A Clumsy, Beautiful Hoax
This is one of the great hoaxes of all time. And best of all, it's done no harm to anyone whatever.The Kensington Runestone
Roger Pinckney, Minneapolis Star Tribune,
April 12, 1998.
The controversy began in 1898, when Swedish immigrant Olaf Ohman was clearing land on his Douglas County, Minnesota farm. As the story goes, Ohman was wrestling with a particularly troublesome stump when he turned up something very strange: a broad, flat boulder carved with what looked like primitive writing.
Ohman called it "Indian writing," hauled the stone into nearby Kensington and propped it up on the sidewalk between the hardware store and bank.
Eventually, a Scandinavian passerby identified the writing. It was not Indian, he said, but Runic -- an ancient script from pre-Christian Europe. The preliminary translation was astounding:
"Eight Goths and twenty-two Norwegians on a voyage of discovery from Vinland over the west. Camped and fished on a lake with two rocky inlets three days from this stone. Came home and found ten of our number red with blood and dead. Ave Maria. Save from evil."
Runes along the side of the stone were translated as: "Have ten men watching our ship by the sea, fourteen days from this island. Year 1362."
It would be 79 years before the Minnesota Historical Society presented evidence that the by-then-world-famous Kensington Runestone was a clever fraud. They had it on good authority: a tape-recorded interview with the children of John Gran, who admitted on his deathbead in the 1920s that he had carved it.
Back in 1898, however, the stone was locally acclaimed as Viking-carved. Jubilant townspeople shipped it first to St. Paul, then to Chicago. Even then, experts in both cities pronounced it "a clumsy fraud." Ohman reburied it in his farmyard, using it as a step to enter his granary.
The stone lay there for nine years until Hjalmer Holand, a graduate student from Wisconsin, arrived to research Scandinavian immigration. He was intrigued by the story of the stone, so much so that he spent the rest of his life attempting to prove its authenticity.
Holand's research led to other artifacts: a steel for striking fire from flint, turned up north of Fargo, N.D. A battle-ax from a Red River mudbank. A broken sword plowed up near Ulen, Minn. And a series of odd holes drilled into lakeside boulders throughout northwestern Minnesota.
After digging into archives in Sweden, Holand advanced the following scenario: A Viking colony on Greenland's west coast had disappeared. In 1354, Magnus Erickson, King of Norway and Sweden, dispatched a rescue expedition. Following rumors that the lost colony had relocated to North America, the expedition poked around New England, then sailed across the Canadian Arctic into Hudson Bay -- the "salt sea" that Ohman's rock carving referred to.
The expedition proceeded upriver to what is now Minnesota lake country -- drilling holes in shoreside boulders to moor their boats -- until they were ambushed by Indians.
Much of the speculation seems reasonable enough. A lost colony is established historic fact, as is the expedition sent in search of it. And Vikings had a way of turning up in far-flung and unusual places. They colonized Iceland, are known to have at least wintered at L'Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland, carved runes on monuments in Jerusalem, terrorized Britain and conquered the north of France (still called Normandy because of the Northmen).
The Kensington battle was soon joined by Prof. Johan Holvik of Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn. Holvik and other scoffers raised some basic questions. Why did the stone just happen to turn up in a proudly Scandinavian community? What about the trip upriver from Hudson Bay? Did Vikings drag their longboats up roaring rapids?
Despite the revelation by the Historical Society in 1977, the debate defined by Holand and Holvik continues. Small towns along the trail described on the stone now celebrate the Vikings' journey -- real or imagined.
Ulen -- where the sword was discovered -- has a "Sword Days" community celebration every summer. Pelican Rapids gathered a number of "mooring stones," displaying them in the city park as genuine. Just outside of Kensington is a rambling county park on the farm where Olaf Ohman claimed he found the stone.
The famous object itself is on display at the Runestone Museum in nearby Alexandria, where it is still a major tourist attraction and the centerpiece of a collection of what are alleged to be Viking artifacts.
But fact or fancy, or whatever one chooses to call it, the runestone and its makers remain a continuing topic in cafes and coffee shops all across the region -- as they have been for a century. Ultimately, belief seems proportionate to each individual's percentage of Scandinavian blood. Those of German and Irish extraction shrug off the story as irrelevent speculation. Swedes and Norwegians fervently believe.
In 1971, Robert Asp, a Moorhead schoolteacher and Norwegian to the core, had enough of idle speculation. Asp built the Hjemkomst, a full-size replica of a Viking longship, in a potato warehouse in Hawley, Minn. It took him 10 years. Although Asp did not live long enough to see the boat in the water, his sons did. They hauled the Hjemkomst to Duluth and launched it.
The Asp boys labored through the Great Lakes, up the St. Lawrence Seaway and finally across the North Atlantic to Norway. Although the Asps did not conclusively prove that Vikings came to Minnesota, they did prove they could have sailed home.
-Roger Pinckney is a freelance writer who used to live in 56572 but has since sailed home to Daufuskie Island, South Carolina
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