In 1893, the world’s attention turned to Chicago, where a grand spectacle was being staged. The Chicago World’s Fair was a feat of planning and engineering, featuring an entire district of beautiful whitewashed buildings with neoclassical facades that came to be known as the White City. Within these buildings were attractions of all sorts, from museums of anthropology to demonstrations of locomotive technology. But the express purpose of the fair, also called the Columbian Exposition, was to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World in 1492. Some, however, took exception to this, and not for the obvious reason that the New World was already inhabited by a rich indigenous culture and civilization. Rather, they took umbrage with giving Columbus credit for discovering the New World because they argued that the honor belonged to others. Numerous countries celebrated their contributions to civilization in pavilions at the fair, but Norway went further. They sent a dozen men on a replica Viking sailing ship across the Atlantic, and then displayed the vessel at the exposition, asserting that credit for the discovery of America rightly belonged to them. Indeed, of all the theories of Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact, or claims that Christopher Columbus was not the first European to cross the Atlantic and find the New World, this one, that Vikings were the first people from Europe to visit North America, has always stood out as far more credible than the rest. There is literary evidence for the claim in the form of the Vinland Sagas, Icelandic prose narratives that relate the stories of Viking exploratory ventures. In them, we learn that around the year 1000 CE, Leif Eriksson went off course on his way from Norway to Greenland and discovered a new land rich in grapes or currants, a land which he called Vinland. Thereafter, this Vinland is said to have been discovered and for a time settled by other Vikings. We know that this claim was circulated as early as 1075 CE, for the medieval German chronicler Adam of Bremen wrote about their discovery of some mystery “islands” deep in the Atlantic; however, the actual location of Vinland was long debated. In the 16th century, when European geographers wrote about the land they called America, Icelanders were certain that this was the Vinland of their Sagas, which had only actually been recorded in the 13th and 14th centuries, hundreds of years after the events they describe. The rest of the world, however, did not yet recognize their claim of discovery. In 1770, a Genevan scholar, Paul Henri Mallet, considered the possibility in his book, Northern Antiquities, but the Icelandic Sagas themselves, and by extension their claims about Vinland, did not receive much attention until the mid-19th century. In 1837, the Danish antiquarian Carl Christian Refn advocated for the recognition of Norse colonization of North America, and by the time of the Chicago World’s Fair, it was a very well-known notion, even though no concrete, archaeological evidence had ever been turned up. What a wonder it was, then, when, only five years later, just such evidence showed up in the form of an inscribed stone, specifically a runestone, such as the many thousands found all over Scandinavian countries like Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. This runestone told the tale of an expedition of Northmen on a journey westward from Vinland, and astonishingly, it was not discovered very near to the locations typically believed to have been Vinland, like Newfoundland or Maine or the Chesapeake Bay. No, this runestone was discovered in central Minnesota, and it bore the date 1362. If it is genuine, it completely rewrite the history of European settlement and exploration in North America. But can it be believed?

As longtime listeners of the podcast must know by now, I love me some stories about inscribed stones whose messages appear to rewrite history but whose authenticity are dubious. Before I ever started the podcast, I wrote a whole novel about Joseph Smith and the beginning of Mormonism, and his claims, about finding inscribed plates that tell the story of the ancient ancestors of Native Americans being Jews who made their way to America in the dim and distant past, marked the beginning of my fascination with such hoaxes, along with my interest in dubious theories of Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact. My interest in such stories was in full display when I started the podcast as well, as I was perhaps even more interested in the story of the Dare Stones, the inscribed stone fraud connected to the lost colonists of Roanoke, than I was in the story of the Lost Colony itself. If you haven’t already, check out my rewritten and remastered version of both those episodes, which I just released as a bonus episode. After my series on the Lost Tribes of Israel in 2021, I really delved into claims like these in my episode Written in Stone: The Archaeological Frauds of Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact Theories, in which I told the story of Dighton Rock, another stone whose inscription was claimed to have been proof of Norse contact with the New World by none other than the aforementioned Danish champion of the theory, Carl Christian Refn, though no one could really agree on the markings of Dighton Rock, seeing also Phoenician, Portuguese and Native American pictograms. As that episode went on, I discussed the Pittsfield phylactery, a potential inspiration for Joseph Smith claims about the Hebraic descent of Native Americans, as well as the Kinderhook Plates, another Mormon hoax, and the Newark Holy Stone and Michigan Relics, all very famous and very fake inscribed stone forgeries. If you never listened to that episode, it would make a great follow-up to this one, so check it out. The reason I didn’t cover the Kensington Runestone and other American runestones in that episode is that it cannot be easily dismissed in a paragraph or two, as the others could be.

