Posted on 01/09/2002 12:52:12 PM PST by crystalk
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.
Best points in its favor:
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.
Worst Points Against:
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.
The answer is in the last line of the inscription on the front. "AVM deliver us from this evil".
This stone is a prayer, made more important by its being carved in stone. This is a terrified man's plea for help and is a rare insight into the Norsemen as humans.
Did they make it back home? I suspect so. They probably left before the water went down and made it back to their ship on the coast by a different route, avoiding the indians (Ojibwa?).
And that, I think is the story. Someone who is serious needs to get out to the knoll and start digging to see if they can locate other artifacts, such as datable ashes. It is a shame that this artifact has been treated so cavalierly over the years, as it could lead to further nderstanding of the Norsemen in Vinland.
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The reason that Iowa flooded was that a wet fall was followed by a heavy snowpack followed by an extremely wet spring. The amount of water that was left in Iowa fields simply could not drain fast enough. This also occurred near Prairie Du Chien, Wisconsin. Prairie flooding, I suspect, was far more common in those days, as our rivers had not been deepened and diked and our flat farm land had nt been criss crossed with drainage ditches. The Mississippi was less than half as deep as it is now. The channel is maintained at 9 feet and it is quite likely that the river average about 2 feet deep in those days.
Why don't you just look up Hjalmar Holand's book on abebooks.com, his main work is Westward from Vinland, and he also wrote a few others, bet you could get yourself a real classic for a few bucks.
This is the big Cormorant Lake just west of Detroit Lakes, Minn-- not the other Cormorant Lake in Grant County just a few miles NW of the stone...
Unlikely. Since Kensington is almost due east of the source of the Red (or Bois de Sioux, at that point).
As you describe, on a flat landscape, rivers will wander all over their flood plain, constantly scouring and depositing, leaving oxbow lakes in their wake. But this close to the source, there would not have been sufficient flowage for such a phenomenon to occur.
>Norway has the same population as Jews in Israel, some 5.3 million, and the USA has the same number of Norwegian surnamed persons as is does Jews, some 5.6 million...
Interesting...
>Denmark would add another 0.3% and Iceland some 0.1%.
Thank you for those figures! My old figures had Norse and Danes at ~1% each and Swedes ~2%. Same 4% total Scandinavian population. What is the source of your numbers?
What rivers? Canoeists instinctively wanna know about rivers. Each has its own character and intrigue.
A favorite is Big Cypress Bayou in East Texas, from Lake of the Pines down into Caddo Lake. A four-day trip over beautiful water, through big trees draped with Spanish moss, lots of game and fish...and virtually no people.
The total from the four countries in USA is still (2000 census) by surnames, some 4.9%, closer to 5 than 4...it was 6% in the 1960 census...
Compared to the difficulty of bringing back dressed game, the weight of the stone does not seem at all out of line, and I think is a non-issue.
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