Any New ANalysis on the "Kensington Runestone"?

If the Vikings unquestionably reached Vinland, which is around Newfoundland, they were close to the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. I don’t know if their ships had the capability to sail upriver, but if they did, they could easily have reached all the way to the end of Lake Ontario, around the Niagara Falls. The Niagara falls would have blocked any further westward movement on ship, but they would already be at the Great Lakes region, which is not that far from Minnesota.

They’ve just reinterpreted the runes. They say “I went to Minnesota and the only thing I got was this runestone”.

The objective evidence indicates that the stone is a modern artifact. Terms like ‘hoax’ and ‘forgery’ don’t apply because no one knows why it was carved. But there’s no other evidence to support the idea of Vikings reaching the North American mainland much less the traveling to Minnesota.

Attempts to confirm that the stone is a Viking artifact are all working on a flawed basis. They aren’t using objective analysis, they’re trying to prove a preconceived notion. Weathering is a terrible way of dating any artifact. Weathering doesn’t occur at steady rates and there are numerous ways that weathering rates are affected. For a small object whose history is totally unknown, weathering is useless. An extra notch on a rune is more likely to be a slip of the chisel than an obsolete rune form. It is unlikely that the Vikings left writing that matches modern Scandanavian syntax, but not their own. And it is extremely unlikely that Vikings traveled to Minnesota from Newfoundland without leaving any other traces of doing so. The trouble with the Viking theory is a lack of objective evidence that such a thing happened. The goal, which is being carried out without success, is to find additional evidence that would lend support to the Viking origin theory. Instead, the effort concentrates on re-interpretting the existing evidence to prove a foregone conclusion. It doesn’t prove that Vikings didn’t travel to Minnesota. It’s just insufficient to prove that they did.

“Not that far” is 900+ miles via the Great Lakes from Buffalo (near Niagara Falls) to Minneapolis (near Kensington). And we’re talking about close to 2,000 miles between Kensington and the nearest confirmed Viking site in North America.

According to the runestone, the exploring party was 14 days journey from where they left their ships. Since viking ships couldn’t have made it past Niagara, this means they must have traveled about 65 miles per day by canoe through unexplored and potentially hostile territory. This would be a pretty remarkable rate of speed under any conditions, but extremely unlikely if they were just exploring. (This is not even taking into consideration that Kensington is more than 100 miles from Lake Superior, a distance that would have had to have been traversed mainly on foot and involved crossing the Mississippi.) It has been proposed that the exploring party could have come from Hudson Bay, but the distance is also great and would have involved additional portages between rivers and lakes.

Aside from any problems with the text, the journey described on the runestone is highly implausible as something that 14-century Vikings would undertake. It’s unlikely they would have taken off many hundreds of miles into the heart of an unexplored continent, far from major waterways, when there wasn’t any indication of significant trading or raiding opportunities.

A few years ago, we had an “expert” give a lecture on the Kensington Stone in a town hall that was in Holand’s stomping grounds (Ephraim, Wisconsin). His thesis was that the stone was genuine, but it was based on such specious evidence that some of our local historians, who would have liked nothing better than to prove it was valid, strongly shot him down with logical objections.

I made a video of this “expert’s” lecture but he paid me to NOT broadcast it; that is, he bought the recording. He never used it or contacted me again.

Not that it makes much difference. Holand was a local celebrity, but I think he was grasping at straws and had only wishful thinking as his driving force.

True, but it seems like they turned to Wooism after getting rejected elsewhere, and altho I admit, their choice of where to publish it does cast some doubts, still the article itself seems OK.

I am not a “Believer” rather I am a doubter both ways. The finder did not seem to be a crackpot, or admit it was a hoax or try to profit over it. There are enough experts on both sides to make me rules this “doubtful”. Most of the arguments against it came from the days when most historians KNEW the Vikings never made it to America, all such ideas were crackpot-ism.

The distance is just far enough to add to doubtful without quite throwing it into “hoax”.

TriPolar your arguments make sense except that the “hoax” side has the same biased agenda.

I’d really like someone unbiased to take a look at this thing. Like I said I have grave doubts, but if it’s real it would add much to history.

You have to keep in mind that they’re the Vikings. They were not your average human being. I think the motivation of the Viking explorers was love of exploration and the unknown as much as trading and raiding opportunities.

