The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1984, Síða 45

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
43
farmer by the name of Olof Ohman who
arrived in Douglas County in 1879. In 1891
he bought a farm near Kensington and it
was while clearing a knoll on his farm that
he came upon the inscribed stone. The
story is that Ohman was felling a small
aspen and, pulling up its stump, he noticed
the stone lying entangled in the roots with a
comer protruding slightly. Evidently the
stone had been in this position for some
time for the roots had partially formed
around it. It is not clear whether Ohman
was alone at the time, or if not, who else
observed the stone; one report states that he
was accompanied by his son Edward, others
that a neighbour was with him. Nor is it
clear exactly when the inscription was first
observed.
The finding of the inscribed stone was
reported to the news media about two
months later, and simultaneously the stone
itself with drawings and photographs of the
inscription was submitted to scholars in the
fields of philology and runology, both in
the United States and abroad. Their unani-
mous opinion was that the inscription was
not a document from 1362 as it purported
to be, but a nineteenth-century fabrication.
There matters rested until 1907 when a
young Norwegian-born writer and lecturer,
Hjalmar Rued Holand, began taking an
interest in the stone. Declaring war on
expert opinion and claiming the stone to be
an authentic fourteenth-century document,
Holand began an active campaign in sup-
port of his claim which lasted until his
death in 1963. Holand gained much popu-
lar support in spite of the fact that experts
in the fields of runology and Scandinavian
philology consistently and continuously
found the inscription a typical nineteenth-
century product.
The language alone furnishes a valuable
clue to the identity of the carver: it is col-
loquial nineteenth-century ‘Scandinavian’
of a kind that developed in Minnesota
wherever Swedes and Norwegians lived
close together. This kind of ‘Scandinavian’
which is neither pure Swedish nor pure
Norwegian is still a striking characteristic
among the old inhabitants of Douglas
County. It bears no resemblance to
medieval versions of the same language.
The carver was probably Swedish, for
Swedish predominates in his ‘Scandi-
navian’, and he uses the word ‘Goths’ (see
below).
Hjalmar Holand cited a wealth of
material in support of the claim that runes
as well as text were genuinely medieval.
None can stand scrutiny, however, and the
references given are without exception mis-
leading or false. Additional arguments of a
historical character have, on the other
hand, been repeated so often that they have
become accepted almost as established
truths. It might therefore be of interest to
examine them further.
The great influx of Scandinavians into
Douglas County began in 1857, forty-one
years before the Kensington inscription
was discovered. Originally the knoll on
which the stone was found was wooded,
and the first settlers used to go there to help
themselves to timber and firewood. Even-
tually the land was homesteaded by a
Norwegian, who cleared it. Ohman bought
the land from the Norwegian, and by this
time, the knoll was already covered with
secondary deciduous timber growth. Since
eye-witnesses established that the tree
growing over the stone was no more than
thirty and possibly as little as ten years old,
there was ample time for the stone to have
been inscribed after the Scandinavians
arrived on the scene.
Accounts of when the inscription was
first observed are conflicting and incom-
plete (there is even some confusion over
the month in which the stone was found).
They leave room for the possibility that the
inscription could have been carved after the
finding of the stone and it could be that the