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The Kensington Stone

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Erik Moltke
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Extract

In 1898 a Swedish-American farmer, Olaf Ohman, cut down an aspen tree on his farm. He found enveloped in its roots a large flat stone which he only just managed to get out without ruining his axe. When his ten year old son had brushed some of the dirt from the stone, Ohman discovered that one of the faces and one of the edges were covered with strange engraved figures. It was soon decided that these had something to do with runes. This is where the saga of the Kensington stone begins: from Ohman's farm to a shop window in Kensington, to Prof. O. J. Breda in Minneapolis, to Prof. George O. Curme, back to Ohman's farm condemned as a blatant forgery. Here it lay despised as ‘a stepping stone near his granary for eight years, without further notice’. It was ‘rediscovered’ by Hjalmar Holand, bought by him, and he devoted his life (three large books and innumerable articles) to attempting to prove that the inscription was genuine. Finally in its Jubilee year 1948 it was given the place of honour in the National Museum at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington as one of the finest pre-Columbian monuments of America.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 25 , Issue 98 , June 1951 , pp. 87 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1951

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References

1 In the newspaper Information, of 9th Feb. 1949, on the basis of the material brought back by Brøndsted, later published in the journal Danske Studier, 1949–50, with a linguistic examination of the inscription by Dr Harry Andersen.

2 German original : ‘Die Echtheit des Kensington-Steins ist erwiesen und damit die Anwesenheit von Skandinaviern in Amerika volle 130 Jahre vor Columbus nicht mehr zu bezweifeln’.

3 This j is one of the details that exposes Holand’s lack of knowledge in most elementary things, since he is pleased to refer to a couple of Norwegian diplomas which in his opinion show many examples of j. These are in fact not j’s but long i’s which are known to have been used from the Middle Ages up to more recent times as a sort of graphic (but not phonetic) variation, a principle which is shown for example in such discoveries as ‘vi’ (we) written ‘wij’, or the Roman numeral viii (VIII) as viij, without anybody, who has some knowledge of old writing, dreaming of talking about a letter j (a consonant—or semi-vowel) without a distinct sound value.

4 Hagen attempts to explain these words plausibly, but unsuccessfully.

5 Holand succeeded in giving a sort of historical background to the inscription. He produced a letter from the Swedish king Magnus Eriksson dated 1354. In this the king commands the Norwegian noble Paul Knutsson to fit out an expedition to Greenland, there to restore declining Christianity. Holand now imagines that the Paul Knutsson expedition arrived in Greenland, but, not finding the Norsemen there because they had either been killed off by the Eskimos or else had emigrated to Vinland, took the expedition to Vinland (America) to find the backsliders and drag them back to the Kingdom of God by the hair. Hence the inscription on the Kensington Stone is a record of what happened to some members of the expedition and a warning of what Fate had in store for the rest.