The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1984, Page 46

44
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
SUMMER, 1984
finding of the stone in its peculiar position
planted the idea of carving the text.
There is practically no weathering at all
of the inscription. The runes are remark-
ably fresh and sharp. The cuts are angular
and keen. They were made with chisels and
awls, a fact in itself remarkable for runes
were rarely chisel-cut in the Middle Ages.
More remarkable yet, they were cut with a
chisel with a regular one-inch bit, a variety
commonly sold in American hardware
stores.
The term ‘island’ for the knoll where the
runestone was found, although incorrect in
English, is the correct term in Swedish,
even if the ‘island’ is surrounded by fields
rather than water. In the case of the rune-
stone knoll, this term is doubly appropriate
since it rises out of swamps which in the
nineteenth century were often flooded,
making the knoll a real ‘island’.
A historical document cited in support of
the inscription’s veracity is an order by
King Magnus Ericson of Norway-Sweden
dated 1354 for a vessel of armed and
spiritual support to the Greenland Norse
colonies. However, the order concerns
Greenland, not Vinland or countries west
of Greenland. It is adventuresome to
speculate that after a 3,000-mile long
journey from Norway, the ship ventured
another 1,000 miles into Hudson Bay and
from there followed an erratic course for an
additional 1,000 miles into Minnesota.
After all, these Norsemen were not search-
ing for the Northwest Passage but their own
settlements.
King Magnus, the hapless ruler of a
united Norway and Sweden from 1319 to
1356 and of Sweden alone from 1356 to
1363, is a legendary figure in Swedish
history, and even today children sing
nursery rhymes about his fair queen,
Blanche of Namur. To the nineteenth
century, the era of Magnus Ericson offered
special attractions: romance, chivalry, and
grandeur as well as incomparable tragedy
with the hardships of the Black Death, the
dissolution of the union, and bloody family
feuds, all events which singled out this
epoch for special attention in schools and in
popular romance.
Sweden and Norway were again under
joint rule in the nineteenth century, with
Sweden as the dominating nation. By the
1890s the political situation was tense, with
Norway demanding her independence one
way or the other. It is tempting to see this
political situation reflected in the Ken-
sington inscription which rather con-
temptuously gives ‘8 Goths’ precedence
over ‘22 Norwegians’.
Other historical sources cited in support
for the authenticity of the inscription
concern Nicholas of Lynn, an English
monk who made several exploratoiy voyages
northwards. The theory is that Nicholas
sailed with the Norwegian expedition and
that together they reached Hudson Bay.
But the evidence at hand shows that on the
contrary, Nicholas’s expedition was an
English enterprise, originating in and
returning to northern England in 1360, and
that it aimed for Iceland from where it con-
tinued northwards. Here Nicholas observed
the magnetic influence of the pole and
whirlpools in the Greenland Sea, the same
phenomena that had been described a
hundred and fifty years earlier by Giraldus
Cambrensis. There is nothing to show that
Nicholas ever saw Hudson Bay.
Because no one has ever confessed to
carving it, the authenticity of the Ken-
sington stone still has its fervent prota-
gonists. The person most often suspected to
have carved the inscription is the finder,
Olof Ohman. Ohman has unfairly been
portrayed as a dull-witted farmer, honest
but poor, uneducated and simple-minded.
Contemporary records do not confirm this
simplicity. He was on the contrary said to
be a ‘queer genius, a man who ‘talked little
but thought much’. He was reasonably
successful financially and could afford to