They got to Newfoundland. Yes, once they got there, they looked for economic and raiding opportunities. But not all people who look for economic and raiding opportunities have the wanderlust that drives them to sail across an unknown ocean. If someone gets that far, I wouldn’t put it past them to have motives that are pretty irrational in that they’re going to keep going even when it’s risky, and when the costs might outweigh the benefits.

In my view, it’s an issue of conditional probability. In other words, given that a group of people has enough of whatever qualities are needed to cross the Atlantic Ocean 1000 years ago and reach the Americas, it’s not at all unreasonable that they’d go far inland, as the traits that would tend to make inland exploration probably correlates highly with the traits that make ocean exploration more likely, of which we know the Vikings had the latter in abundance. (On the other hand, a group of tourists that land on a cruise ship in Newfoundland has a very low chance of exploring 2000 miles inland; the difficulty of the trip that we know a group made gives them credit that they could plausibly continue with further exploration).

Could they have portaged their ships across the Niagara so as to have reduced their total inland travel?

I think this is one of those things that history and time is the ultimate arbiter on. Imo, the Kensington runestone will be vindicated as genuine.

I don’t think so:

Lets suppose they did actually embark on that epic journey shown, leaving their boats at Niagra falls, or an equally epic overland journey from Hudson bay. Why did they leave no other markers or inscriptions behind except one which just happened to be exactly where a Scandinavian community was in the 19th century?

Why would they be driving?:confused:

Anyway here is one suggested route from the wiki article:
A natural north-south navigation route—admittedly with a number of portages round dangerous rapids—extends from Hudson Bay up Nelson River (or the Hayes River, as preferred by early modern traders from York Factory[27][28]) through Lake Winnipeg, then up the Red River of the North. The northern waterway begins at Traverse Gap, on the other side of which is the source of the Minnesota River, flowing to join the great Mississippi River at Minneapolis. One of the early Runestone debunkers, George Flom, found that explorers and traders had come from Hudson Bay to Minnesota by this route decades before the area was officially settled.[29] Supporters of the stone’s authenticity argued that the 1362 party could have used the same waterway
I also point out that archeaologists think that L’Anse aux Meadows might not have been the big site, there was quite possibly another, larger settlement in Vinland.

There are some other even more doubtful markers along the trip:
*This waterway also contains alleged signs of Viking presence. At Cormorant Lake in Becker County, Minnesota, there are three boulders with triangular holes which are claimed to be similar to those used for mooring boats along the coast of Norway during the 14th century. Holand found other triangular holes in rocks near where the stone was found; however, experimental archaeology later suggested that holes dug in stone with chisels rather than drills tend to have a triangular cross-section, whatever their purpose.[32] A little further north, by the Red River itself, at Climax, Minnesota, a firesteel found in 1871, buried quite deep in soft ground, matched specimens of medieval Norse firesteels at the Oslo University museum in Norway.[33]
There has also been considerable discussion of what has recently been named the Vérendrye Runestone, a small plaque allegedly found by one of the earliest expeditions along what later became the U.S./Canada border, in the 1730s. …]
*

And there may have been another large stone or two but if the early settlers did not recognize runes, then someone might have just used it to build his barn.

I would just like to add some support for fellow Swede Floater here. Some of the “believers” here seem to think that there are two equal sides in this dispute and that the evidence may swing either way, when in fact virtually everybody who knows anything about runic inscriptions agree that it is a hoax. If you transcribe the runes to latin letters the text is almost completely modern and understandable to any present day scandinavian, with words and grammar that just didn’t exist in the 14th century.

Not according to this paper, although I am not an expert enough on Latin and Norse languages or medieval history to critique the paper or the Massey Brothers’ claims.

It’s fairly modern Norwegian mixed with older language.

Are you referring to the Massey Bros claims? I’d be interested in your concurrence or refutation by point. Throwing in your qualifications wouldn’t hurt.

Put it like this. It’s fairly simple to read, quite unlike real medieval texts I have seen.

They were exactly your average human being. They sailed looking for economic opportunities in land, fishing, and trading. That makes them no different from the Italians trading with the Far East, the Basque and Bretons looking for new fishing grounds, and the Spanish and Portuguese wanting spices and gold.

They most emphatically were not berserker wilderness nuts. Expeditions were hard and chancy and not taken lightly. The difficulties of settlement even in what was then milder climate areas of the North Atlantic are well known, as is the failure of all those settlements. They were already encountering furious opposition from the natives when they got to North America and that was the first place they gave up on.

