The grave of a woman named Gudveig was empty, except for a rune rod which served as a proxy. She had died at sea and was buried like a sailor, sewn into sackcloth, a stone at her feet for ballast. A huge stone weighing more than a ton had been placed above the empty grave, either to guard her soul or to keep it from walking abroad.
Ozuur Asbjarnarson died on some island during winter and was buried in unhallowed ground with a wooden stake planted over his chest. Eventually a priest would arrive; then the stake could be withdrawn and consecrated water poured into the hole. That’s all we know about Ozuur Asbjarnarson. It seems hardly enough.
The graves of quite a few children were located. Most of them had been buried with their toys.
Herjolfsnes cemetery yielded what was left of fifty-eight adults arranged in neat rows with their heads to the west. When time came for them to sit up on Resurrection Day they would face the rising sun. Each skeleton held a cross with a runic inscription:
GOD THE ALMIGHTY PROTECT GUDLEIF.
THORLEIF MADE THIS CROSS IN PRAISE AND WORSHIP OF GOD ALMIGHTY.
And so forth.
These Herjolfsnes colonists were fashionably dressed in accordance with European styles of the late Middle Ages, although in homespun wool rather than dyed silk or Italian velvet. From this rough material they had cut handsome cloaks and those tall Burgundian caps pictured by Memling, Christus, and other Flemish artists. They had copied the hood with a long tail, called a liripipe—de rigueur for modish gentlemen—which we recognize from descriptions by Dante and Petrarch. And they had imitated the cotte hardie, a man’s tight short jacket which fully exposed his legs, except that the Greenland cotte hardie was less revealing. The garment as Europeans wore it must have seemed too bold.
One thing about these cloaked and hooded skeletons is unforgettable: their size. They look like children pretending to be adults. The tallest woman measured just four feet, nine inches. The men were not much bigger.
Half of these people died before the age of thirty, and all of them had been feeble, their bodies deformed. This was not true of the early Green-landers, Eirik’s colonists, nor of their first descendants whose bones indicated that they were healthy enough. But it appears that toward the end, about the time Eystribyggd was raided and plundered, the colonists were suffering from tuberculosis, malnutrition, and rickets.
So it may be argued that the Viking impetus failed. Nothing was born of these people, nothing developed from them.
But that violent westward surge, foaming against the littoral of the New World, has not yet receded from the imagination because even today, a thousand years after Bjarni Herjolfsson was blown off course, we wonder just how far west the Vikings traveled.
This brings up the Kensington runestone, a memorial tablet approximately the size of a tombstone. Medieval Scandinavian characters on its face tell a grim story:
[WE ARE] 8 GOTHS AND 22 NORWEGIANS ON EXPLORATION JOURNEY FROM VINELAND THROUGHOUT THE WEST. WE HAD CAMP BESIDE 2 SKERRIES ONE DAY’S JOURNEY NORTH OF THIS STONE. WE WERE OUT FISHING ONE DAY. AFTER WE CAME HOME, FOUND 10 MEN RED WITH BLOOD AND DEAD. AV[E] M[ARIA] DELIVER [US] FROM EVIL!
HAVE 10 MEN BY THE SEA TO LOOK AFTER OUR SHIP, 14 DAYS’ JOURNEY FROM THIS ISLAND. YEAR 1362.
On July 20, 1909, a Minnesota farmer filed this deposition with the local notary public:
I, Olof Ohman, of the town of Solem, Douglas County, Minnesota, being duly sworn . . . In the month of August, 1898, while accompanied by my son, Edward, I was engaged in grubbing upon a timbered elevation, surrounded by marshes, in the southeast corner of my land, about 500 feet west of my neighbor’s, Nils Flaten’s, house, and in the full view thereof. Upon removing an asp, measuring about 10 inches in diameter at its base, I discovered a flat stone inscribed with characters, to me unintelligible. The stone lay just beneath the surface of the ground in a slightly slanting position, with one corner almost protruding. The two largest roots of the tree clasped the stone in such a manner that the stone must have been there at least as long as the tree. . . . I immediately called my neighbor’s, Nils Flaten’s, attention to the discovery, and he came over the same afternoon and inspected the stone and the stump under which it was found.
