One warm autumn day in 1897, the American farmer Olaf Oman, along with his ten-year-old son Edward, went to uproot stumps. When one of the stumps was turned out, they saw that its roots were twisted around a huge gray stone, almost rectangular in shape.
Olaf scraped the dirt off the stone and found some carved marks on its smoothly polished surface. Despite the fact that the find weighed about 90 kilograms, Olaf and his son took it to the neighboring village of Kensington, to the community of emigrants from Scandinavia, where they put it on public display. But, since there were no experts in ancient writing among the local population, and the Swedes for some reason decided that the inscription was made in ancient Greek, the stone was sent to the Greek department of the University of Minnesota.
There one of the professors Olaus Brady recognized the runes in the writing and made the first translation of the inscription. She said the following:
We are 8 Goths and 22 Norwegians, participants of the reconnaissance voyage from Vinland to the west. Ten of our squadron remained by the sea to look after our ships 14 days from this island. We stopped at two skerries one day's journey north of this rock. We went fishing for one day. Then we returned and found 10 of our people bloody and dead. Ave Maria, deliver us from evil. The year is 1362.
Deciding that the inscription was skillfully forged, the professor nevertheless gave a copy to the Scandinavian linguists and archaeologists. They also concluded that the stone was fake. Indeed, according to the ideas of that time, no one could swim to America before Columbus, and even more so wander around Minnesota, one of the states of the Northwest Center. At the beginning of the 20th century, such an idea seemed incredible to learned minds. The find was returned to the farmer, and he adapted it as a door sill in front of the house.
Fortunately, Hjalmar Holland found out about the runestone in 1907. It was he who bought it for only $ 10, and then throughout his life he tried to solve the riddle of the strange inscription. So, having examined the trees growing near Olaf's farm by the number of annual rings, Holland came to the conclusion that their age was estimated at about 40 years. And since the first settlers in this area appeared only in 1858, it is unlikely for this reason that the find was a fake.
After a quarter of a century of research, Hjalmar Holland published the results of his work in 1932. His conclusions were bold, even implausible, at the time. We now know this about the expeditions of the Vikings, in particular, Leyva Erickson and his followers to the shores of Hudson Bay back in the X-XI centuries. But in the first half of the 20th century, it was believed that before Columbus, the North American continent was inhabited exclusively by Indians and the Eskimos in the far north.
What Holland claimed According to his theory, back in 1362, 130 years before Columbus, the Normans not only knew the northeastern coast of North America well, but also penetrated hundreds of kilometers to the west, into the central regions of the United States up to the upper Mississippi, there, where the Kensington Stone was found. By the way, he was not the only such find. So, in 1930, an iron hook, usually used by the Vikings for mooring, was found on Lake Latoka, in 1940 a Norwegian flint was found near Detroit Lake, in 1942 on one of the farms in Minnesota the handle of a Scandinavian sword of the XIIIXV centuries.
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Holland alone managed to find a dozen places in Minnesota with so-called mooring stones, which were used by the Norwegians. It was these stones, scattered along the shores of the Great Lakes, that helped Holand trace the route of the Viking voyages in 1362 and even map it. Subsequently, references to the travel of the Normans were found in historical chronicles.
According to ancient manuscripts, in 1355, by order of the Norwegian king Magnus Erickson, an expedition headed by the famous statesman of medieval Norway, Paul Knutson from Onarheim, set off for Greenland. Unfortunately, the sources do not report anything about the results of this venture. It is only known that Knutson and his team were absent for a very long time. Only a few people returned home from this expedition, and even then nine years after its start.
In Knutson's expedition, the Norwegians and Swedes, most likely, acted together, as they were recruited from the king's personal guard. And although the Swedes were undoubtedly fewer than the rest of the participants in the voyage, they, unlike the Norwegians, were taught to read and write, and, therefore, could create a runic inscription.
Apparently, the Kensington Stone really tells the story of Paul Knutson's expedition. According to the inscription, ten people died in battle, apparently during the attack of the Indians, and the rest lived for some time in the new land, exploring it and making sorties in small detachments inland. Perhaps one of these detachments did not return for some reason, and the rest were waiting for him until they lost their last hope. This explains their long, almost nine-year absence. It should be noted here that it was customary for the northern peoples of Europe to report their fate with the help of runic inscriptions. As evidenced by the Kensington Stone.
As for the disappeared Knutson's detachment, all that remains is to speculate. It looks like the Scandinavians made it all the way to the upper Mississippi, where they joined the local Mandan tribe. The Indians of this tribe attracted the close attention of ethnographers two centuries ago. And all because they were very different from all other Indian tribes in appearance, customs and religious beliefs. So, every fifth Indian had white skin and light blue eyes. Slightly less often among them were completely blond people. Unlike other Indians of the Great Plains, who led a nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle, the Mandans already lived in permanent settlements, reminiscent of the ancient structures of the Northern European peoples.
On the one hand, Holland's painstaking study of the history of Norway in order to provide an explanation of the runic inscription seems to prove the reliability of this find. On the other hand, the very presence of such a detailed inscription is not typical for people of antiquity. We can only hope that Knutson's squad was a happy exception. Be that as it may, the Kensington Stone, after all the checks for authenticity on March 11, 1948, was ceremoniously transported to the National Museum in Washington.
But his story did not end there. In December 1998, the unique artifact was subjected to detailed analysis using modern technologies. Specifically, reflected light microphotography, surface matter examination, and electron microscope scanning were used. And again, geologists came to the conclusion that the stone, before it was removed from the ground, lay in it for at least half a century.
Geologists paid attention to one more detail, the degree of weathering of the inscription and came to the conclusion that its age is close to 500-600 years. The inscription itself, of course, can still be forged, but the degree of erosion of the signs on the stone never. The far-reaching process of weathering undoubtedly confirms that the runes were applied to the stone several centuries ago. After a complex of studies, only one conclusion suggests itself: the inscription was carved by the ancient Scandinavians.
The Kensington Stone is currently the only ancient runic monument found on the American mainland. But the contribution of this find to the history of the development of the continent is truly enormous.