Kensington Runestone
A slab found in Minnesota in 1898, claiming to record a Scandinavian expedition in 1362. Runologists reject it essentially unanimously, and the grounds are linguistic rather than archaeological: the language is too modern by about five hundred years.
This is not evidence
At a glance
- Alphabet
- None. The characters imitate medieval runes, but several of them belong to no row known from the medieval period.
- Date
- Claims 1362; carved in or shortly before 1898
- Found at
- Solem Township, Douglas County, Minnesota, United States
- Now
- Runestone Museum, Alexandria, Minnesota
The text
Why none is reproduced here.
Not reproduced. Setting it out in the same block this site uses for genuine inscriptions would put it on the same footing as them, which is exactly the confusion this entry exists to undo. The wording that gives it away is quoted below, where it does some work.
Discovery
Turned up late in 1898 on land farmed by Olof Ohman, a Swedish immigrant, in Solem Township, Douglas County, Minnesota, reportedly tangled in the roots of a tree he was clearing. It has been in and out of scholarly attention ever since and is now displayed in a museum built around it at Alexandria, Minnesota.
Why it matters
Its significance is entirely modern: it is the best-known runic object in North America and the reason a great deal of runic misinformation circulates there. As evidence about runes it shows nothing, which is why no entry in this dictionary cites it. What it does illustrate well is how the case against a forgery is actually made: not by testing the stone, but by reading the words.
Common misconceptions
Claims about this object that circulate widely and do not hold up.
The decisive objection is linguistic, not geological. Weathering studies and mineral analysis are quoted in the stone's defence, and they cannot settle the question either way, because the language is wrong in ways no amount of weathering can fix: the inscription has no grammatical cases and no plural verb forms, both of which 14th-century Old Swedish required, and it reads instead like the Swedish of the 19th century.
Individual words give it away as well. The phrase read as "journey of discovery" uses a compound unattested in any Scandinavian, Low Franconian or Low German source before the 16th century, two hundred years after the date the stone claims for itself.
The characters are not a medieval runic alphabet. At least seven of them appear in no row known from the medieval period, and several match the runes on two sheets written by a Swedish journeyman tailor, Edward Larsson, and signed by him in 1883 and 1885, which is to say they match a 19th-century Swedish source rather than a 14th-century one.
That the stone is a forgery says nothing about whether Norse voyagers reached North America. They did: L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland is a Norse site, established archaeologically and about 350 years earlier than the date this stone claims. The two questions get run together constantly and are unrelated.
Sources
Full references on the sources page.