Kensington Runestone: Its 1910 Panel’s Own Expert Said No

What was found in 1898?

According to the 1910 report, Ohman was having timber cleared from a patch of land, and his men were grubbing out stumps (Exhibit A, p. 1). The stone lay face down under about six inches of soil, on the slope of a knoll that rose from a marsh. Ohman, his sons, aged 12 and 10, and a neighbor, Nils Olof Flaaten, were there at the finding or just after. A poplar or aspen had grown above the stone, its roots spread around it.

Illustration

An illustration of an imagined scene of the kind the 1910 report describes: stumps being grubbed out on a Minnesota farm in November 1898. Not a picture of the find; the stone is not shown.

Nobody recorded the ground the way an excavator would. What survives is testimony, gathered by the committee more than a decade later, and a pencil sketch of the stump that Samuel Olson of Kensington drew from memory (Exhibit A, pp. 2–3, 25). A dig record would have described the layers the stone lay in and what lay with it; the stratigraphy page shows what such a record can settle and what it cannot.

The stone was soon shown in a Kensington drugstore, then sent to Minneapolis, where Professor O. J. Breda examined it, and to Evanston, Illinois, where Professor George O. Curme did. Both pronounced it fraudulent, the report says, so it went back to Ohman in March 1899 (Exhibit A, pp. 5–6). The report does not give their reasons. The stone then served as a stepping stone near Ohman’s granary for eight years, until Hjalmar Rued Holand obtained it in 1907 and brought it to the Society.

What does the stone say?

Holand published a translation in Harper’s Weekly on October 9, 1909, and the 1910 report printed the runic text in Latin letters (Exhibit A, p. 6). Rendered into English from that text (translated by Hoax and Hindsight), the face reads: eight Goths and twenty-two Norwegians on a voyage of discovery from Vinland in the west; a camp at two skerries, a day’s journey north of the stone; a day of fishing, and ten men found bloody and dead on the return. It ends with the letters A V M and a plea for deliverance from evil. The edge adds ten men by the sea to watch the ships, fourteen days’ journey from this island, and the year 1362.

The text of face and edge in English, translated for this page from the runic text as printed in 1910. No rune shapes are drawn. The 1910 committee judged “fourteen” more likely than “forty-one” for the edge’s number (Exhibit A, p. 47).

The numbers are cut with unusual number signs, which the committee counted in the stone’s favor (Exhibit A, p. 46), and the committee read A V M as a prayer to the Virgin Mary, common in 14th-century Scandinavia (Exhibit A, p. 33).

The word Vinland ties the stone to a larger claim: that Norse sailors reached the American mainland long before Columbus. The Kensington stone is not the only object offered as proof of it. The Vinland Map, another piece of supposed Norse evidence, was called a forgery by Yale in 2021, on the strength of a modern pigment in its ink.

What did the 1910 committee decide?

On April 21, 1910, the Museum Committee resolved that it “renders a favorable opinion of the authenticity of the Kensington rune stone” (Exhibit A, p. 48). The same sentence set a condition. A competent specialist in the Scandinavian languages, chosen by the committee, had to check the report’s references and approve its conclusions. The five members who signed were Edward C. Mitchell, F. J. Schaefer, O. D. Wheeler, N. H. Winchell and Warren Upham.

How the 1910 approval ran: a conditional resolution in April, a reserved conclusion in May, and a rejection from the specialist in July, all printed together in December (Exhibit A, pp. 47–49).

The Society’s Executive Council did not adopt the opinion. On May 9, 1910, it voted to print the report with a statement that the Council and Society “reserve their conclusion until more agreement of opinions for or against the rune inscription may be attained” (Exhibit A, p. 48). The committee then chose Professor Gisle Bothne of the University of Minnesota as its specialist.

Bothne’s reply, dated July 19, 1910, is printed in the report itself. He wrote that he had long agreed with the leading authorities of Norway and Sweden, naming among them Magnus Olsen, Bugge, Noreen and Montelius, in holding that the language was too modern and faulty. He found the testimony about the find unconvincing and closed plainly: “I do not consider the Kensington stone authentic” (Exhibit A, p. 49). He proposed that the stone go to Norway “to be examined by expert runologists,” adding that nothing else would settle the matter.

So the condition the committee set was not met. The report printed the committee’s favorable resolution and the specialist’s rejection side by side. In June 1910, the Illinois Historical Society had also published an adverse paper by the philologist George T. Flom, who called the inscription modern (Exhibit A, p. 50).

Can letter forms and words date the stone?

The case against the stone in 1910 rested on language. The objectors, summarized in the report as experts in the Scandinavian languages, held that several words and letter forms on the stone were not in use in 1362 (Exhibit A, pp. 34–35). Each objection works like a terminus post quem, the earliest date a thing can have, set by its newest part. If a form first appears in 1495, an inscription that uses it can be no older than 1495, whatever date it carries.

