What is the Kensington Runestone?

It was in 1898 that Olof Öhman, a Swedish migrant who’d settled in Minnesota, made a curious discovery. While clearing out some land he’d purchased close to the township of Kensington, he found a slab of sandstone lodged within the hard, tangled roots of a tree. His son Edward noticed some strange markings on the stone, prompting Öhman to drag the stone out and take it back to his farm.

The markings were confirmed to be Scandinavian runes, and the find became a regional sensation, covered by Minnesota journalists and put on display at a local bank. News of the stone spread across the world, as international experts weighed in on its authenticity. Today it’s on display at the Runestone Museum in Alexandria, Minnesota.

What is written on the Kensington Runestone?

The Runestone was apparently left by a group of 30 northern European explorers ‘on an exploration journey from Vinland to the west’. According to the runes, members of the party went fishing one day, then returned to their camp to find ‘ten men red of blood and dead’. The stone also says that there were other explorers left behind on the coastline, a 14-day journey away. Most tantalising of all is the date inscribed on the Runestone: 1362. That’s 130 years before the first trans-Atlantic voyage of Columbus.

Can you describe what a runestone is and what its purpose was?

A runestone is a piece of a great slab, they can be three or four metres tall and a couple of metres wide. The Vikings erected them as memorabilia for their achievements at the time, like a diary saying something like ‘Sven was here together with Torbjorn and we carved this runestone on our journey’.

Sometimes they erected them for someone who died like a king. They are very beautiful and sometimes were painted in different colours. Sometimes it’s hard to decipher what they say because the language is very different [from modern Swedish] and more like how they speak in Iceland today.

Why do think that Öhman didn’t make the runestone himself?

He had a homestead and he had to fight really hard to build a little shack. Before that, he lived in a cave with his wife and two kids for a long time before he could build it. And it seems like those academics who say he made the runestone himself, don’t understand what immigrants had to go through and the hardships they faced.

They didn’t have time to carve a runestone for half a year because they needed bread. They needed to plough the land otherwise they would lose everything.

I would have been very sceptical if after finding it, he put it on display and charged money to see it but he didn’t. He gave it away. He said, ‘I wish I never found the darn stone’.

Can you describe what a runestone is and what its purpose was?

A runestone is a piece of a great slab, they can be three or four metres tall and a couple of metres wide. The Vikings erected them as memorabilia for their achievements at the time, like a diary saying something like ‘Sven was here together with Torbjorn and we carved this runestone on our journey’.

Sometimes they erected them for someone who died like a king. They are very beautiful and sometimes were painted in different colours. Sometimes it’s hard to decipher what they say because the language is very different [from modern Swedish] and more like how they speak in Iceland today.

Why is the Kensington Runestone so controversial?

Because it would prove that Vikings or the descendants of the Vikings sailed across the Great Lakes, all the way into the heartland of the US.

Why do you believe it’s possible, Vikings could have sailed all the way to Minnesota?

Well, I say it’s an easy ride compared to all the other places the Vikings went. From the year 600AD to the years 1100-1200AD when they became Christians,the Vikings sailed down through Russia, all the way to the Middle East and even further. That is accepted as a fact because we have all the items back in Scandinavia, coins from Asia, coins from Northern Africa and fabric from India.

It would have taken them four or five days to go to Iceland, four days to go to Greenland and four or five days to go down to Newfoundland. That’s easy compared to sailing to the Middle East where you have to sail through lots of little rivers and across the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea and into the Caspian Sea.

There’s a Viking settlement in Newfoundland and people were living there for 350 years. But it was mainly a station where they repaired ships. It had blacksmiths who are working there, docks and everything for ships to come in and be repaired.

Why do they have a repair shop on the tip of Newfoundland? Because they want to go further inland, to the Hudson Bay or down to Maine or to the coast.

In my heart, I know they sailed into the big lakes of the US and came to the heartland of the US. Why stop at Newfoundland? There’s nothing up there really just a repair shop.

Looking at the stone itself, what physical proof is there that it is authentic?

There have been geological experiments being done on this stone many times now and physicists have looked at it, and the weathering of the engravings are said to be at least 300 years old.

Academia says the language is not a 14th century language from Scandinavia, and I say, ‘Oh you know exactly how they spoke?’ because no one apart from the clergy wrote anything down. Also, there are three runes on the stone that weren’t known about till 1934.

So, I asked those people from academia and the world and linguistics, ‘How come this guy who never went to school, from northern Sweden, knew three runes that no one in academia in Scandinavia knew about until the mid-1930s?’ Source: https://www.history.co.uk