lake, a string of lake-oids in(ending-in)the Pomme de Terre R. were supposed to bring them within a mile or less (a k) of the place of finding?

Interesting, I didn't suppose anyone would actually know much about such remote places.

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