The Farmer, the Root, and the Runes
In 1898 a Minnesota farmer clearing his field found a slab wrapped in tree roots — a message, it seemed, from Viking explorers dated 1362. Was it history's lost fragment, or a hoax hiding in plain sight for over a century?
Late in 1898, Olof Ohman, a Swedish immigrant farmer, was clearing trees and stumps from his newly acquired land in the largely rural township of Solem, Douglas County, Minnesota. Near the crest of a small knoll above the wetlands, he uncovered a slab of greywacke stone, lying face down, tangled in the roots of a stunted poplar tree. His ten-year-old son Edward noticed strange markings carved into its surface. Ohman first guessed they had stumbled on an 'Indian almanac.'
The stone measured about 30 by 16 by 6 inches (76 by 41 by 15 cm) and weighed 202 pounds. Its nine lines of runic text on the face, and three more along an edge, told an extraordinary story: an expedition of 8 Swedes and 22 Norwegians, traveling from Vinland, camped by two skerries a day's journey north of the stone. While the men fished, ten of their companions were found dead, red with blood. The inscription closed with a prayer — AVM, save from evil — and a date: the year 1362.
The timing of the discovery was electric. Scandinavia and Scandinavian America were swept up in a wave of National Romanticism, with renewed fascination for Leif Ericson's voyage to Vinland. Just five years earlier, Norway had sailed a replica Viking ship, the Gokstad reconstruction, to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Tensions simmered between Sweden and Norway, who would split apart in 1905, and the stone's claim of a joint Norwegian-Swedish expedition drew accusations from both sides that the other had forged it. Scandinavian immigrants in Minnesota, proud of their heritage and still fighting for acceptance, found in the stone a possible vindication.
A copy of the inscription reached the University of Minnesota, where Professor Olaus J. Breda examined it and declared it a forgery, publishing his findings in the journal Symra in 1910. Breda sent copies to prominent Scandinavian scholars — Oluf Rygh, Sophus Bugge, Gustav Storm, Magnus Olsen, and Adolf Noreen — who unanimously pronounced it a recent fraud.
The stone was then examined at Northwestern University, where scholars dismissed it as a prank or found no plausible historical context for it, and it was returned to Ohman. Norwegian-American historian Hjalmar Holand later claimed Ohman had given him the stone, though a bill of sale shows Ohman actually sold it to the Minnesota Historical Society for $10 in 1911. Holand revived public interest by summarizing studies from geologist Newton Horace Winchell and linguist George T. Flom, both published in 1910.
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