Science: Olof Ohman’s Runes

Eight Goths and 22 Norwegians on exploration journey from Vinland westward. We had camped by two islands one day’s journey north from this stone. We were and fish[ed] one day. After we came home [we] found ten [of our] men red with blood and dead. A.V.M. [Ave Virgo Maria] save [us] from evil. [We] have 10 men [of our party] by the sea to look after our ship[s] 14 days’ journey from this island. Year 1362.

When Farmer Olof Ohman stumbled across this laconic (but, to him, illegible) account of adventure and death, near Kensington, Minn, in 1898, he had no idea of the importance of his find. The story was carved on a 200-lb. stone he dug out of a small hill that had once been an island in an ancient lake. The inscription was written in more than 200 runes, the ancient alphabet of the Norse. Ever since the carving was first translated, the Kensington Stone has been one of the most fascinating exhibits in the history of the daring Norse seamen.

Forgery in Stone? Doubters soon spoke up to spoil the fun. Experts on old Norse writing claimed that the language was like no known Scandinavian dialect. Authorities decided that the stone was a forgery. It was probably carved, they thought, by a friend of Farmer Ohman, an unfrocked Swedish minister who was known to have had a Swedish grammar with a section on runes. During the past 50 years few real experts have even bothered to study the discredited stone.

But last week one Danish expert on old runic inscriptions announced that the Kensington Stone may be genuine, after all. In a lengthy report released by the Smithsonian Institution, Dr. William Thalbitzer admitted with true scientific caution: “I cannot but waver in my doubt . . . the inscription may be authentic.”

Support from Greenland. What first caused Thalbitzer’s doubt to waver was his study of the smaller Kingigtorssauq rune-stone discovered in 1823 near Upernavik in northern Greenland. The Greenland Stone is undoubtedly genuine, and its runes have peculiarities like those that cast doubt on the Kensington Stone.

After long study, Dr. Thalbitzer was convinced that some at least of the faults of language in the Kensington inscription may be normal for the period. At the end of the 14th Century, he says, the languages of Scandinavia were in decay and confusion. Latin letters were replacing the ancient runes, dialects were changing rapidly. These language changes, he decided, might account for the peculiarities of the Kensington Stone.

King’s Expedition. Dr. Thalbitzer does not pretend to know how eight Swedes and 22 Norwegians got to Minnesota in 1362. But he repeats a theory developed by Hjalmar R. Holand, a Norwegian-American who has long championed the Kensington Stone. In 1356, according to Holand, King Magnus Ericksson of Sweden and Norway sent an expedition under Powell Knutsson to see what had happened to the Norse colonies in Greenland. When they found that the colonists were dead or had moved elsewhere, Knutsson’s Norsemen pushed farther west. Eventually they reached Hudson Bay, and then the Great Lakes and Minnesota.

The careful Dr. Thalbitzer does not completely endorse this theory. But he does think that the Kensington Stone was condemned too quickly. “The last word,” his report says, “has not yet been spoken.”