I don’t think I can avoid it. Lileks noted this morning, on The Buzz, that today is the anniversary of the discovery of the Kensington Runestone in 1898. If anything comes within the parameters of my “beat,” I guess it would be the Runestone.

But I don’t really want to. It’s a subject that can make me no friends.

If you don’t know anything about the stone (which means you’ve never read my novel Wolf Time, and shame on you), it’s a piece of blackish stone, about a yard high (I’ve seen it in Alexandria, Minnesota, several times, and I also drove out to the discovery site once), carved with runes, an alphabet that began among the Germanic peoples in antiquity, flourished in the Viking Age, and actually survived in remote parts of Scandinavia into the 18th Century (if I remember correctly).

It tells the story of a Gothic (Swedish) and Norwegian expedition to America in the 14th Century, and notes that some of the men went out fishing, and came back to camp to find ten of their company “red with blood and dead.”

The stone was found by a Swedish immigrant farmer named Olof Ohman. He exhibited it at the local bank, and it attracted attention from a few American scholars, who rejected it as a fraud. At that point, it seems that Ohman dropped the subject (as well as the stone), turning it over on its face to serve as a step into his cattle barn. In 1907 he sold it for ten bucks to a Norwegian-American student named Hjalmar Holand, and then things started happening.

Holand became a prominent ethnic historian and a major booster of Scandinavian culture in America. For a man like Holand, the runestone constituted proof positive that Scandinavians were not Johnny-come-latelies in this country, but the original discoverers (it was much the same impulse that made Columbus so important to Italian immigrants around the same time). Holand wrote several books about the stone, and was a tireless advocate for its authenticity for the rest of his life.

Scandinavian runologists have pretty consistently rejected the stone as a hoax, and I don’t believe that opinion has changed with time. The argument about the “idiosyncratic” runes included in the inscription goes on to this day, and it goes on at a level far above my head.

A new wrinkle in the argument involves a geological analysis of the stone published in 2000. The author, Scott F. Wolter, is a highly regarded forensic geologist, who has testified as an expert in a number of legal cases. He believes that the inscribed stone was buried in the ground no less than fifty years, which would mean it had to have been carved well before Ohman’s time, and probably before there was white settlement in the neighborhood. Like every other opinion about the stone, Wolter’s has been challenged.

What do I think about the Kensington Runestone? I’ve learned to be cautious when expressing my opinion. I once told a group I spoke to in Moorhead, Minnesota that I didn’t believe in it, and the chairman, who had been very nice to me, replied with some disappointment that his grandfather had been a friend of Ohman’s.

I think Ohman (probably with the help of a friend; there was a deathbed confession by a neighbor who said he was part of the prank) carved the stone with the help of a history book he owned. I don’t think he intended to perpetrate a hoax. I think he was just interested in seeing how people would react (it has been noted by more than one scholar that Ohman never made any serious effort to make money off the thing). Then when it didn’t draw much attention, he set it aside. I think he was surprised by the notoriety that came from Holand’s books, and was afraid at that point to admit he had carved it, concerned he’d be called a liar and a hoaxter. I think the whole thing got out of hand for him, and he didn’t know what to do.

On the other hand, I’ve never seen a strong refutation of the geological analysis.

So my vote is no, but I reserve the right to change my mind.

Next question.