{"it":{"id":"W11A19","kind":"artifact","sub":"Hoax or modern","name":"Kensington Runestone","place":"Alexandria MN","mat":"greywacke","dims":"79 x 41 x 14 cm, about 90 kg (Westin Tikkanen); 200 pounds, about two and a half feet high (Ohman affidavit via Williams)","loc":"Runestone Museum, Alexandria MN","acc":"n/a","find":"Olof Ohman farm 1898","flag":"disputed (majority: 19th c. hoax)","src":[96,97,465],"lat":45.885,"lon":-95.377,"tags":["Hoax or modern"],"sum":"In the fall of 1898, while clearing land near Kensington, Minnesota, Olof Ohman found a carved graywacke slab in the roots of an aspen. Its runes tell of 8 Swedes and 22 Norwegians on a journey from Vinland, and date it to 1362.\n\nIf genuine, it would put Norse explorers in Minnesota 130 years before Columbus. Hjalmar Holand bought the stone in 1907 and defended it for the rest of his life; the Smithsonian displayed it in 1948 and 1949 without endorsing it.\n\nThe scholars who first examined it in 1899 judged it not medieval. In 2004 papers from the 1880s turned up in Sweden showing closely related runes used as a journeymen’s code in Dalarna, and dialect scholars have proposed a neighbour of Ohman’s, Anders Andersson, as the main carver.\n\nIf it is modern, why was it carved?","why":"Runologists read a 19th-century carving; Holand read a Norse record of 1362.","nfacts":4,"nsrc":3,"yt":"Check the rune forms against 14th-century usage.","rel":["W11A31"],"hook":"Olof Ohman pulled a 200-pound slab from the roots of a tree on his Minnesota farm in 1898."},"S":{"96":["Wikipedia Kensington Runestone","https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kensington_Runestone&oldid=1365631547"],"97":["MNopedia (Minnesota Historical Society), Kensington Runestone","https://www.mnhs.org/mnopedia/search/index/thing/kensington-runestone"],"465":["Wikipedia: Kensington Runestone","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_Runestone"]},"rec":{"id":"W11A19","alias":[],"ms":[{"a":"dimensions","v":"76x41x15","u":"cm","unc":"","by":"","yr":"","m":"","b":"S","t":"MEASUREMENT","id":"W11M054","s":["W11S30"],"c":"Wikipedia Kensington Runestone","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kensington_Runestone&oldid=1365631547"},{"a":"mass","v":"92","u":"kg","unc":"","by":"","yr":"","m":"","b":"S","t":"MEASUREMENT","id":"W11M055","s":["W11S30"],"c":"Wikipedia Kensington Runestone","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kensington_Runestone&oldid=1365631547"},{"a":"internal_date","v":"1362","u":"AD","unc":"","by":"","yr":"","m":"inscription","b":"S","t":"MEASUREMENT","id":"W11M056","s":["W11S30"],"c":"Wikipedia Kensington Runestone","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kensington_Runestone&oldid=1365631547"},{"a":"dimensions_mn","v":"graywacke slab","u":"","unc":"","by":"MNopedia","yr":"2020","m":"","b":"S","t":"MEASUREMENT","id":"W11M070","s":["W11S36"],"c":"MNopedia (Minnesota Historical Society), Kensington Runestone","url":"https://www.mnhs.org/mnopedia/search/index/thing/kensington-runestone"}],"lab":[{"k":"Materials","v":"greywacke","b":"S","s":["W11S30"],"url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kensington_Runestone&oldid=1365631547"}],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[{"a":"museum_accession","r":"not in staged/legacy artifact record (free sources)"}],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA172","a":"14th c. Norse record dated 1362","who":"Hjalmar Holand; Scott F. Wolter (2003 weathering analysis: inscription >200 yr old, highly contested)","main":"Experts dismissed runes 1899 for form/vocabulary discrepancies with 14th-c Scandinavian; most likely carver Olof Ohman (never admitted)","ms":"W11S30;W11S36","st":"contradicted","n":"","nl":"1"}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"art":{"claimed_anomaly":"14th c. Norse record dated 1362","mainstream_reading":"Experts dismissed runes 1899 for form/vocabulary discrepancies with 14th-c Scandinavian; most likely carver Olof Ohman (never admitted)","provenance_flag":"disputed (majority: 19th c. hoax)","current_location":"Runestone Museum, Alexandria MN","find_circumstances":"Olof Ohman farm 1898","claimant":"Hjalmar Holand; Scott F. Wolter (2003 weathering analysis: inscription >200 yr old, highly contested)","status":"contradicted","dimensions":"76x41x15 cm; 92 kg","material":"greywacke","date":"","culture":"","museum_accession":"n/a","b":"V","s":["W11S30","W11S36"]},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"W11S30","t":"Wikipedia