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Before Columbus Sailed The Ocean Blue
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Kensington Runestone
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1557/4711183.html
Before Columbus Sailed The Ocean Blue
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/before-columbus-sailed-the-ocean-blue.6731/
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Kensington Runestone
Last update: April 8, 2004 at 6:17 AM
Kensington Runestone looking more like a fake
Peg Meier, Star Tribune
April 8, 2004RUNE0408
Scholars who believe the Kensington Runestone is a 19th-century prank -- and not concrete evidence that Norsemen beat Columbus to America by 100-plus years -- say they have found the smoking gun to prove it.
The latest in the century-old Minnesota controversy came in documents written in 1885 by an 18-year-old Swedish tailor named Edward Larsson. He sometimes wrote in runes -- an ancient Scandinavian language that differs from the English alphabet. But Larsson's runes were not the usual runes used over the centuries.
The scholars contend that parts of his documents seem to be written in a secret runic alphabet used by tradesmen in Sweden in the late 1800s, rather like codes that tramps have used over time to leave secret messages for each other.
Swedish linguists happened upon Larsson's documents recently and found that his writing corresponds to pieces of the Kensington Runestone inscription. They say that the journeymen's code did not exist in medieval times, when the Kensington Runestone is purported to have been carved.
Kensington Runestone
Minnesota Tourist Bureau
"My opinion is this once again nails down the case against the Kensington Runestone," said Michael Michlovic, professor of anthropology and chairman of the Department of Anthropology and Earth Science at Minnesota State University Moorhead.
"This new evidence is really devastating. It comes unexpectedly and from a collection of old letters that have nothing to do with the Kensington Runestone."
The Runestone's origin has been hotly debated in Minnesota and beyond since 1898. It was then that a Swedish-American farmer named Olof Ohman said he found a large stone tablet wrapped in the roots of a poplar tree. The tree was in his farm field at Kensington, near Alexandria, Minn. A runic inscription on the stone describes a massacre of 10 members of an exploration party of Swedes and Norwegians in central Minnesota in the year 1362.
For more than a century, nonbelievers in the inscription's authenticity have said Ohman or his friends carved it as a joke on scholars.
Meanwhile, advocates insist that the Runestone proves that Nordic explorers were in west-central Minnesota in 1362.
Believers in the stone's authenticity say the new evidence doesn't harm their case. Scott Wolter is a St. Paul geologist who has extensively studied the stone. The inscription has weathered for more than 200 years, his research shows, and therefore the stone could not have been carved by jokesters in the late 1800s. Wolter said the skeptics' reliance on the Larsson documents is "another example of people making snap decisions. They've made up their minds and went looking for evidence for it."
The missing link?
The Kensington Runestone was displayed at a museum in Stockholm, Sweden, last fall and examined there by scholars.
Meanwhile, Tryggve Skold of Finland, a retired professor of Scandinavian languages who had studied Larsson's papers, heard a radio interview about the Runestone. Intrigued, he compared Larsson's runes with those on the Kensington stone.
"The resemblance was striking," said Henrik Williams, a runic specialist in Sweden, in an e-mail making the rounds among Runestone skeptics.
Williams previously had been on the fence about whether the Runestone was really carved by Norsemen. The odd runes had puzzled him. In his assessment, he stated that earlier he repeatedly had ruled out the likelihood of finding a missing link to explain them. "Boy, was I wrong," he wrote, insisting the missing link surfaced in the Larsson papers.
Following the journeyman system of the time, Larsson had walked around Sweden to train with master tailors. He was a musician, and most of his papers were handwritten music scores, but he also left books, letters, farm documents and pictures. The runes are his copies of alphabets -- worksheets more than letters. His family donated the collection to a Swedish linguistics and folklore institute.
Quite a showpiece
To Williams, it is inconceivable that the runes on the rock in Minnesota could have survived in Sweden for 500 years with little variation; languages live and change over time. However, Williams said, it is very likely that some kind of secret runes were known in the late 1800s both to Larsson and to Ohman and other Swedish immigrants to Minnesota.
Williams wrote that he can't say for sure who carved the Kensington stone, but claimed it certainly wasn't created in the 1300s.
To Williams, Alexandria may no longer bill itself as "the birthplace of America," but the Runestone Museum in Alexandria "still possesses a remarkable showpiece. ... Although I personally have to admit a certain feeling of loss at the realization that the mystery of the Kensington Runestone is solved, I am also glad to have learned so much in the process and to have gotten to know so many nice people. I realize that not everyone will be convinced we have reached the solution, but in my mind this matter is resolved."
To Michael Michlovic at MSU Moorhead, the charm of the Runestone remains. He finds it incredible that Ohman, a largely self-taught immigrant, created a hoax that has lived for almost 106 years.
While he has no doubts the rock was carved in the 1800s, not the 1300s, Michlovic guesses that believers won't give up.
"Proof has been established before," he said. In 1977, it was revealed that a friend of Ohman's announced on his deathbed in the 1920s that the inscription was a hoax. "That didn't convince people," Michlovic said. And two years ago a book by the Smithsonian Institution forthrightly stated that the Runestone is "universally considered a hoax by scholars today."
Stay tuned, Michlovic said. There's bound to be more coming.
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1557/4711183.html
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