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“The Algonquin language is Old Norse,” Sherwin wrote in the preface of his Vol. 4. Sherwin, a native of Norway before he moved to the U.S., began comparing the languages because he heard a New England place name before he saw it in print, and was told it was of American Indian origin.

So Old Norse had complex agglutinative syntax? Old Norse conjugated verbs with pronominal prefixes that changed according to the direct object?

Granted, I never studied Old Norse. But I'm writing in a Germanic language right now, so I think I have a pretty good idea of the basic grammatical underpinnings of Germanic.

And I can tell you as someone who has studied Algonquian languages (including, especially Delaware/Lenape), there is no reason at all to believe these languages are in any way the same. They just aren't even close. You can't just take a couple words that look that same in two languages and say they are related.

By the way, the latest research on the Walam Olum is that it is indeed a fake, as was suspected when the notoriously shady Rafinesque first came out with it. David Oestreicher, I believe, has done the work on this.