The thought that some exploratory drive sent them 2000 miles further inland against a known native presence is bizarre. Any exploration would have been preferable to that. The fact that they managed to spend so much time inland that they would have reached a spot 2000 miles from Newfoundland without leaving a single artefact or disturbed piece of earth - only a stone “found” in a field in the middle of Minnesota far away from Lake Superior - defies all credulity.

L’Anse aux Meadows, which lasted only a very few years, is the tip of an island about as easternly a point as you could find in North America. Saying that the Vikings could have therefore sailed, portaged and trekked across thousands of miles of hostile wilderness - just because! - is exactly as likely as saying that the Spanish who landed on Key West could have therefore sailed, portaged and trekked across thousands of miles of hostile wilderness to get to the middle of Minnesota. The Spanish, in fact, were a thousand times more capable of doing so successfully. There is no evidence that they did. And no evidence other than sheer imagination for the Vikings, either.

Regarding Viking drives: many of these men HAD to leave their country. Eric “the Red” had to leave Norway (he killed a man who was a friend of the king).
Greenland was settled because all of the good land in Iceland was taken. This is what drove Viking exploration-the homeland was too small and overpopulated.

One interesting possible artifact found in the Great Lakes region is the Sodus Point Viking spearhead found on the South shore of Lake Ontario.

While it can be most easily explained as an object that got traded from Newfoundland (or even Greenland) to the interior, it doesn’t seem to have undergone any modern, serious examination. It seems that the town isn’t encouraging a new tech analysis. (Plus there’s the usual provenance issues.)

I just want one object found in situ by pros somewhere in the lower Great Lakes region that isn’t questionable.

Interesting…Longfellow’s famous poem (“The Skeleton In Armor” )was inspired by artifacts thought to be Viking armor. Unfortunately, the bones and “armor” were destroyed in a fire…have any pictures of the “armor” survived?

Can you provide any actual cite for that, beyond your personal opinion?

This is simply special pleading, not based on any evidence. Can you provide cites for Vikings exploring far inland anywhere, when they were not driven by trade opportunities? Vikings and their descendants explored the river systems of eastern Russia in order to reach the rich trade opportunities of the Black Sea, the Caspian, and Byzantium, of which they already knew the existence. Can you provide an example of Vikings exploring far inland into Siberia, away from the routes to Byzantium? Surely if they were inclined to do such a thing, they would have occasionally have done it much closer to home, in Eurasia.

Again, I think you need to provide an example of Vikings going thousands of miles inland into an unexplored wilderness, away from any previous previous trading posts or settlements, and where there was no evidence of substantial trade or raiding opportunities (the Indians of Minnesota would have had virtually nothing to trade but fur, which the Vikings already had plenty of), before you can argue the least degree of plausibility for the trip. It simply makes no sense based on what we know of the Vikings.

They certainly could not have carried a normal ocean-going Viking ship around the falls. In any case, the Vikings used different kinds of ships for ocean versus river travel. To navigate above Niagara, they would have either had to disassemble the ships and carry them piecemeal around it, or else build new boats from scratch above the falls.

It’s possible that the “fourteen days travel” from the “inland sea” where they left their ships refers to the travel time from Lake Superior to Kensington, which makes more sense than having traveled in that time from Lake Ontario below the falls. But this would require them to have built at least two ships above the falls. They would have also somehow have gotten the ships past the rapids on the St. Marys River between Lakes Huron and Superior. These rapids normally required a portage before the construction of the Soo Locks to bypass them. As at Niagara, they would probably have had to either disassemble their ships to portage them or build new ships above the rapids.

Depicting the supposed expedition as simply an extension of Viking maritime exploration is ridiculous. It would not have involved merely sailing merrily up the St. Lawrence from Newfoundland and into the Great Lakes. There are very significant obstacles between Newfoundland and Minnesota. It defies belief that a Viking party would have undertaken such an incredible feat driven merely by some generic love of exploration.

It is fascinating that people love to speculate about the wild Vikings who trekked for years across unknown wilderness just for the hell of it… and never mention that the natives also roamed across their homelands regularly and had established sophisticated trade routes centuries before. (And also warred against other tribes and brought home prisoners and goods.) Somehow they don’t count.