By Stephen J. Martin. Even the establishment now admits that Leif Eriksson and other Vikings reached at least as far as what is now Canada and made settlements there. But controversy continues to surround claims that the Vikings penetrated to Minnesota, perhaps by way of Hudson Bay. The main evidence that they may have done so is the Kensington Rune Stone (KRS). But the stone has been widely pooh-poohed. Is it real or is it a fake? Is the famous and oft-debated artifact a legitimate historical record of the travels of Scandinavian adventurers into the heartland of America in the mid-14th century? Some new developments, according to the author, have “proved conclusively to all but the most stodgy establishmentarian academics the absolute legitimacy of the KRS.”
Recent advances in the understanding of the Kensington Rune Stone consist of a conclusive paper on the linguistic aspects of the runes and the words used by the carver and an equally irrefutable study of the geological aspects of the stone itself. Less has occurred recently within the third milieu, that of historical documentation from elsewhere—yet, nothing has been found to challenge the spectacular advances within the past few months in the century-old effort to exonerate the KRS from the hasty and ill-informed initial opinions of skeptics. Perhaps the most impressive indicator of the importance of recent advances has been the almost total silence from the KRS’s nay-sayers. In the past, claims by proponents of the stone’s legitimacy were almost always countered, often very quickly, by an army of court historians desperate to prop up their ill-conceived and erroneous notions of the progression of New World exploration and settlement by Europeans. [Read the entire article as PDF…]
Taken from
The Barnes Review, March/April 2002: The Kensington Rune Stone
VOLUME VIII, NUMBER 2