Anne Stine Ingstad leading archeological excavations at L'Anse aux Meadows, 1963.

Unlike claims about the Hebraic origin of Native Americans, which have been convincingly refuted for a very long time, the claim that North America was visited first by Norsemen has been proven true! As early as 1914, a historian named William Munn from Newfoundland began to theorize the locations of Norse settlements in the New World, namely Helluland and Vinland. Specifically, Munn suggested Vinland was actually located on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, at a place he called “Lancey Meadows,” which is really L’Anse aux Meadows, or “the bay with grasslands.” The prevailing theory of the day, however, was that, since the name Vinland suggested a land rich in wild grapes, then the locations must have been further south, since it was then falsely believed grapes could not grow north of Massachusetts. However, in 1960, Norwegian archaeologists explored L’Anse aux Meadows, led by a local guide to what he called an “old Indian camp,” and discovered the grass-covered remnants of old Norse structures. Thereafter excavating the site and finding artifacts of bone, bronze, and stone, they have convincingly proven through comparison with similar encampment sites on Greenland and Iceland that this was indeed a Norse settlement, though whether it was the storied Vinland remains a point of debate. Some scholars still suggest that the lack of grapes at L’Anse aux Meadows means the Vinland site remains to be found further south down the Atlantic coast. However, while there is some indication that there may have been Viking trading outposts north of there, and west of Greenland, on the Avayalik Islands, Willows Island, and Baffin Island, no evidence of further Viking exploration south and west or into mainland North America has ever turned up. So the fact that, at the height of American interest in this topic, a runestone claiming to have been left by Vikings who had traveled inland from Vinland was found some 2000 miles south and west of Newfoundland, all the way on the other side of the Great Lakes in Minnesota, is understandably hard to believe. But as I said, it cannot be easily dismissed, as there are some scholars who, though outliers in the academic community on this topic, continue to argue that the Kensington Runestone is genuine and represents proof of far more extensive Norse exploration of North America than has previously been established.

The runestone was reportedly discovered in November of 1898 by a Swedish farmer named Olof Ohman. The story goes that he and his son were clearing trees from their land at the time, and they were working on uprooting a particular poplar or aspen tree (versions of the story vary on this point). This entailed digging around the tree, cutting through the roots, and winching it out. On this occasion, though, Ohman claimed to have discovered a 200 pound slab of rock grasped within the roots that had to be removed. Ohman’s 10-year-old son, Edward, was the first to notice the strange inscription on the stone, according to a later affidavit, and Olof Ohman called a neighbor over, Nils Flaten, to examine it. This stone would have a long and storied career, persisting through many eras during which it was variously decried as a fraud and then authenticated as a genuine medieval artifact in a scholarly debate that continues to this day. At first, it was displayed in a local bank window, and soon its runic inscription was roughly translated by a Scandinavian languages professor. The content of its message would be refined through the years with further study, such that today we recognize that its irregular runes bear a message in Old Swedish on its front face that translates to: “8 Götalanders and 22 Northmen on …exploratory journey from Vinland west of…We had a camp by two skerries, one day’s journey north from this stone. We were fishing one day. After we came home we found 10 men red from blood and death. AVM save from evil,” AVM being largely thought to mean “Ave Maria.” On the side of the stone tablet is a further message: “There are 10 men by the sea to look after our ships 14 days’ journey from this island. Year 1362.” Shortly after it was translated, it was sent to Northwestern University, where other professors declared it a modern forgery, determining that, though it claimed to be from the 14th century, its language was not medieval. Chicago newspaper articles also reported on the further indication that it was not medieval because the entire bottom left corner of the stone appeared to be covered in a layer of cement, which must have been present when it was carved because a portion of the runes had been engraved into it. So much for the strange runestone, it seemed, and Olof brought it home, discarding it on his property facedown and using it carelessly as a steppingstone to more easily access his granary.

