Thinking Sideways: The Kensington Runestone

Discovered in 1898, the 200 lb Kensington Runestone is, as the name suggests, a stone covered in runes. What makes this stone so interesting is that it was found in Minnesota, USA. Though the authenticity of this out of place artifact has been hotly debated, if real, the stone provides evidence that in 1362, Scandinavian explorers would have been the "first" to discover the new world, almost 100 years before Columbus.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Thinking Sideways. I don't know. You never know. The story
is of things we simply don't know the answer too. Hey, guys,
welcome to an episode of Thinking Sideways the podcast. An episode. Well,

(00:27):
I'm not going to say another because maybe this is
their first good point. It's an episode. Yeah, I'm Devin,
I'm joined by and and we're going to talk about
an unsolved mystery. In case that's not how you found us.
This is a big one too. It's you know what,
I actually think this one is really really interesting. It

(00:47):
is not so big, but it was heavy. Yeah. I
had a really hard time in the research of this.
Just there's so you and I talked about this earlier.
Is it? There's a lot of minutia in it, and
I did I started to get ahead. Ye happen. Yeah,
we're going to talk about the Kensington runestone today. R

(01:09):
It's runestone. In eighteen nine, a Swedish immigrant named Olaf
Allman found a two hundred pounds slab of sandstone also
called graystone because it's gray but it's sandstone, in Solemn, Minnesota.
It was found when he was clearing an area of

(01:30):
what some websites report is unclaimed, but upon further digging.
Was totally his property, but it was just kind of
an empty unreclaimed yeah, reclaimed maybe, um. But he was
clearing trees from it, and he fell a tree and
there was a stone that was entwined in the roots.

(01:51):
Probably again the stories and I'm inclined to believe that
it was entwined in the roots, but well, there's some
evidence to show that there were roots growing against it,
whether it was on the ground and they were directly
under or it was underground. It was it was underground,
it wasn't you couldn't see the top of it. You

(02:12):
couldn't see any part of it from the ground. But
whether it was actually entwined in the roots or if
it was kind of just nearby, hard to tell. And
this is this is not like a oh the Internet retelling.
It's hard to tell. Literally, the three people that were
there when I was discovered, none of them can agree,
Like they don't remember actually what day it was found,
or like what time of day or what exactly they

(02:33):
were doing or anything like that. One of those situations.
One of those. So that's why you know, I witness
testimony is it's hard, Well, it's so varied. One person said, oh, yeah,
it was November eight, and the other one said, no,
it was August eleven, right, eleven eight or eight eleven. Think, yeah,
it's hard to tell, so we're just gonna say I

(02:56):
think it was entwined in roots in the fall of
the Fall of eight. He named this stone after the
closest settlement, which was Kensington, because I thought Minnesota he was,
but that's like the county area. The closest settlement was

(03:17):
town Village. I guess it was very small, large settlement
with that grouping of people. The stone was covered in
ruins and was said to be from about thirteen sixty two.
I'm sorry the year at thirteen sixty two. It apparently
tells the account of some Scandinavian explorers, and if this

(03:39):
is the case, many of our listeners will have already
realized that means that these Scandinavian explorers managed to quote
unquote discover right the New World like a hundred years
before Christopher Columbus, actually well over a hundred years because
a little because I wait, if you think about Europeans
coming here, you know, like the British and everybody like that,

(04:01):
they settled on the coast. But we didn't actually penetrate
as far into the interior. Is this for a long
time after that? Right? So yeah, so yes, you're right,
more than a hundred years before, way back. So the
stone inscription has been translated a number of different ways.
We're just going to use the text that's on Wikipedia
to start with, and then we'll talk about some of
the discrepancies later. Got it. So this is our baseline.

(04:24):
This is our baseline. What I would say is pretty
much accepted as the translation. Uh, the sorry, and I
should mention the front of the stone and then one
of the sides of the stone are carved, so we've
got it's kind of a monolith in terms of shape,
it's a rectangle. We've got four faces too, you know,
the front and back that are larger, and then two

(04:45):
slimmer sides, and then the top and the bottom. Yeah yeah,
And there's nothing on top and nothing on top and bottom,
nothing on the back one of the sides or the back,
but something on the well, I guess you know what
you'd call the front and one of the sides. Okay,
I think it's the front, then they is it the
right side? If you were looking directly at the inscription,
I believe it's the right side. The left side, is it?
I think so? Okay. So the front says eight Gotlanders

(05:09):
or Swedes and twenty two Northmen or north Norwegian Norwegian.
On this acquisition, journey from Vinland, far from the west,
we had a camp by two shelters. One day's journey
north from this stone, we were fishing. One day after
we came home we found ten men red from blood

