Kensington runestone

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Photograph of the rune stone from 1910

The so-called runestone of Kensington was presented to the public in 1898 by Olof Ohman from Kensington , Douglas County , Minnesota , USA . Ohman allegedly found the stone while digging an aspen in the root system. The inscription is said to represent the legacy of a Greenlandic American expedition of the Grænlendingar from the 14th century. The authenticity of the rune stone was hotly disputed from the start, but is now viewed by experts as a modern forgery. The stone is now in the Runestone Museum in Alexandria .

Stone and inscription

The stone consists of greywacke and has a mass of approx. 90 kg, a height of approx. 75 cm, a width of 43 cm and a thickness between 10 and 20 cm. The inscription is said to come from a late medieval Greenland expedition in 1362, centuries after the end of the Viking Age , but also 130 years before Columbus. It is:

»8 gods [ Götaländer , d. H. Sweden] and 22 Norwegians on a voyage of discovery from Vinland to the west. We had camp at 2  archipelago , a day's journey north of this stone. We went fishing for a day. - After we got home, [we] found 10 men red with blood and dead. AVM , free [us] from [the] evil! "

On the narrow edge it says:

“Got ten men at sea to see our ships for fourteen days from this island. [The] year [is] 1362. «

Hjalmar Rued Holand

When in 1892 the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America was celebrated, this aroused opposition, especially among Scandinavian immigrants in the USA. Minnesota , to which Kensington belongs, was and is the US state with the highest number of Norwegian and Swedish Americans . These referred to medieval reports that Vikings had crossed the Atlantic long before Columbus. The discovery of Kensington - by a Swedish immigrant, of all places - fits into the context of the dispute around 1900 about who were the first Europeans in America. That these were actually Scandinavians could not be proven until 1961, when the settlement of L'Anse aux Meadows was found in Newfoundland . By 1900 this evidence was still missing.

Hjalmar Rued Holand (1872–1963) was a young American of Norwegian descent who was enthusiastic about the thesis of the discovery of America by the Grænlendingar. He viewed the Kensington Stone as proof of his theory and as the last evidence of the lost Swedish-Norwegian Knudson expedition (1355-1364). He persuaded the farmer Olof Ohman to sell him the stone for US $ 10 in 1907 and published the first full translation of the runic text. It was also he who arranged for the finder's sworn statement. He obtained expert opinions on the age of the aspen , the degree of weathering of the stone and the inscription. For fifty years Holand defended the authenticity of the Kensington Stone, and other scholars also supported him. Today, however, there is agreement among experts that the stone is a clumsy forgery to prove the discovery of America by Scandinavians.

Doubts as to its authenticity

Doubts about the authenticity of the stone arose early on. Historians interjected, for example, that the scene described by the inscription was completely implausible: Traveling Scandinavians who discover in the middle of a foreign country that many of their companions had been slain would certainly have had other worries than laboriously carving runes into a stone.

Scholars were soon of the opinion that the text was a crude mixture of Scandinavian languages ​​and English, written by someone who had no knowledge of the Old Norse language. However, Olof Ohman, a simple farmer who had almost no schooling himself, had a Swedish manual called The Knowledgeable Schoolmaster , which also contained an incomplete chapter on runes, and here was an Our Father with the line “and deliver us from him Evil ”in exactly the form found on the Kensington Stone. The consistent disregard for Old Norse vocabulary, syntax, grammar and runic forms is also striking . In addition, on other rune stones there are no calendar years in digits, but government years, and numbers are written out as words. Meanwhile, "all Scandinavian runologists and experts in the history of Scandinavian linguistics have identified the Kensington runestone as a forgery".

Others

The fictional magical runestone from the film Blood Creek by Joel Schumacher was modeled after the runestone from Kensington.

literature

  • Minnesota Historical Society (Ed.): The Kensington Rune Stone. Preliminary Report to the Minnesota Historical Society by its Museum Committee . The People's Newspaper Company, St. Paul (MI) 1910 ( digitized ).
  • Hjalmar Rued Holand: The Kensington Rune Stone. In: Wisconsin Magazine of History. 3: 2 (1919), pp. 174ff. ( Reprint as digital copy ).
  • Hjalmar Rued Holand: The Kensington stone. A study in Pre-Columbian American History . Privately Printed, Ephraim (WI) 1932.
  • Eric Wahlgren: The Kensington Stone. A mystery solved. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1958.
  • Kurt Welker: The forgotten continent. VEB FA Brockhaus, Leipzig 1970.
  • Detlef Brennecke: The benefits of counterfeiting. The "runestone" from Kensington, Minnesota . In: Karl Corino (Ed.): Forged! Fraud in literature, art, music, science and politics . Greno, Nördlingen 1988, ISBN 3-89190-525-4 . Through New edition Eichborn, Frankfurt a. M. 1990; Rowohlt, Reinbek b. Hamburg 1992, ISBN 3-499-18864-3 , pp. 355-3365.
  • Klaus Düwel : Runic lore . 4th edition. Metzler, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 978-3-476-14072-2 , p. 212ff.
  • James E. Knirk: Kensington Runestone. In: Scandinavian Studies 69, 1997, pp. 104-108.
  • Ders .: Umlauted Runes on the Kensington Runestone. In: Scandinavian Studies 73, 2001, pp. 210-214.
  • Richard Nielsen: The Kensington Runestone. In: scandinavian Studies 73, 2001, pp. 209-210.

Web links

Commons : Kensington Runestone  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Homepage Runestone Museum , accessed February 28, 2015
  2. ↑ Detlef Brennecke: From the benefit of forgery. The "runestone" from Kensington, Minnesota. In: Karl Corino (Ed.): Forged! Fraud in literature, art, music, science and politics. Reinbek b. Hamburg 1992, pp. 355–365, inscription text: p. 359.
  3. ↑ Darwin Ohman: The Kensington Runestone. Ohman Family Archives [1]
  4. ^ Helmer Gustavson: The non-enigmatic runes of the Kensington stone. In: Viking Heritage Magazine. ( University on Gotland ) 2004 (3), p. 31f.
  5. ^ Klaus Düwel: Runenkunde . 4th edition. Metzler, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 978-3-476-14072-2 , p. 212ff.