The Kensington Stone: A Mystery Solved

Description

The Kensington Runestone is a 202-pound (92 kg) slab of greywacke covered in runes on its face and side. A Swedish immigrant, Olof Ohman, reported that he discovered it in 1898 in the largely rural township of Solem, Douglas County, Minnesota, and named it after the nearest settlement, Kensington. The inscription purports to be a record left behind by Scandinavian explorers in the 14th century (internally dated to the year 1362). There has been a drawn-out debate on the stone's authenticity, but the scholarly consensus has classified it as a 19th-century hoax since it was first examined in 1910, with some critics directly charging the purported discoverer Ohman with fabricating the inscription. Nevertheless there remains a community convinced of the stone's authenticity This book is the expansion of a research paper, "Runic Letters, Archive Study, and the Kensington Inscription," presented at a meeting of the Modern Language Association of America at Chicago, on December 28, 1953. The necessary field work and archive research in Minnesota were conducted in the summer of 1953 with the aid of a research grant from the Committee on Research of the Academic Senate, Southern Section, of the University of California. Important references were subsequently checked in the Royal Libraries of Stockholm and Copenhagen during the writer's sabbatical sojourn in Scandinavia in 1954-55 for the purpose of general runological study and the preparation of a work on runes, with the support of a grant from the American Philosophical Society. To the officials of the Society as well as to the Committee on Research, mentioned above, the author expresses his gratitude for generous support of this project at several stages of its development. Preface vii List of Illustrations xiii I. An American Rune Stone 3 II. The History of the Rune Stone 7 III. Authorities For and Against the Stone 10 IV. The Nature of the Problem 19 V. The Discovery of the Stone in 1898 31 VI. The Affidavits 48 VII. The Stone and the Geologists 59 VIII. Some Historical and Geographical Details 70 IX. Mr. Holand as Investigator 81 X. The Report of the Minnesota Historical Society 98 XI. The Language and the Runes 107 XII. Related Cultural Factors 121 XIII. A Certain Printed Book 131 XIV. Rival Versions of the Inscription 138 XV. "No Premeditated Ingenuities" 154 XVI. Olof Ohman 174 XVII. Conclusion 179 Notes 182 Bibliography 215 Index 223