(05:30):
and dead. Maria saved from evil. And then the side says,
there are ten men by the inland sea to look
after our ships. Fourteen days journey from the peninsula or island,
year thirteen sixty two, the inland see referring perhaps to
one of the Great lakes. It's possible there's some theories
out there that actually this little parcel of land that

(05:53):
it was found on, it was found on an incline
or like a little grassy knoll area, and that it
could have it was kind of rounded by wetland's much
further away, but that at that time it could have
been that it was more of a wetland lake area,
so the waters had receded since receded, but that the
place that the stone was found was in fact a
small island on a small body of water, but it

(06:16):
could also be a great lake. It's not specified. I've
also seen stuff that to answer part of what your
question is is that to get there, they went north
of the United States where our borders are, came in
through Canada, and then that runs you into the Great Lakes.
I can't remember the name of the inlet or the
channel that you can use, but they use something like

(06:38):
I don't know, I mean, there is there was a
way to do that. I'm not sure that the lakes
naturally interconnected, and I should know this. You know, they
taught me the stuff, and I believe that for the
most part, they were maybe not enough to do large
shipping vessels like today. That was that man altered that.
But they were connected in some fashion, and so I
think that that is the research that I was doing

(07:01):
about how did they get there. It's that the lakes
are loosely interconnected, and so they they theoretically could have
made their way. Doesn't explain where the stone was found,
but it gets him into the area. Is yeah, that's
a big kind of close to that area. And then
then they got to hoof it overland for quite a
long ways for me, A little ways for sure. So

(07:24):
this stone was found and then kind of held onto
a little bit and then allman kind of thought, well,
maybe I don't know that it says it's from thirteen
sixty two. This was This was his actual thought pattern.
In case you guys were wondering, he wrote it down
in his diary. He said, I don't know, like it
was kind of from I'm kidding. Sorry. When when he
found it was he able to read the ruins himself

(07:47):
or decipher them. So this is kind of one of
the things about this story that's interesting. Most of the
stories that you'll hear there's so there's two camps that
you hear this story from, and they're both sure that
they're right. One camp is this is a huge hoax,
This isn't actually from that time. The other camp is, no,

(08:08):
this is real. And most of the people who say no,
this is real, they say it was real because the
guy who found it was totally illiterate, which is not
the case. This this guy omen was actually he was
a Swedish immigrant. He went to school in Sweden where
he would have learned runes. So word for word, perhaps
not were the US in common usage in the end

(08:33):
of the eighteen hundreds and Sweden. Still. Yeah, that's that's
what I wasn't sure because I had seen some stuff
that said he would have had books with runes, but
wouldn't have necessarily been reading. I mean, it wasn't the
it wasn't the number one of the languages, but they
were still it was still taught in school, kind of
like cursive is still taught in the United States, but taught. Yeah,

(08:53):
they still teach it. Yeah, So it's one of those
things right where it's like, well, nobody uses that, but
you learn it. And well anyway, so he probably likely
would have been able to decipher at least some of it. Regardless.
It was an old stone he found on his property
and he thought, hey, maybe we should get this assessed
by somebody. So it was first assessed for authenticity by

(09:14):
a professor at the University of Minnesota. And it's unclear
if this professor saw the actual stone, like they actually
took the stone to him to look at, or if
one of these copies of texts written copies of the
text were just sent to him. That would be a
lot easier, and if it would be a lot easier,
but it's been mentioned that most of the written copies

(09:37):
of the text were kind of poorly and crudely done.
Well were they handwritten copies or were they rubbing? I
think they were handwritten copies, like somebody who sat down
and tried to write them, and that it may have
been copied by somebody who didn't actually write rooms that
often or didn't know so that it seems to be
there's definitely some speculation that, uh, the written copies of

(09:58):
these rooms were not good, maybe to the point of
detrimentally to people being able to tell if linguistically it
was correct or not. And a lot of the copies
written copies of these have like very big differences in it, uh,
lots of discrepancies happening. So I think it's likely that
he actually just saw a piece of paper. Um, but

(10:20):
he dismissed it immediately. He said it was a really
poor attempt at forgery. And like I said, I can't
tell with accuracy if if he you know, saw the
paper or not, but if you saw the real thing, yeah,
if it was the paper, I I just want to say, like, well,
how would he know? And professor of linguistics linguistics, yeah,
specializing in um, Norse and Swedish, Scandinavian ruin and language studies.

