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Kensington Runestone Proved Authentic
By Frank Joseph
FATE :: January 2006

Scientists announced on December 10, 2005, that a controversial stone inscription has been authenticated as incontrovertible proof that 14th-century Europeans reached North America 130 years prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

“This is it,” declared Richard Nielsen, a Texas oil-industry engineer from Houston, during a press conference at the Kensington Community Center in Minnesota, “the smoking gun that proves it’s medieval.”

He was referring to a rectangular, 202-pound granite boulder featuring orderly lines of carved runes—glyphs in a written language used a thousand and more years ago by the Vikings and later Scandinavians, who left dozens of rune-inscribed stones across Scandinavia. Nielson’s runestone is special, however, because it was not discovered in Denmark, Sweden, or Norway, but about 145 miles northwest of Minneapolis, in rural Kensington, on November 8, 1898. Also, the Kensington Runestone is unlike any other inscription. It is a unique document that gives a rare peek into the medieval monastic mind.

It was found by a farmer, Olof Ohman, while he, his sons, and some neighbors were clearing a field. Part of their job was removing a 30-year-old poplar on the southern slope of a 50-foot knoll between his farm and that of his neighbor, Nils Flaaten. As they pulled the tree over, they saw that its roots were thickly entwined around a six-inch-thick gray slab, 36 inches long by 15 inches wide, covered with strange writing and lying face-down in the soil about six inches below ground level.

Cut from the grasping roots, the stone was lifted into a cart and eventually stored in a shed. Inaccurate copies of the inscription, made by Ohman and by Samuel Siverts,  were sent to Olaus Breda, professor of Scandinavian languages at the University of Minnesota at Saint Paul. University-trained linguists from the Twin Cities were able to read the runic inscription with little difficulty because it had been carved in Swedish as spoken during the High Middle Ages.

Although their initial translation was fundamentally correct, Nielsen’s more recent version is probably closer to the spirit of the original text. Covering the front and one side, it relates, “We eight Goetalanders and twenty two Northmen are on this acquisition expedition far west from Vinland. We had properties near two shelters one day’s march north from this stone. We went fishing one day. After we came home, I found ten men red with blood, dead. Ave Maria, save us from evil! I have ten men by the sea to look after our ships fourteen days’ travel from this site. Year of the Lord 1362.”

The runes appear to have been carved by a 14th-century Cistercian priest who arrived with his Scandinavian companions in what is today west-central Minnesota, where bloodshed resulted from unknown causes. The “Vinland” cited in the inscription was located in either Newfoundland, site of an earlier (and uncontroversial) Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows, or somewhere along the coast of Maine. The Goetalanders mentioned were from the Swedish island of Gotland.

Immediately after its discovery, the Kensington Runestone was almost unanimously dismissed by professional archaeologists as a deliberate hoax, even though most had never personally examined the object of their condemnation. Despite Olof Ohman’s lifelong insistence that he found the artifact as described, he was repeatedly accused of having faked it. Because he happened to be a Swedish immigrant himself, he was pilloried as a forger who wanted to twist history for his own ethnic advantage. From the day he unearthed the inscribed boulder, Olof was a bitter man ...

Read the rest of this article in the January 2006 issue of FATE

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