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Can You Decode Them?

January 2004

by Janet Brennan

A notched rectangle and Z-rod and a triple-disk cauldron (without the usual cross bar) decorate the back of an eighth-century cross slab in the churchyard at Aberlemno. A battle scene is below the symbols. The hole penetrating the stone is a modern addition, reason unknown.

Picture this: The year is a.d. 610. You are a farmer in Scotland, walking along a path as you search for your lost cow. Suddenly you come upon a large rock standing on end alongside the path. It has three images carved on it. The top picture is a fish, below that is something that looks like a tuning fork lying on its side, and at the bottom is a hand mirror and a double-sided comb. You know what message these three carvings convey.

Now, imagine this: The year is 2004. You are a tourist vacationing in Scotland. As you drive through the northeastern part of the country, you see a tall stone standing upright along the roadside. It has three figures carved on it. The top image is two connected discs with a backwards Z bisecting it, below that is a snake also bisected with a Z, and at the bottom is a hand mirror. You have no idea what these symbols mean.

You decide to search out other similar stones, to try to discern a pattern. But you would need months to see them all, as Scotland has more than 250 of these things, known as Pictish symbol stones. Read the rest of this entry »

Vikings and Goetalanders got here 130 years before Columbus.

January 2006

by Frank Joseph

The authentic runestone found in Minnesota verifying the presence of Vikings in North America several hundred years before Columbus.

Scientists announced on December 10 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.” Read the rest of this entry »

In Greenland only ruins remain of numerous Viking homes and churches. Why did all the settlers vanish?

April 1953 - Vol 6, No 4

April 1953

By Gordon Cooper

What does the name “Greenland” suggest to you? A huge island somewhere up near the North Pole covered with eternal ice and snow, the home of a few Eskimos who hunt seals and live on blubber? I think that this is the usual picture which the name conjures up in our minds, for many of us gained our impressions of the country from the well-known hymn which begins “From Greenland’s icy mountains, from India’s coral strand.” Many probably will be surprised to learn, therefore, that far from being an almost uninhabited icy desert, as long as a thousand years ago Greenland was a flourishing country, a self-governing republic, with a population of several thousand people who made their living by farming and hunting and trading with Europe and America. But so it was! Read the rest of this entry »