(10:48):
So he didn't like it. He didn't what next? Then?
The stone, the actual stone, as far as I can tell,
uh In, was sent to Northwestern University. The opinion there
as that while the stone itself was pretty weathered, the
inscription seemed to be lighter and done more recently. The
stone was photographed, and um, apparently some archaeological venture was

(11:13):
done kind of near where the stone was lightly but
I don't think it was any It wasn't like a
huge scale. They weren't, you know, thinking, oh, there's a
huge settlement here, we gotta dig six No. I think
it was just kind of some slight excavation around where
he said he found the stone, just to see. But
he had been clearing the land, so it's not as

(11:33):
though he wasn't preserving it. You know, he didn't find
the stone and go oh oh, no, I better stop
felling all these trees and make sure that somebody could
find something if there is anything. Oh yeah, I can
see A year later, Um, I think it was over there.
But that is literally what happened. I mean, they started
interviewing the three people right and as I said, like,
they couldn't even agree on what month they had found it,

(11:55):
let alone where they had found it. So well, if
he's if he's working the land and he's clearing trees
and he's changing the topography. I don't know if either
of you have ever been to a construction site where
they're doing major grade work. But you go on on
day one and you've got a good idea where things are,
and and then if you leave for a week, you're

(12:16):
kind of lost because by the time you come back
everything has changed. But stretched that over the course of
a year, and you just kind of keep getting used
to it a little bit by a little bit and
don't quite remember where things were before. That's easy to
understand why they had no idea where they found it.
True that I don't know if they all saw. They
didn't even see the ruins to begin with, right, I mean,
when when they first covered the stone, you know they

(12:40):
saw they saw they did, actually they saw a part
of it and they tried to clear This is another
thing that affects the They the ruins on the side
were cleaned off with a nail. They just took a
nail and scraped away, which would obviously alter the ability
to actually accurately date when that had happened. Um, and

(13:03):
that's part of the reason that they had a different
color because they were freshly scraped. So again it's you know,
it's hard to tell with that if they just did
a really good job scraping the runes Queen so they
could see what was going on or what happened there. Regardless,
nothing was reported to be found from this excavation, exploration,
whatever you want to call it. And the stone was

(13:25):
returned to Omen in March of eight and since everybody
said it was pretty much just worthless, it wasn't really
an artifact. It was you know, totally fake. He just
used it as a stepping stone, uh, like the kind
of entryway stepping stone to his granary. Just stuck it
right in there, ruins down. He wasn't treading on the runes,

(13:48):
but he did. He just used it as a as
the entry stone. Well the backside is the flat side, Yeah,
so of course they'd be the one he uses a
step Yeah, so he just did that. Yeah, don't get
no respect. Yeah, so interest waned in this rude stone.
But it had been kind of a big media you know,
been shipped around a little bit. Yeah, but there, you know,

(14:12):
there had been some newspaper articles. It had been kind
of a big deal. Everybody said, that's a hoax. And
he said, all right, fine, it's a hoax. I'm going
to use it as a stepping stone. A historian. Mr.
Holland was investigating the possibility of a Norwegian settlement in
Minnesota and became aware of the stone and became, of
course very interested in the stone as it might provide

(14:34):
some I don't know, evidence or something like that. So
he uh went over to the Kensington area and spoke
with Almond about the stone, um, and they pulled it
out of the ground and he examined it, and at
about this time, the Minnesota Historical Society decided, Oh, I
guess we'll investigate this too. Okay, guys, oh I guess

(14:59):
we should because it's popular again, Yeah, that people are.
The fact that Holland got interested in it, he kind
of really drummed up a lot of support for it,
for its authenticity. He he thought it was real really
kind of from the get go, you know, it was
kind of one of those confirmation bias things where he
he thought, oh, yeah, the Norwegians totally settled this area

(15:21):
way earlier than we think. And then he heard about
the stone and he said, see, it's totally it's real.
Of course that's real, because I've been thinking this thing
and now I found some proof for it. The Minnesota
Historical Society hired a man named Newton Winchell, and he
started collecting Affidavid's from the people who were there when
the stone was found and then also family and friends. Yeah. Yeah,

(15:45):
kind of trying to, you know, collect the stories of
it and see if maybe they had created this forgery
or anything like that. Uh. And he was also a geologist,
so they thought that he would probably be a pretty
good person to carry out this investigation. I don't I
don't know why, but he interviewed a lot of locals
as well as omens family, and interviewed Holland and some linguists.

