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.

It is a kind of stone called greywacke, and there was quite a bit of stone outcropping and a sharp bluff of 50 ft or so just below the hill on which it was found, and a lot of rocks there, but the story definitely was that no stones found within some hundreds of yards, if not miles, were the same type as this...

Of course glacial action thousands of years earlier must have created the kind of topography shown in those maps, wonderful! Thanks, Okie!

I thought it highly significant that just a mile or less NE of the spot was something called Lookout Mountain, which must afford a view of prairie for miles, and might have been sought out and climbed by, explorers looking for how the land lay...and what their course should be...

I live near Kensington, MN. There are not alot of lakes around that area. It's mostly FLAT farm land. Most in this area don't believe in the runestone....and they don't care. There recently was another stone similar to the "runestone" found. When the Runestone Museum (a hole in the ground....not much traffic) was going to hire experts to authenticate the stone, the pranksters came forward and admitted it was a fraud. Even showed them exactly how they did it and demonstrated. That rock went to the rockpile. I personally knew the great great grandson of Ohman. He's a theif. Got fired from his job for STEALING company money. The Kensington Runestone is a hoax.

Another tidbit. After the stone was discovered then the people in this area didn't believe it was real (The Ohman's aren't held in high esteem here). The Ohman's took the stone back out to their farm and used it for MANY years as step into the barn. The runestone resurfaced when Alexandria needed to boost their tourism. They built a shabby museum (tiny, unkept) to house the stone and lots of souveniers. A couple Ohman men killed themselves due to the backlash of the community on their tall tale.

"I thought it highly significant that just a mile or less NE of the spot was something called Lookout Mountain, which must afford a view of prairie for miles, and might have been sought out and climbed by, explorers looking for how the land lay...and what their course should be..."

The topography in the immediate area of Runestone Hill is clearly glaciated. According to the topo, the hill itself is surrounded by a marshy area and the area is shot through with pothole lakes. Given only a higher water level, the occasional hills (or hummocks) would, for all practical purposes, be islands.

That's what has been said for 104 years now... The stone is a fraud because the people who found it were low class.

Not likely that a lot of high class people would be grubbing around out in mud, digging rocks out of soil so it could be farmed...not a lot of buttons and bows. A stone isn't responsible for who finds it, I am sure the Hope Diamond was not found by a prince of the realm either.

There is a difference between honest criticism, and accusing the innocent just because they claim something unusual. Where is the EVIDENCE of fraud?

100 Years Ago, even those who rejected the stone the most, also felt that Ohman could not have been the one to do the carving, on the contrary it might have been palmed off on him (ie planted where he would find it, they felt) because he and his family were scorned...

But I had no idea this class thing was still going ON out there...

Wow, that would have been the target for explorers trying to get their bearings in the trackless prairies, allright! The place of the Runestone's finding is about 1 mile or a bit more, SW of this Ski resort, and in between are both "Lookout Mtn" and "Lake Oscar" as well as several small lakes and ponds then around "Runestone Hill" itself...

I didn't suppose anybody was even out there any more, supposed everybody had moved away or frozen or something since those pioneer days that Holand and Ohman talked about. Giants in the Earth, and all that...

The Ohman's were not "scorned" until AFTER their tall tale. I don't understand why anyone would place a stone anywhere around that area. It's flat......in the middle of nowhere. No huge lakes, rivers or streams. The biggest town close by is Alexandria. There are huge lakes....chains of them, and rolling hills there. Big Olie is the town's mascot. He's a huge Viking standing in the downtown area. The Runestone Museum is a block away.

I would give it a fifty-fifty, but it is amazing how scholars have not been able to just blow it to pieces, to the satisfaction of all...it is amazing what strengths it had...

but (just maybe) if you were trying to cross North America from north to south, from Hudson Bay to the Gulf, you would have to go up the Nelson and Red Rivers as far as you could go, and then try to get east into the Mississippi to continue on down to New Orleans, and guess what: you'd pass right thru Kensington.

That ski resort looks homey and fun, too bad it is so far from Fla. or I would come out and have a look round some time...

Thanks for your local-color input, you have made it a much more interesting thread and better than several published books (or booklets)...C.

The Red River is very narrow. You barely notice it except there is a sign on all bridges (tiny or not) that state the river's name. Crossing the Red River from Minnesota to North Dakota at Breckenridge/Wahpeton is so narrow, you could jump (it's winding and narrow the whole way to Fargo). Now, when the floods came a few years back, it almost destroyed the two towns. Once you cross the state line it is so flat, you can see forever.......I've never seen such perfectly flat farm land. Just a little extra rainfall in the spring and the farmland is under inches of water for miles (the river not affected). The rivers on the Minnesota map are very deceptive. Most are barely a foot across for miles and don't get much wider than 10 yards if at all. The only rivers worth launching a boat is the Mississippi and parts of the Minnesota.

I commend you on knowing that the Red River flows south to north. Maybe they did cross over and come through Kensington to get to the Mississippi...IF they knew it was there....,but I can't imagine them leaving the stone in the middle of nowhere (no big landmarks). The tale is they were clearing brush for farming with horses and plow....pretty thick stuff.

Once you pass Fergus Falls and head north on I94, it's flat all the way to Grand Forks (I haven't been north of that). The whole west 1/3 of Minnesota is flat practically treeless (no forests)....as you head east (and north of I94), it becomes very hilly and you see huge forests of trees....especially pines (it's beautiful and remote....called "cabin country" up here).

Andes Tower Hills is a fun place...especially the tubing. Still have a sprained thumb from a few weeks back. It's mostly a "kids" hangout......there's not much to do here during the winter in Minnesota. It's been unusually warm here and the lakes are barely frozen over. Ice houses, snowmobiles (only place to ride right now), and vehicles are going through daily. Snow is practically gone, but expecting some tonight.

There is some evidence that Norsemen had been traveling interior North America at will, and had a general knowledge of how it lay, for many centuries...

including having been involved in the large-scale mining of copper in the Lake Superior region during the Bronze Age: it had always been a mystery where enough copper could have been obtained to even HAVE a "Bronze Age" in the Old World...

To be sure. If we go back to the era from say 3000 to 1000 BC, we have thousands of tons too much copper in the Old World, and at the same time thousands of tons too much in the New (it WAS mined, but there were only very few and scattered populations in the New World anywhere, with no evidence they used copper to any extent).

It is now being whispered at last that it may have been shipped from the New World to the Old. If I live to be a 100, they may yet get to where I was when I was 15.

Too(little)in the New World.I agree.The Indians used their copper mostly as ceremonial decoration and status symbols,not the type things to be easily tossed away.Also,haven't a few pieces made of bronze been found in some of the mounds?I don't believe the Human Race is given enough credit for earlier accomplishments.Who in their right mind would spread word of treasure to their competition?I know I'd keep quiet about a new land rich for plucking and trade.

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