Five objections that came with a year, set against the stone’s own date. Every year is an earliest known use cited in the 1910 report, not a proven first use (Exhibit A, pp. 34–41, 50–52).

The dated objections and the committee’s replies, one row per form (CSV) (where the data comes from) Data: The Kensington Rune Stone: Preliminary Report to the Minnesota Historical Society by its Museum Committee (1910)

The committee’s answer goes to the weakness of every floor built from words: a dictionary gives the earliest use its compiler found, not the first use in speech. The report listed words that Kalkar dated to 1550, 1575 and 1610 but that appear in documents of 1329, 1250 and 1241 (Exhibit A, p. 39). It argued that the 1910 objectors were comparing a single inscription with a “usage,” and that usage is uncertain (Exhibit A, p. 37).

That reply works best for single words with small gaps: the committee itself counted only 38 years between 1362 and about 1400 for po. It does not answer the pattern, and no reply to the letter ö, said to appear in 1495, turned up in the pages read here. In this page’s reading, one borrowed word can be older than its dictionary entry, but a run of separate forms, each dated later than 1362, is harder to set aside. Bothne, who had examined the committee’s report, was not persuaded (Exhibit A, pp. 48–49).

What do the tree and the weathering show?

The committee leaned on the tree. Witnesses said a poplar had grown over the stone with roots flattened against it, and the report gave their estimates of the tree’s age as at least ten, twenty to thirty, or about forty years (Exhibit A, p. 2). From ring counts of other poplars from the farm, shown to witnesses in 1910, the committee judged the tree nearer fifty than ten years old (Exhibit A, p. 3).

What the tree can say. An age of 10 years puts the stone in the ground by 1888; an age of about 50 years, by about 1848. The year 1362 lies far off this scale (Exhibit A, pp. 2–3, 26).

The tree-age estimates and the burial years they imply (CSV) (where the data comes from) Data: The Kensington Rune Stone: Preliminary Report to the Minnesota Historical Society by its Museum Committee (1910)

A tree sets a terminus ante quem, a latest date: the stone was in the ground before the tree grew over it. Even the oldest estimate reaches only to about 1848, which is 486 years short of 1362, so the tree bears on who placed the stone, not on when it was carved.

Ohman took the first part of his farm in 1890, and the committee argued that a tree of the size most witnesses described could not have grown in the eight years he had owned it (Exhibit A, p. 26). In the same paragraph it allowed that the stone could have been placed while an earlier owner held the land, and said it had not looked into that.

The weathering was read both ways inside the same report. It states that “The first impression derived from the inscription is that it is of recent date, and not 548 years old” (Exhibit A, p. 14). Then it built a scale of weathering stages that gave the cuts about 500 years, while warning that the figures were rough estimates open to personal error. The report also quotes the Wisconsin state geologist W. O. Hotchkiss estimating the time since the runes were cut at “at least 50 to 100 years” (Exhibit A, p. 16).

Who carved it, and why was it believed?

No test or document read for this page names a carver. The 1910 report followed rumors that Ohman knew runes and found a Swedish grammar of 1840 among his books that had belonged to a former preacher, Sven Fogelblad (Exhibit A, pp. 18–19). The committee treated the rumors as unproved and vouched for Ohman’s honesty; Ohman wrote that he did not remember writing runes anywhere (Exhibit A, pp. 5, 24). Those are a committee’s judgment and a finder’s own statement, and this page takes them as testimony, not as proof either way.

The stone on display, photographed in 2018. The pale area at lower left may be the layer of calcite the 1910 report describes on the inscribed face (Exhibit A, p. 5). Photograph, not a reconstruction.

Why the stone kept its believers is a separate question from who made it. According to the summary of his 2015 book, the historian David M. Krueger found that belief in the stone became part of how a local Nordic community saw itself, and that its story served for years as the basis of civic celebrations (Exhibit E). The same summary says advocates still promote it “despite the overwhelming evidence that it was a hoax.”

If the stone is the hoax that summary calls it, those findings meet this site’s test for the wish-shaped fake, a forgery that published studies show was accepted partly because it fit what its audience expected. The fit is this page’s reading of the summary, not Krueger’s term. The pull was local, and the specialists consulted in 1899 and 1910 were not swayed.

The stone also traveled. According to Erik Moltke, writing in Antiquity in 1951, it was shown at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington in 1948 (Exhibit C). In 1982 Robert A. Hall Jr. published a book arguing that it is genuine, read here only by its title in a review record (Exhibit D). Runic scholarship still returns to it: in 2019 Futhark, a journal of runic studies, printed “The Dialect of the Kensington Stone” by Staffan Fridell and Mats G. Larsson, read here only as a bibliographic entry (Exhibit F).