(16:10):
And the linguists pretty much to a one said no,
this is this is a hoax. But Holland and Witchell,
we're both really convinced that it was real. For a
number of reasons that will lay out in a couple
of minutes. Holland and Winchell definitely thought it was real.
The reason that they think it's real is because linguists
by and large are saying that this, the language used

(16:34):
on this stone is not consistent with with eleventh century
Scandinavian grammar, which is fair. The linguists were saying that
it was a poor forgery of eleventh century Scandinavian grammar,
and you know, uh, it should be fourteenth century. So
I'm not totally sure why it's the eleventh century that

(16:56):
they're talking about in terms of grammar. And you know,
as we know, language is a living thing, so it
does change. It allows people to be able to pinpoint
and say this is when this language is from, based
on the slang or the way that grammars used, or
cases or things like that in some In some languages,
that is true, I know, for both the written and

(17:18):
the verbal form. For some other languages, though, I know
that though the spoken version may you know, ebb and
wane back and forth and change, the written version is
not to make a pun here, but it's set in stone.
It is one way. This is how it's done, and

(17:40):
it's not built to be flexible, and it's not allowed
to be flexible. So I wonder if that's why they're
saying it's not consistent with the eleventh century. And I
unfortunately I read this as well in the research and
never thought to look into that. But I wonder if
that's the reason is that there was they say from
time A to B it didn't it did never change. Yeah,

(18:01):
I I think probably that's the case. I also think
you've to take into consideration how long this group would
have had to have been traveling to make it to Minnesota.
So I think they, you know, kind of backlook obviously
not three years. They weren't. They weren't obviously for three years.
But if you can say, you know, maybe fifty years
then or even ten, I don't know. I don't know

(18:23):
how long it takes Scandinavians to get across the ocean
at this time and then and then make landfall and
then make it all the way to minnesotaeh he was.
I could take a while. It would take it's it's
about a six to nine months journey. I'm ballparking here.
I'm guessing to get from one to the other across
the ocean, and then from there the exploration process would

(18:46):
be long and drawn out. So I can see where
I could see where ten maybe even fifteen years maybe,
but I would imagine guys would get homesick after a while. Yeah,
you would think. But also they were here. If they
were around that long, you think there'd be more artifacts
left over. Yeah, yeah, yes, that's true. The stone's ownership.

(19:07):
You may be wondering, well, who owned the stone, because
Olman owned it for a while. Well, he owned it
until nineteen o seven, at which point Holland purchased it
for I believe it was ten dollars. Well it was,
you know, ten dollars in early nine hundreds, so that's
a lot more than we normally think of it. But

(19:28):
when you hear how much he tried to sell it for,
you will galyze it was absolutely a good deal. He
tried to sell it to the Minnesota Historical Society for
five thousand dollars in nineteen ten. Holland and, well, that's
some serious appreciation. It is. Obviously they said no, thank you.
But in nineteen forty eight on the I guess I

(19:52):
haven't really mentioned that the authenticity of the stone has
never really been like a yes, everybody says it's uh
this it's a hoax, or it's not. It's never been
agreed upon. It's always had this huge ebb and flow.
So it's gone through periods of legitimacy, validated by this
fact that in nineteen forty eight, the stone was on

(20:15):
display at the Smithsonian Institute in d C. For a
full year. And they don't really they don't put things
they think are fake in the in the usually not
normally not Usually they've displayed things they've discovered later on
we're fake. But everything they can discern it's real. That's
the only reason to go up. Yeah. So the curator
actually said of the stone that it is quote probably

(20:37):
the most important archaeological object yet found in North America
unquote when it was in the Smithsonian apparently, so he
really thought it was real. Obviously, after the year long
display in the Smithsonian, the stone was set up as
a permanent exhibit or I guess, the only exhibit at
the room Stone Museum in Alexandria, Minnesota. I was just thinking, man,

(20:59):
this to be. It can't be the most exciting museum
to go to. Hey, kids, we're gonna take field trip. Okay,
next stop is this thing that's our only stop? Actually
a stone? Yeah? And next up a stone? Yeah? Yeah,

(21:20):
I think it's kind of an interpretive center as well, right,
I mean it can't. It's not just a stone in
the middle of a room. Um, it did. It also
was shown at the New York World's Fair. It got around.
It did get around it. Uh. It also went to
Norway for a year or two. It's so it's been
around and again, you know, it's been this evan flow
of how you know, when people are like on the yeah,

(21:41):
it's real train and goes to interesting places, and when
people are on the no, it's fake train, it stays boring.
I say it's real. It's a rock for sure. It's
definitely rock. I would agree with, Yeah, that's it. Okay,
it's rock. So if you want to email us, you know,
we got to talk about theories. Okay, there's many of them.

