Kensington

The Kensington Runestone

In 1898 the Swedish farmer Olof Öhman was clearing an aspen on his land near Kensington, Minnesota, and found a slab in the roots with a runic inscription: a party of eight Goths and twenty-two Norwegians on a journey west from Vinland, ten men killed, the year 1362. The stone became the proof of a Norse presence deep inside the continent. Runologists have pointed to the same thing from the beginning: the language is not medieval Swedish but a nineteenth-century Swedish dialect written in runes, with forms and loanwords that did not exist in 1362 and characters known only from the schoolbooks of the day. No specialist in runes has ever accepted it.