Kensington Runestone","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kensington_Runestone&oldid=1365631547"},{"id":"W11S36","t":"MNopedia (Minnesota Historical Society), Kensington Runestone","u":"https://www.mnhs.org/mnopedia/search/index/thing/kensington-runestone"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Kensington Runestone","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_Runestone"},{"id":"VW11A19-4","t":"MNopedia (Minnesota Historical Society): Kensington Runestone","u":"https://www.mnopedia.org/thing/kensington-runestone"},{"id":"VW11A19-5","t":"Holand, The Kensington Rune Stone (Internet Archive)","u":"https://archive.org/details/kensingtonrunest00hola"}],"qs":["Linguists say the runes look 19th-century; a geologist says the weathering looks centuries old. When language and stone disagree, which do you trust, and why?","If Norse explorers really reached Minnesota in 1362, how much of the \"Columbus discovered America\" story would we have to rewrite?","Ohman never confessed and nobody proved who carved it. Is \"probably a hoax\" a fair verdict, or a convenient one?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/04/Christian_Krohg_-_Leiv_Eirikson_discovering_America_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg/1280px-Christian_Krohg_-_Leiv_Eirikson_discovering_America_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Christian_Krohg_-_Leiv_Eirikson_discovering_America_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg","title":"Christian Krohg - Leiv Eirikson discovering America - Google Art Project.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Christian Krohg","cap":"","alt":"Kensington Runestone: Christian Krohg - Leiv Eirikson discovering America - Google Art Project"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e2/1948plaqueKRS.jpg/1280px-1948plaqueKRS.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1948plaqueKRS.jpg","title":"1948plaqueKRS.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Travellers & Tinkers","cap":"Kensington Runestone Discovery Park 1948 historic plaque which says— The Kensington Rune Stone On this spot was found a stone dated 1362 relating the story of a"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/32/BigOle-AlexandriaMN.jpg/1280px-BigOle-AlexandriaMN.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BigOle-AlexandriaMN.jpg","title":"BigOle-AlexandriaMN.jpg","lic":"CC BY 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0","by":"DrReload","cap":"Statue of \"Big Ole the Viking\" in Alexandria, Minnesota, proclaiming the city the \"Birthplace of America,\" based on an assumed authenticity of the Kensington St"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Edward_Larsson_1885_I.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edward_Larsson_1885_I.jpg","title":"Edward Larsson 1885 I.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Edward Larsson","cap":"Edward Larsson's rune cipher resembling that found on the Kensington Runestone. Also includes runically-unrelated blackletter writing style and pigpen cipher. S"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Kensington-runestone_flom-1910.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kensington-runestone_flom-1910.jpg","title":"Kensington-runestone flom-1910.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Book author: George T. Flom","cap":"Images of the two carved faces of the Kensington Runestone, from George Flom's short book \"The Kensington Rune-Stone : an address\" (Illinois State Historical So"}],"article":{"id":"W11A19","mode":"rewrite-plus-quick-research","research":"quick","title":"The Kensington Runestone: a Minnesota farm and the year 1362","dek":"A Swedish immigrant pulled a carved slab from under a tree in 1898. Its runes claim Norse explorers reached Minnesota in 1362. A century of study points to the 1800s, and a name has now been put forward.","byline":"The Nommo","updated":"5 Nov 2026","sections":[{"h":"The strangest true fact","p":["The most famous runestone in the world, by one Swedish professor’s count, was not found in Scandinavia at all, but on a farm in central Minnesota [2].","Henrik Williams of Uppsala University ran web searches in 2010 and found the Kensington stone drew about three times as many results as Sweden’s great Rök stone [2].","Its carved text claims that Scandinavians stood near this spot in 1362, which would be 130 years before Columbus reached the West Indies [1]."]