The story of the Kensington Runestone was not to end there, though, for it was resurrected by a Norwegian-American historian of the Midwest, who made it a career goal to authenticate the stone. He purchased it from Ohman and collected affidavits from witnesses of its discovery. The state historical society thereafter took a further interest and assigned an archaeologist to re-examine it. This scholar viewed the cement substance on the stone’s corner as a “calcite layer,” and though he did admit that calcite would disintegrate quickly in the elements, he suggested that because the stone had been found buried, it had been preserved. This new scholarly support for the stone’s authenticity resulted in its being displayed prominently in the Smithsonian Museum of Washington, D.C., for two years, which then drew further scholarly criticism, this time from linguists and runologists who argued with renewed passion that, through comparison with other medieval runic inscriptions, it was clear the runes on the Kensington stone were of modern, 19th century origin. Nevertheless, a museum in nearby Alexandria, Minnesota, was dedicated to the runestone, and it became something of a mascot for not only Scandinavian immigrants to America, but also for the state of Minnesota itself, which rebranded itself the “Birthplace of America” at its New York World’s Fair pavilion in 1964. And since then, a few outlier academics have bucked consensus by arguing that there are indeed medieval examples of some of the stranger uses of language and runes on the tablet, and that geological evidence can be marshaled to support the stone’s authenticity. Proponents of the stone’s authenticity even go so far as to invent entire historical scenarios, suggesting the travelers who left the stone in Minnesota may not have been from among the original Vinland settlers, but instead were from a later expedition sent westward in 1350 by King Magnus, ruler of Sweden and Norway, in order to reconnect with trans-Atlantic colonies with whom they’d lost contact. Here we begin to see numerous parallels to the Lost Colony of Roanoke. In order to explain the presence of the stone in Minnesota, it’s speculated that the colonies at Greenland and Vinland were found abandoned, and the expedition struck inland, believing the lost Viking colonists may have done likewise. And in a striking parallel to the Dare Stones hoax, one theory has it that the Scandinavian explorers actually hadn’t made it that far inland, but that some Dakota Native Americans had decided to lug the 200-pound stone to that location. Keep in mind that there is no convincing evidence for these scenarios. They rely only on the dubious Kensington Runestone for proof, and this demonstrates convincingly that, in rejecting Occam’s Razor and the by comparison simple and more probable explanation that the Swedish runestone suddenly discovered in the wake of the Columbian Exposition by a Swede was a 19th century hoax, the proponents of the Runestone simply want to believe it’s real and will go to great lengths to convince themselves that it is.

Rather than speculate on the circumstances that might make the artifact genuine, let’s examine the evidence that it is not, first by considering the content of the stone’s runic inscription. The message appears to indicate that, much like the first Dare Stone hoax, this one was meant to stay in one place as a marker (go back to my first two episodes, which I just remastered, to understand this reference). This is clear from the mention of their fishing trip, camping “by two skerries, one day’s journey north from this stone.” Such directions would be meaningless unless the stone were meant to be erected as a kind of landmark or monument, which was common of such runestones back in Sweden and Norway. If we can safely reject as unlikely the theory that Dakota native peoples chose to bear a 200-pound stone far from where it had been placed, then we can begin to think about the logic of the statement that this encampment in Minnesota was west of Vinland, which tracks, but that they left men with their ships 14 days’ travel westward. This makes less sense. The location of Vinland is understood to be on the Atlantic coast, whether you want to locate it at Newfoundland or some as yet undiscovered location on the New England coast. This would mean far more than 14 days’ travel on foot to reach Kensington, Minnesota. For this to be accurate, then, these medieval explorers’ ship would have had to be anchored in the Great Lakes. However, the first ships known to sail in the Great Lakes had to be built and launched there because Niagara Falls and the rapids of the St. Lawrence River prevented passage all the way from the Atlantic. However, a 19th-century forger might have mistakenly believed that Vikings could sail right into the Great Lakes because the Norwegian Viking replica ship had famously crossed the Atlantic and sailed across the Great Lakes right up to the Chicago World’s Fair. This, however, was only possible because of the construction of the Erie Canal in 1825. Proponents of the Kensington Runestone will typically suggest, however, that the waterways of the Americas had greatly changed between the 14th century and the 19th century, pointing to the mention of islands in the runic inscription as proof. The runes say the travelers camped a day north on two “skerries,” which were rock islets, and indicate that the stone was being erected on “this island.” As there were no bodies of water with islands in the area, and as Olof Ohman’s farm was certainly no island, believers must assert that some boulders somewhere might have been skerries in a wetter era. There is no explaining the calling of Ohman’s farm an island, though.

Olof Ohman displaying the runestone at a local carnival, 1927. Image courtesy Minnesota Historical Society.