(22:04):
There's a few, you know, my mo and I was
about to say, I'm looking at this, I'm like, wait
a minute, you broke this up into two very big categories.
There's four categories. Yeah, just look harder, Steve, there's four categories. Technically, yeah, yeah,
that's a technicality. Yeah. But as I've said, I will

(22:24):
say again, I will continue to say. Everybody who's ever
written about the Runestone is a percent sure that they
are right, that it is either totally a hoax or
totally not. There's very little stuff out there about somebody's saying, well,
it could be this, and I did find two theories
and both of them are good. I think that kind

(22:45):
of land sort of in the middle. But pretty much
everybody else is in their camp. All right, let's let's
camp one. Camp one is it's a hoax. Okay, here's
why this word that I'm gonna make Joe pronounce them
that I'm gonna spell, but I I know I'm mispronouncing that. Well,
it's a Norse word. Yeah, it's spelled O p d

(23:07):
A g E l s e f A r d,
which was the word that's translated into voyage of discovery.
And apparently it did not occur in the Norse language
until several centuries after the thirteen sixty two inscription date,
putting it in approximately the sixteenth century. There's a bit

(23:28):
of controversy regarding this issue because one of the ruins,
which is the thirst room the theory as run it,
so it can be used in a number of different ways.
Ruins are kind of tricky that way. Ruins are phonetic
in that right, So it's not like each room equates
to one letter in the English language that spells out

(23:49):
a word that probably doesn't even sound like you think
it's going to sound because we don't say words the
right way. It's each room represents a sound. Okay, nodding
slowly in this student, Yes, I'm on, I'm on board
with that, all right. So there is a run that's
used in that word. Um, the thirst run is how

(24:09):
I'm going to pronounce it, and it could have been
used to represent a t sound, which would have made
the word that we spelled earlier, the obstacle per credit card,
into a different word, which means journey of acquisition, which
was a standard word that was used in the century,

(24:29):
instead of the journey of discovery, which is the word
that it's commonly translated as, which wasn't common until the
sixteenth century. Okay, because as you say, I know I
had seen some sources that when I saw the translation,
it was really weird because it was it was a
word slash word slash word slash, you know, voyage of
something something something something something and pick it was like

(24:52):
choose your own adventure. Yeah, and so I will mention
that if this run is used to represent the t
sound it's used, it's the only place it's used to
represent that sound in the on the entire rune stone.
They use the more standard runes to represent that sound
everywhere else. But it is speculated that it was that

(25:13):
use of that word. I don't know. Maybe it's like
I can't spell available to save my life, right, everybody
has those words where it's like I think it's spelled
this way, which I don't know. Maybe that so this
guy had a little block when it came to that word.
And you're carving in stone. It's not like you can erase,
go back. You know, that doesn't exist. It's just whatever

(25:35):
it is. The next issue is the issue of cases
on the stone as No, it's that in like tenses. Okay,
I was just trying to make sure because I never noticed.
I always think of cases as upper and lower case
like we do in English, so that's why I was
just I never saw anything like that. Runs are very uniform,

(25:58):
so that's why I was confused by that. Yeah, it's
it's um like the you know, plural singular I we
view them. Okay, that that that makes more sense, and
I always struggle with linguistics, so this is why I
asked this question. Until the fifteenth century, there were four
cases in the North Scandinavian language that the Ruin Stone

(26:22):
is written in UH, and that was later abandoned for
two cases, which is simpler. It's a good idea, yea think.
So please don't ask me a lot of detail because
I am not linguistics person. I didn't want to delve
too deep into this because it would be an hour
and a half on is why these cases are this way? Yeah,
it's this is not such a inter shattering mystery. I agree,

(26:46):
I absolutely agree. You can afford to spend weeks and
weeks and weeks learning about this stuff. Yeah. Anyway, apparently
the stone uses just the two cases instead of the
more common four cases, which would have been common at
the time. Again, not really, as Joe was saying, a
problem for me, as much you're carving in stone, you
got like ten dead people next to you. It's not

(27:07):
that long. It's not that long of a it's not
that long of a text. So while people who are
way better versed in linguistics than me may shout, yes,
that is totally shattering and it's strong proof against this
being real. I don't think it's that big of a deal.
It's what what was it? Ten lines eight lines long?
Is what this is? That's it. Yeah, it's there's not

(27:30):
a lot of room for messing around anything kind of yeah. Yeah,
so you're not going to get all fancy with it.
And by the way, they I don't think they had
the corpses right next to them. I think they were
like a day's ride away or something like that. Okay, sorry,
we'll forget about painting a beautiful picture. Okay, waxing pot.
You had a bunch of corpses. Yeah, apparently I don't
read runes, so I cannot confirm or deny this. But apparently,

(27:53):
according to some sources, the inscription uses the English spelling
of dead, not d E A D, but d E
D with runes phonetically instead of what the Norse world
would have been. Again, I can either confirm nor deny,
but this is something that people say. Yeah, no, I
also have to ride through the middle of that one, okay,

(28:14):
or maybe maybe dead beats something else in Scandinavian. One
would presume that the people who were translating it wouldn't
know that though instead of saying no, it's spelled the
wrong way, you would hope. Yeah. And finally, as we
mentioned before, the stone itself was weathered, but the inscription

