A New Rune Stone Found in Canada Is Yet Another Nineteenth Century Fake

​You wouldn’t know it from a Popular Science article deploying the familiar “archaeologists remain baffled” trope, but a recent analysis of a carved stone found in the Canadian wilderness in 2018 helps to bolster the case that the Kensington Runestone was part of a broader nineteenth-century trend of fake inscriptions. 

Researcher study the rune stone. (Ryan Primrose / Ontario Centre for Archaeological Education)

​Deep in the woods, nearly 500 miles northwest of Ottawa, sits a slab of stone on which the Lord’s Prayer and an image of a boat are carved in Furthark runes, the oldest type of rune. The stone slab only became visible when a tree fell, exposing where it had long been hidden beneath dirt and trees after it was deliberately buried long ago.
 
An interdisciplinary team that included Henrik Williams—the Uppsala University runologist readers with a long memory will remember from his long-ago critiques of Scott Wolter—examined the runes and kept quiet for several years as analysis progressed to prevent incomplete or incorrect information from leaking.
 
"We didn't want to release information publicly until we had done as much as we could at the time to understand exactly what it was," archaeologist Ryan Primrose told the CBC.
 
The team determined that the runes were most likely carved by a Swedish member of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the early to middle nineteenth century, and the text—the Lord’s Prayer in Swedish—was copied from a version published in the later nineteenth century, derived from a 1611 original version. The text used a form of Furthark runes developed by Johannes Bureus in the 1600s, which Bureus had adapted for Swedish. (The original use of the alphabet in from the first millennium was not deciphered until 1865.) The team speculates that the stone may have been meant for a worship site for Swedish workers.
 
The discovery is especially important because it provides direct evidence that Swedish-speaking immigrants carved runestones during the nineteenth century and deliberately buried them. This is exactly what skeptics have long believed was the origin of the Kensington Runestone. If the dating of the Canadian stone is correct, the carving of rune stones dates back half a century or more before the Kensington Runestone’s “discovery,” and coincides closely with the period in the 1830s and 1840s when Carl Christian Rafn set off a craze for Scandinavian history when he claimed in Antiquitates Amercanae (1831) that the Norse had colonized North America.