In order to explain away these issues, they are typically suggested to be problems of translation. Perhaps the words translated as “skerries” and “island” meant something else. Indeed, some of the most spirited defenses of the Kensington Runestone’s authenticity are linguistic in nature. While most experts have determined that the translated language of the runes is far closer to 19th century Swedish than to the Old Swedish of the Middle Ages, more recent scholarship by defenders of the stone have shown through comparison to medieval charters written in Old Swedish that some of the unusual usage can be found in medieval Swedish writings. Nevertheless, the examples cited are so rare and non-standard that it remains improbable that so many of these unusual words would be present in one text, and some words, like the preposition “from” and the word translated as “journey of discovery,” have never been found used in any medieval text. While these words that don’t seem to have been in medieval usage were common in 19th-century Swedish, there were still some puzzling terms that were not in 19th-century usage, suggesting that, if it were forged, the forger would have had to have some knowledge of medieval Swedish. But in the 1950s, it was discovered that Olof Ohman had in his possession a book called The Well-Informed Schoolmaster that contained these Old Scandinavian words in a section on the history of the Swedish language. Then there are the runes themselves, the script used to write the stone’s Old Swedish message. Its runes have long puzzled both those who debunk and those who authenticate the stone, as they simply do not comport with most known medieval runic inscriptions, but neither do they correspond with more modern runic scripts. This has led to interesting theories about the person who inscribed it, be they medieval traveler or forger. Some say they invented a polyglot runic system all their own, while others say they must have been a scholar using Roman scribal practices that they adapted into a runic script. A simpler explanation emerged in 2004, though, when a folklore research institute discovered a 19th century runes list compiled by a Swedish tailor, which provides both a medieval runic alphabet and a later variant runic code, dubbed the Secret Style, used by traveling Swedish workers. And so, now we know that the most unusual words and characters of the runic inscription, the parts that long puzzled all who examined it, may have been known by Olof Ohman or other Swedish immigrants who had settled in that area, as they were freely communicated in extant schoolbooks and may have been commonly used as a kind of journeyman code by Swedes of their economic class.

It seems inescapable now that we examine the man Olof Ohman himself. Unsurprisingly, since he was a Swede, and he just happened to find a runestone such as the many that were known to stand in Sweden, whose runes seemed to translate into an approximation of Old Swedish, all just a few years after the stunt in which a replica Viking ship sailed to nearby Chicago to assert that the Norse had been the first to settle America, suspicion quickly settled on him. However, it should be emphasized that there is no irrefutable evidence that Ohman was the perpetrator of this hoax. And actually, numerous character witnesses have sworn to his honesty and could not possibly imagine, if he had involved himself in such a hoax, that he would also involve his 10-year-old son in such a way. And certainly the fact that Ohman simply discarded the stone and used it as a step with zero regard for its preservation after it was declared a modern inscription does at first blush seem to indicate that he didn’t really have a dog in the fight. However, we might also imagine that, having been involved in such a hoax, he might have simply considered it failed and worthless after it was immediately seen through, which would explain his disregard for the stone just as well. Some have suggested that if it was a hoax, it may have been the work of another Swedish-American who had immigrated to the area, for there was a burgeoning community there. One suspect was a schoolteacher named Sven Fogelblad, whose education may have given him the knowledge needed to compose the inscription, and another possible co-conspirator was John Gran, believed by some to have chiseled the message. However, for this conspiracy to work, Olof Ohman still likely had to have been involved, since he was close friends with them, and since it was buried on his land and he was the one who dug it up and started showing everyone. Just as there are character witnesses who say Ohman would never do such a thing, others said that Ohman and Fogelblad were an iconoclastic pair, and such a prank would not have been out of character for them. And there are further claims that John Gran admitted to the conspiracy in a deathbed confession, or at least a sickbed confession, to his son, but evidence for this confession is likewise weak. There is also the fact that a book with the Old Swedish words from the stone was later, after Olof’s death, found to have been in his possession. But owning a Swedish schoolbook is not proof of anything, and according to some reports, if Ohman were involved, no one in his family believed it. While it’s distasteful to bring this up and speculate about it, some who defend Ohman against charges being involved in the fraud point out that both Ohman’s son and daughter took their own lives in separate incidents years apart, and it’s asserted they did so because the stain on their family name was so shameful to them. However, we have no evidence that their tragic suicides were in any way caused by the accusations against their late father, and perhaps just as likely is the fact that both siblings suffered unrelated depression. Both heredity and environment are believed, after all, to contribute to suicide risk. In the end, all we really know is that Ohman dug up a runestone that anyone might have buried there.