},{"h":"What it is and why it matters","p":["The stone is a gravestone sized slab of graywacke, a hard gray sandstone, with runes cut into its face and one edge [1].","The Minnesota Historical Society’s encyclopedia calls it either a record of Norse exploration or Minnesota’s most brilliant and durable hoax [1].","It has been on permanent display at the Runestone Museum in Alexandria, Minnesota, since 1958 [2].","If the date were genuine, it would tell a story found in no other record, because no other trace of such an expedition has turned up [1]."]},{"h":"What the stone says","p":["The generally accepted translation tells of 8 Goths, meaning Swedes, and 22 Norwegians on a journey of exploration from Vinland through the west [1].","They camped by a lake with two small rocky islands, a day’s journey north of the stone [1].","After a day of fishing they came back to find 10 of their men red with blood and dead, and the text breaks into a prayer: Hail Virgin Mary, save us from evil [1].","It ends by saying 10 more men were left by the sea to guard the ships, 14 days’ journey away, in the year 1362 [1].","Williams points out that the word göter means people from Götaland in mainland Sweden, not from the island of Gotland, which is a detail that matters later [2]."]},{"h":"Key facts and measurements","p":["Olof Ohman’s own affidavit of 1909 describes a 200 pound slab, about two and a half feet high and more than a foot wide [2].","Karin Westin Tikkanen, writing in a peer reviewed archaeology journal, gives 79 by 41 by 14 cm and about 90 kg, which is close to the affidavit’s figure [4].","Even the month of discovery is uncertain: affidavits signed in 1909 say August 1898, while near contemporary newspapers say November [4].","The age of the tree over the stone was never fixed either, since its rings were not counted and estimates ran from 12 to 70 years [4]."]},{"h":"How it was found","p":["Ohman, a Swedish immigrant who came to Douglas County in 1879, turned up the slab while clearing land near Kensington in the fall of 1898 [1].","According to his affidavit, it lay clasped in the roots of an aspen [2].","Westin Tikkanen adds that his ten year old son Edward scraped off mud and revealed the lines of strange letters [4].","The stone was sent to Chicago, where Professor George Curme examined it in 1899, while Professor Olaus Breda in Minneapolis worked from a drawing [2].","Both men concluded the inscription was not medieval [2].","The stone went back to Ohman, who sold it in 1907 to Hjalmar Holand, who then wrote about it until his death in 1963 [2]."]},{"h":"The strongest case for 1362","p":["Holand, who held a master’s degree in Scandinavian philology, made authenticity his life’s campaign across six books [4].","His high point came when the Smithsonian displayed the stone in Washington from February 1948 to February 1949, though Westin Tikkanen notes the Smithsonian never endorsed it as genuine [4].","In 2003 the geologist Scott Wolter concluded the carving was more than 200 years old, a result MNopedia describes as highly contested [1].","Williams, a critic of a medieval date, still grants several points to defenders: no evidence has ever shown that Ohman carved it, and the discovery story has never been proven false [2].","He also notes that many words once called impossible have since been shown to exist, or to be possible, in Old Swedish [2].","Two academics, the Cornell linguist Robert Hall and the Copenhagen ethnologist William Thalbitzer, supported a fourteenth century origin, as Williams reports [2]."]},{"h":"The mainstream case","p":["Williams writes that every academically trained specialist in Scandinavian, English or German studies who has written on the stone, to his knowledge, has agreed with Curme and Breda [2].","The geography is hard, too: for ships to lie 14 days away, the only route is south from Hudson Bay, nearly 800 miles in a straight line [1].","Williams compared the runes with about 130 inscriptions that may come from fourteenth century Norway, plus standing stones and a runic law manuscript from Scania, and found no specific ties [2].","Then, in 2004, two sheets of paper turned up at a dialect archive in Umeå, Sweden, written in 1883 and 1885 by two brothers from the province of Dalarna [2].","They list a set of odd runes, apparently a secret code used by journeymen, that is closely related to the runes on the Kensington stone [2].","For Williams, the evidence supports a nineteenth century inscription, though he declines the word fake, since nobody knows what the carver intended [2]."]