(28:36):
wasn't weathered. So the stone was obviously a very old stone,
but the inscription itself looked much newer. So, you know,
the edges weren't as degraded as you would expect to
see given the age, and where that you would expect
to see on fine lines like that Steve's looking, and
not cut very deeply into the stone really, so you
would see a lot of where if it was exposed

(28:59):
to the elements, like on the edges of what's the
ruins that have been carved, they wouldn't it was if
it was above ground the whole time. Yeah, I can
see that. That's exactly my point to write. It was buried,
So I don't think it was meant to be buried.
I don't think it was originally buried. There's a lot

(29:19):
of evidence to suggest that it was put upright like
a like a headstone almost. Yeah, Yeah, so it was
part of it was buried and then the rest of
it got buried over time. You would expect to see
probably more where than necessarily you see currently on it.
But again it comes back to you know, they cleaned
it off with a nail, like who knows? Who knows?

(29:41):
So if this is a hoax, the next big question
is who created the hoax? Who created Well, he has
been number one suspect right then, of course is the
number one suspect, And I don't think it was him.
What would you know? The is one of those things
I asked this every time we talked about a hoax.

(30:03):
What are you going to get out of the hoax?
Like he actually made ten bucks? Well, no, ignoring the
financial gain, I mean easy trying to to get some
notoriety out of it, like I never understand what people
hope to gain from from pulling the wool over people's else. Well,
that for me is I think the biggest reason that
I don't think it's Almen, right. I mean, he found

(30:25):
it eventually brought it to people's attention. They said it's
a hoax. Here have it back, and he said, okay,
I'm just going to use it as a stepping stone.
Then yeah, exactly. He didn't. He was never a vocal
advocate for its authenticity. He was always throughout the entire
time just kind of standing back saying I found this thing.
Is it? What is it? And people said, here, it's
this thing, and he goes Okay. You would think that

(30:46):
if somebody had the wherewithal to make a hoax like that,
they would be brazen enough to keep pushing that it
was real. I mean we see this all the time.
How many books have come out in the past decade
that are supposed to be pure fact and they turn
out to be pure fiction, But the person who wrote

(31:06):
it just continually, you know, goes on TV and does
everything they can to defend that it's real. Those people
and they've got big brass ones, they are just they're
holding it up and this guy didn't do that at all. Yeah.
So yeah, I think that if you're gonna if you're
gonna pull off a hoax that involves carving things in stone,
to what you want to do is you want to
carve the eleventh fift Commandments into a stone tablet. I've

(31:30):
found the Lost five Commandments. That's what I would do. Yeah,
I know that's what you would do. Yeah, maybe some
cool commandments in there too. Uh No, I think it's
I think it's definitely not Alman. I think he definitely
isn't the one. So who else created? Right? And I
think you know, the other big question is exactly that.
And the only other option is that somebody spent some

(31:52):
time created this hoax, dropped it off on some abandoned
land for a while because it was buried near a tree, right,
and the tree was like forty years old, and hoped
someone would find it and recognize what it was and
bring it to people's attention. So who was the historian
was so fascinated by the prospect of Norrisman coming to Minnesota.

(32:13):
Mr Holland, Yeah, so you suspecting him? I don't. I
don't because I don't think that he would have left
it up to chance as much as that, Right, that's
a big risk to take. And he wasn't that old
of a man. I mean, if it's if it's in
the roots of a forty year old tree, it's had
to have been there at least forty years. I got

(32:33):
the we'll talk about that, well, ballpark is we'll talk
about that. But my my point is I got the
impression that he was a forty something to fifty something
year old man, not an eighty year old man. Yes,
that's true. He was a younger man, which means that
he would have had to done it as an adolescent. Yeah. Well, okay,

(32:54):
so the tree itself was forty years old. And again
this is one of those facts I go back and
forth on in terms of if I what I believe.
But apparently, and I don't know how, because they uprooted
the tree and it was gone, they didn't count the rings.
I assume they did count the rings, so they said
the ring They said, Okay, it's a forty year old tree.

(33:15):
Most of the trees around here forty years old. But
apparently somebody came and examined the roots and said, oh, no,
the roots were disturbed about ten years ago where the
stone was. I don't know how. Okay, I don't know
how they would have found that out, But some somebody said, no, no, no,
something was buried here, something big was buried here, like
ten years ago, disrupting the way that the roots were

(33:36):
growing or something like that. I could see somebody being
able to figure that out today with you know, all
of the computer technology that we have, because I what
I'm getting I'm understanding this to mean is that some
yo yo went out to the bottom of that tree
dug a big ditch or trench pushed the roots out
of the way through the stone, and then covered it

(33:56):
back up to make it look like it had been
there for longer than it had. Okay, that's that's what
I thought. Man. Roots, It's like a tree branch, you know,
it takes a long time before it becomes very very
obvious that somebody has tied it up and it's been
you know, altered in its growth pattern. Yeah, yeah, okay,
I agree with you. I don't know, I totally agree