Another Midwestern Runestone, the Heavener stone. Image courtesy the Oklahoma Historical Society.

While evidence of a conspiracy is weak to nonexistent, geological evidence of a fraud is, if you’ll excuse the pun, concrete and even more convincing than the linguistic evidence. As with the inscription, archaeologists and geologists on both sides of the issue have gone back and forth on this topic, with some arguing the layer of what appeared to be cement was a natural calcite vein or suggesting that it was a lime mortar such as the kind the Norse were known to use, and others comparing the aging of certain mineral elements in the stone to other stones like old tombstones, though such comparisons of lithologies are problematic, especially since the stones they compared them to were sometimes as far away as Maine. One of the most recent and most thorough examinations, by geologist Harold Edwards in 2020, shows the Kensington Runestone is very unlikely to be authentic. Edwards identified the calcite encrustation as stucco of the sort commonly used in the 19th-century, and pointed out that while 14th-century Norsemen were known to use such mortars, explorers traveling far afield in a strange land were unlikely to be carrying with them the barrels of lime they would have needed to make it. Furthermore, he identified the stone as a kind of flagstone that was being used in Minnesota for sidewalks in the 1890s. Scratches on its reverse side that had previously been mistaken for glacial striations he identified as tool marks, and the kinds of tools that would have been needed by the Norse to make the stone, including a grinding wheel, would again, not have been carried around by explorers. Moreover, there were plentiful nearby limestone boulders that would have been much easier for 14th century Scandinavians to break and cut and carve, and some of the marks on the Runestone, specifically the word dividers, appear to have been made with a 19th-century conical punch. In fact, all the runes measure exactly one inch, a standard of measurement that medieval Norse explorers would not have used. While it was long argued that the stone being found within the roots of a tree proved its age, and that root marks could be observed on it, Edwards could find no such marks. He points out, also, that though the stone logically would have been created to stand upright above ground, the calcite-rich stucco would have quickly been eroded and destroyed if exposed to weather for any significant amount of time before the stone was buried, and that the stone was weighted in such a way that it was more likely to have naturally fallen with the inscription side up. This meant that, since it was discovered with the inscription face down, it was more likely to have been purposely buried. And while it is true that the calcite stucco would have been better preserved belowground, it still would have degraded and actually faster if it were buried so long beneath an aspen tree and wrapped up in its roots. Edwards therefore concluded that the stone was a hoax created not long before its 1898 discovery.
While the scholarly debate over the Kensington Runestone has raged over the years, further evidence of medieval Norse contact in the Midwestern United States would have certainly gone a long way to authenticating it. As it happens, in 1923 another runestone did turn up, this time in Oklahoma, near Heavener. Then in 1967, another was discovered near Poteau, Oklahoma, and in 1969, two more in Shawnee. Finally, in 2001, the same strange letters from the Kensington Runestone, AVM, long believed to mean Ave Maria, were discovered carved into a lichen-covered boulder near the Kensington Rune Stone Park, a historical site preserved at the location of Ohman’s farm, where the original stone was found. However, rather than any of these stones actually serving to confirm the existence of Vikings in medieval Minnesota, they actually help to prove that it was a hoax. The Heavener stone is believed to be of 19th-century origins as well, carved by Scandinavian immigrants to Oklahoma who may have been inspired by the find in Kensington, and the rest of the Oklahoma stones were so clearly of modern origin, with freshly carved runes, that they are universally acknowledged to be hoaxes. As for the AVM stone, shortly after its discovery in 2001, some grad students came forward to say they had carved it back in 1985 as a fun prank and a test of the public’s credulity. But perhaps the most convincing evidence that all of the inscribed runestones of the Midwestern United States are hoaxes, aside from the obvious fact that they were discovered during a time of revived interest in medieval Viking exploration in places where Scandinavian immigrants had settled and formed communities, is the fact that no other signs of Viking settlements have ever been discovered. Consider L’Anse Aux Meadows, the likeliest candidate we have for Vinland and the only confirmed location of medieval Norse contact with the Americas. This settlement could be confirmed because of the signs they left behind: their abandoned artifacts and the remnants of their buildings. Without such an archaeological site, and with only these dubious stones to stand as evidence, the belief that Scandinavians settled the Midwest simply collapses under the weight of its presuppositions.

Until next time, remember, scholars too can sometimes be duped by hoaxes, and when one decides to stake their entire reputation on one, they can end up being the most clever and convincing proponents of such lies.

West of Vinland: The Controversy of the Kensington Runestone

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