},{"h":"Who carved it?","p":["MNopedia names Ohman as the most likely carver, noting that he owned a small library with information about runes [1].","One book in that library, a Swedish schoolmaster’s encyclopedia of 1882, covered the history of the Swedish language and its old spellings [4].","In 1970 a taped deathbed account appeared, in which Walter Gran said his father, Ohman’s neighbour John Gran, had admitted helping make the stone [4].","Defenders dismissed the tape as secondhand rumour, and Williams judges that the confession story does not stand up [2] [4].","The newest suspect comes from language, not testimony [3].","The dialect scholars Staffan Fridell and Mats Larsson traced word endings in the text to two areas of Sweden, part of Dalarna and the province of Härjedalen [3].","Of the men suspected, only Anders Andersson, born in Härjedalen in 1863 and settled about 5 km from Ohman, spoke a matching dialect, and they propose he was the main author, perhaps with Ohman’s help [3].","That is their proposal, built on dialect clues, not a confession or a document [3]."]},{"h":"What’s unexplained","p":["Nobody has yet produced direct proof of who cut the runes, or when [1] [2].","Williams calls for properly published geological study, since recent work echoing the first geologist’s view of an old carving has had no scientific support [2].","Why anyone would carve it, if it is modern, is still an open question."]},{"h":"Related places","p":["For another old document read in very different ways, see the Piri Reis map."]},{"h":"A thought to leave with","p":["Williams thinks the stone is worth studying even as a modern carving, because its runes preserve a folk code that scholars had never seen before 2004 [2].","If he is right, the most valuable thing on the Kensington stone, in his view, is the Dalarna style runes themselves [2]."]}],"sources":[{"n":1,"text":"Nelson, Paul, “Kensington Runestone”, MNopedia, Minnesota Historical Society, first published 15 May 2020 (institutional encyclopedia)","url":"https://www.mnhs.org/mnopedia/search/index/thing/kensington-runestone"},{"n":2,"text":"Williams, Henrik (Uppsala University), “The Kensington Runestone: Fact and Fiction”, The Swedish-American Historical Quarterly 63, no. 1 (2012): 3 to 22, full text via the North Park University digital collection (academic)","url":"https://collections.carli.illinois.edu/digital/api/collection/npu_sahq/id/6147/download"},{"n":3,"text":"Fridell, Staffan, and Mats G. Larsson, “The Dialect of the Kensington Stone”, Futhark: International Journal of Runic Studies 8 (2017), short notice, full text via Uppsala University repository (peer reviewed)","url":"https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1333700/FULLTEXT01.pdf"},{"n":4,"text":"Westin Tikkanen, Karin, “The Consequences of Truth”, Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 22, no. 1 (2012): 19 to 29, full text (peer reviewed)","url":"https://reference-global.com/download/article/10.5334/bha.22113.pdf"}],"source_note":"All four sources opened in full on 5 Nov 2026. Size and weight shown side by side: 200 pounds, about two and a half feet high and over a foot wide (Ohman affidavit via Williams) and 79 x 41 x 14 cm, about 90 kg (Westin Tikkanen). The data record’s 76 x 41 x 15 cm and 92 kg came from Wikipedia only and are not used. Find month shown side by side: August (1909 affidavits) and November (newspapers), per Westin Tikkanen. Wolter 2003 weathering result is reported only as MNopedia and Williams describe it. The Andersson attribution is Fridell and Larsson’s proposal and is labelled as such.","related":["W11A16"]}},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"76x41x15 cm; 92 kg","h":"Recorded dimensions","s":[202]},{"v":"Greywacke","h":"Made of","s":[202]},{"v":"Olof Ohman farm 1898","h":"Where it was found","s":[202]},{"v":"Runestone Museum","h":"Held at: Runestone Museum, Alexandria MN","s":[202]}],"hs":{"202":["Wikipedia Kensington Runestone","https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kensington_Runestone&oldid=1365631547"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/W11A19.webp","w":1280,"h":851,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/04/Christian_Krohg_-_Leiv_Eirikson_discovering_America_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg/1280px-Christian_Krohg_-_Leiv_Eirikson_discovering_America_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}