(34:18):
with you. I um yeah. And I'm also not not
so sure that the roots would have survived that long
because usually when you clear land, you saw that, you
saw out the wood, you know, and take it home,
throwing the woodpile or whatever, and then all the all
the stomps you're throwing a big pile, you burn them. Yeah.
Oh no, I I absolutely agree with you. There's no
way that somebody could have unless they examined it on
the day. This was an affidavit from somebody who for

(34:42):
whatever reason, examined the roots on the day. Uh, there's
no way that they would be able to know. This
also worth mentioning this whole forty year thing. The settlements
that were in Minnesota in that area at that time,
they were very new. White people were buying large not
living there forty years ago, so interesting fact for the era.

(35:02):
So for somebody to just create this hoax, drop it
and hope that somebody finds it someday, hounds stone into
what could be considered hostile herritory and just trying it
in the ground and then right away, So that's our

(35:23):
segue into it's not a hoax. We touched on the tree,
which was kind of one of my first points in
that it's not a hoax situation, but it can go wherever.
It's fine. Yeah, we kind of arguing that, yeah, we
can move away from it. And then the knoll. We
also talked about that it could have been an island

(35:44):
almost sorry, the knoll, that the tree with the stone
underneath it. This is like, right, the sounds like a
very Lord of the Rings description. I think it's that
like bog and the frog on the log and the
bog and of anyways, Uh, it could have been and
likely was, in fact, an island in the middle of

(36:07):
swamp way wetland kind of area, assuming as one should,
that the water table was different in Minnesota six hundred
years ago because uh the water, the water could have
been about fifty feet higher than it currently is, which
would have put water surrounding that knoll. Okay, Does that

(36:28):
make it anywhere likely that a chunk of sandstone is
going to be sitting there? Though? I think there are
two possibilities that it affords. One is that the rock
was moved by water to this place, right with rising
and lowering lowering tides. So you think the rock was
just bobbing in the water and just sort of washed upon. Yeah,
I mean, you know, two hundred pound rocks to float.

(36:50):
Just science, there are no nautical hazards. No, yeah, they are,
They totally are. It's that that in h icebergs the
same thing, right, No, I mean water has been it
moves things. It's course, it absolutely is. But also that
it could explain that they could have been camping there,
that that would have been a place that some people

(37:11):
would have been camping. They would have ended up there,
and that's why that stone was there, because they could
have gotten there with a boat. It also you also
got to think about it from and explorer's point of view.
I'm in this body of water, It's an area I
don't know. There are people who I don't understand who
potentially are hostile. It's safer to make camp on an island,

(37:35):
on a high ground, on the high ground rather than
on the surrounding mainland because it's nobody. It's harder to
sneak up on you. Almost impossible in fact, to sneak
up on somebody because you make a lot of noise
waiting through that. Yeah, and also you can see people
waiting through them. I mean, you know it's on a
little canoe or a boat or whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah,
that's I think a pretty good solid fact for why

(37:57):
it would be there, except that it just sort of
happened to be there and they did some carbon out there.
Is that? Is that the idea? Yeah, it's yeah, I
guess yeah. Okay. The prayer to marry the Maria that's
on the stone. People cite this as something that is

(38:18):
pretty important little bit of history regarding its authenticity. It's
it's a Catholic prayer, but the Swedes of Minnesota, we're
all Lutheran pretty much, but for the most part at
the time, that was the prevalent religion at the turn
of the century. But way back in the day, the
turn of the Okay, just making sure I knew which

(38:41):
centree we were talking about here. So this is the
turn of the century when the stones, when if it
were a hoax, when this thing would have been made?
Because is it the turn of the nineteenth century? Is that?
Is that the year? Is that the year? I never
can understand it. I don't even understand why the hell

(39:02):
of the nineteenth century is in because it's the eighteens.
It totally makes sense. I mean, I get it, but
it's dumb. It's confusing. The further we get away from
the first century, the stupider against Yeah. No, but so
it's But an interesting fact is that Swedes of the
fourteenth century, their hundreds were Catholic, So it makes sense

(39:26):
that the prayer that would they would have had would
have been all all a maria, not that the Lutheran
version of what that might be, which I think is
an important fact. I also don't know how much you
know that as a Swede in the you know, nineteen hundreds,
that's fairly sophisticated fake. If it's a fake, yeah should know.

