A message from the past
In 1898, a Swedish immigrant farmer named Olof Öhman was clearing land near Kensington, Minnesota, when he made a strange discovery. Tangled in the roots of a poplar tree was a 202-pound (92 kg) slab of greywacke sandstone. Carved into its face and side were characters that were later identified as runes, an ancient Scandinavian script. The stone, measuring roughly 30 by 16 by 6 inches (76 x 41 x 15 cm), recorded a dramatic story.
The inscription describes "8 Goths [Swedes] and 22 Norwegians on an exploration from Vinland to the west." It describes a fishing party returning to their camp to find ten of their men "red with blood and dead." The text ends with a plea, "AVM [Ave Virgo Maria] save us from evil," and mentions ten men left behind with their ships, a "14 days' journey" away. The date is carved into the stone's edge: 1362. If authentic, the Kensington Runestone places Norse explorers in North America a century before Columbus's first voyage.
The academic debate
The scholarly consensus since the stone's first examination in 1910 is that it is a 19th-century hoax. Linguists are the primary skeptics. Experts like runologist Henrik Williams of Uppsala University point out that the language, grammar, and rune forms on the stone are inconsistent with 14th-century Scandinavian scripts. They more closely resemble the Swedish spoken and written in the 19th century, with some runic forms documented in Sweden in the 1880s, just before Öhman emigrated. Many scholars suspect Öhman, perhaps with help from friends, carved the stone himself as a prank. The complete lack of any other 14th-century Norse artifacts in the region further supports the hoax theory.
Academics dismiss the stone, but a dedicated community defends the stone's authenticity. Proponents often point to geological analysis as evidence. Geologist Scott Wolter has argued that the weathering of the inscription, particularly the degradation of mica flakes within the carved runes, indicates an age far greater than 100 years. Early on, geologist Newton Horace Winchell also performed an analysis and concluded the inscription was consistent with an age of 500 years. Supporters also propose historical scenarios, such as a mission ordered by King Magnus IV of Sweden and Norway around 1355 to find Norse Greenlanders. The debate continues, comparing linguistic analysis with geological claims and historical speculation.