Kensington Runestone

Kensington Runestone – Subject of Discussion/Controversy

Since the discovery of the Kensington Runestone in 1898, by a Swedish farmed, Olof Ohman while clearing the land for his farm near Kensington, Minnesota, it has been the subject of discussion and controversy. Owing to integral disbelief and the fact that Olof was a Swedish, several of them thought that the stone could be a forgery and this controversy prevailed for more than 100 years.

However the controversy is over and there is now physical evidence that the runestone is authentic and has a large role in American history. Being discovered in the largely rural township of Solem Douglas County, Minnesota, it has been named after the nearest settlement, Kensington.

The inscription implies to be a record which is left behind by Scandinavian explorers during the 14th century. There has also been a drawn out argument on the authenticity of the stone though the intellectual consensus classified it as a 19th century joke as it was examined first in 1910, while some critics charging the alleged discoverer Ohman to have invented the inscription. However, there is a local community which tend to remain convinced of the authenticity of the stone.

Runic Form Changes from One Generation to Another

Though several rural people were illiterate in regular writing and reading, knowledge of runes was well-known and the runic form seemed to change from one generation to another. It is revealed that some of the runes on the Kensington Stone were of 18th or 19th century variety that was utilised in Dalecarlia, the province of the mother of Ohman. Ohman acknowledged knowing rune and had also been seen carving runes on sticks in his early years in Minnesota.

The Kensington Runestone is about 31 inches high, 16 inches wide, six inches thick, weighing about 202 pounds. Towards the face and one side, one will find characters known as `runes’ which is a kind of writing used in the Middle Age by the inhabitants of north western Europe only like the Danes, Norwegians and Gotland Islanders.

Till now most of the information that is available to the archaeologist has been collected from the information that is recovered at the place of the site and in recent years it has been revealed that a majority of the ancient architectural, geoglyphic and monolithic structures that were built around the world tend to have something in common.

Intriguing/Successful Mystery

The unity is that the structures were associated in a manner which the study of their linier alignment unveils a much bigger story and expands hugely the data available to the archaeologist together with the related disciplines.

 The Kensington Stone is an intriguing as well as a successful mystery and after over one hundred years of discovering it, the inscription still tends to be a subject of debate. One of its most interesting debate is that its ‘errors’ is the cause from purposeful encryption.

 Though cryptographic runes are known from Scandinavia, they tend to adhere to consistent criteria that the American examples are not. It is an amazing example of the early Nordic-American folk culture, though it is not a milestone in American archaeology.