I kept the stone in my possession for a few days; and then left it in the Bank of Kensington. . . .
Nils Flaten, who accompanied Ohman to the office of the notary, swore to his part in the discovery. This much can be verified, along with a few unimportant details.
Is it a fake, or not?
The runestone’s leading advocate was Hjalmar Holand, a Norwegian-born Wisconsin cherry farmer who learned about it in 1907 while he was a student at the University of Wisconsin. He tried to buy it. He offered five dollars, but Ohman wanted ten. Holand could not afford ten. Ohman by this time had put up with a certain amount of ridicule because almost every geologist and philologist who examined the stone had concluded that the carving must be recent, and perhaps because of this he suddenly gave the stone to Holand.
For the next fifty-five years Holand tried to authenticate the grisly tale—which he himself had translated. He even took the stone to Scandinavia for examination. And there have been authorities in one field or another who agreed with him that it could not be a fraud. The American ethnographer Stirling called it one of the most significant finds ever made on American soil. A German geographer, Richard Hennig, said that the stone’s authenticity was certain “and consequently the presence of Scandinavians in America a good one hundred and thirty years before Columbus can no longer be doubted.” The Preliminary Report of the Museum Committee of the Historical Society of Minnesota pronounced it genuine. And so on. Most experts, however, look upon the Kensington stone with distaste, boredom, resignation, and contempt.
The Danish rune specialist Erik Moltke, for instance: “Even the non-specialist will observe that the text, when it is transcribed into Latin, is easy to read. That is not the language of the fourteenth century, but rather of the nineteenth. In the language of the late Middle Ages ‘we had’ should be written ‘wi hafd hum’ not ‘wi hade’; ‘we were’ as ‘wi varum’ not ‘wi var’. . . .” Moltke also pointed out that the carver had invented a runic j, and had included a modified ö which was not introduced into Swedish until the Reformation.
Among Olof Ohman’s possessions when he died was a book with this resounding title: Carl Rosander, Den kunskapsrike Skolmästare eller hufvudegrunderna uti de för ett borgerligt samfundsliv nödigaste vetenskaper. It contains a chapter on the development of the Swedish language and gives, as one example, a fourteenth-century prayer ending with “fraelse [os] af illu,” which is to say, “Deliver [us] from evil.” In Ohman’s copy the page on which this prayer occurs had been well thumbed.
Birgitta Wallace of the Carnegie Museum speaks for a majority of professionals when she says that the stone was carved by a nineteenth-century immigrant: “. . . someone with an embryonic knowledge of runes, but who lacked familiarity with medieval Scandinavian languages. The carver could have been almost any one of the early Scandinavian settlers in Minnesota, all of whom knew something about runes but who generally had no philological education.” The language employed on the stone, she remarks, is a dialect which developed in the Kensington area and is still spoken by a few old-timers, though it is unknown elsewhere. Furthermore, the tool used in making the inscription was a chisel with a standard one-inch bit, a type sold in American hardware stores.
Quite a few bona fide runestones have been found in Scandinavia. They are big, blunt, ugly things that remind you of menhirs or of the weathered teeth of ancient monsters, and their crude messages are seldom dramatic, although real enough:
RAGNHILD, ULV’S SISTER, PLACED THIS STONE—AND THIS BOAT-SHAPED STONE CIRCLE—TO HER HUSBAND GUNULF, AN OUTSPOKEN MAN, SON OF NÆRVE. FEW ARE NOW BORN BETTER THAN HE.
. . . SER PLACED THIS STONE TO HIS BROTHER AS . . . AND [HE] MET HIS DEATH IN GOTLAND [?]. THOR SANCTIFY [THESE] RUNES.
SØLVE