(39:49):
Oh it happens that these people were a different, totally
different religion than me. So I'm going to add their
prayer into my hoax of this thing. That's fairly sophisticated.
It's not strong, but anyways, I think that's a fair
thing to mention. What else have we got here on

(40:10):
your bullet point list of it's not a hoax? I
love my bullet point list. I love to make fun
of them, I know you do. Next is that there
are some scholars who attest to its authenticity. The not
the linguists as much, but historians. There are some Well,
I've actually seen some really interesting stuff. So this stone

(40:30):
has got is it mica that's in the stone? I
want to say? And they talk about the weathering of
it when you're you know, when you take a microscope
to it and you can see how it's weathered. And
they've actually figured out how much the difference of the
weathering between the grooves that were cut in the stone
versus what is on the face, and it's pretty consistent

(40:53):
with the thirteen sixties some year date that's on, which
is really compelling. I agree. Again, they're saying that the
weathering of the ruins, it's consistent with being six years old.
There's six there's a difference between them. So the face
that is exposed has completely weathered away. The mica on

(41:14):
is completely weathered out, but the stuff that's in the
grooves has about his shows about six hundred years worth
of weathering. Now, I can't explain how that works, but
that's what I read, and it was like, wow, well
that's really scientific. I'm inclined to believe that it sounds science.

(41:35):
It's probably true. I would have said that he would have.
Another point that people bring up is the dotted R.
I hate the dotted R. I like the dotted R.
Do you know what the dotted R? Yeah, but I
think they just must took their R for an eye. No.
So the way that the R run is done, it

(41:57):
looks like an R pretty much like if you we're
just going to carve an R in straight lines. Yeah,
in straight lines. So it's a've got a vertical line.
You've got from left to right at an approximate degree angle,
and then from right to left at a mirror of
that angle back into that vertical line, and then you

(42:17):
do the same thing to make the tale of the R.
That's exactly what an R is. An R is that, well,
there's a dot in the middle in the absence area,
the negative space, the negative space, thank you, you know,
art stuff in the negative space on the top bit
of the art. This is why I always described letters. Yeah. No,

(42:39):
so there's a dot there. And apparently this is a
thing that only happened really in medieval times, so the hundreds.
But that could have it could have just been a
defect in the rock face. It's you can see it
in all of the rs that are used in the inscription.
It's not just one little dot and this of it
because I've only seen one are called out and because

(43:03):
there's a there's a huge fight over that are, a
stupidly huge fight and it all all of the images
that I see are of a single R. I you know,
when I look at the inscription, I I think I
see them around. I mean I think I see it
in all of them. But I could just be that

(43:23):
could be wishful thinking. Okay, Because because I agree with
you now that you say, oh, it's always the same are,
I realized, yeah, that the one that they do the
close up of is always the same ARE. But I'm
pretty sure when I look at it, it looks like
there's the dotted ARE and all of it. Because you know,
I was gonna say it's a single one, because there's
always the what's that what do they call it? The
dropped tool theory? Somebody dropped a tool and it just

(43:46):
happened to strike there and just happened to mar the stone.
So that's why I'm surprised to hear that there are
you saw at another place. But you know, I didn't,
you know what, I didn't really try to scan it
really well. I was just kind of briefly looking at
it as as reading the words that I can understand
English self. Sure, Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, you know,

(44:10):
I haven't really seen enough good close up photos of
the runs to really examine them closet problem. That's the
other thing that's hard with it is it's not as
though they're taking close ups of, you know, every single
little bit. It's just the you know, call out the
one room that has this weird thing going on, or
as we're about to talk about this one X that's
really interesting. It's actually all of the x is. But

(44:32):
this this theory is angle. It's angle theory, sub theory, whatever,
it's the knights templar angle or the hooked X theory.
I love it when the Night's get involved. Yeah, me too.
This this theory posits that the Night Templar, Knights Templar,
Nights Templar, we're running from something I think religious persecution

(44:58):
about that time for whatever reason. There's some for some
reason in the middle of the US um way earlier
than any other European descendants would have been. There is
some there's some stories that suggest that the Knights Templar
they were. There were a substantial amount of them that
were rounded up in the early hundreds and killed, and

(45:20):
then the rest of them all disappeared again. This is
one of those like that. I don't even know. That's
where the Knights Templar. Knights Templar are so popular because
there was a mass execution and a mass disappearances they did,
and there are a lot of theories that suggests that
they came to America or the New Land and it

(45:43):
ties into this other unsolved mystery in the United States
called the Newport Tower, which is in Rhode Island, which
most people think is a tower that was built, you know,
after Columbus got here, but some people say was built
earlier by the Knights Templar. It's I didn't do too

(46:03):
much research into that. It's probably its own episode, maybe
someday if we feel like it. But so, but anyway,
that but the Knights Templar didn't speak Swedish or Norwegian,
right they some of them did. They wrote in ruins,
some of them. Yeah, according to this theory, I don't.
I don't know any of them personally, so I don't
know what they wrote and what they didn't write. And

(46:25):
if you did, you couldn't say. I couldn't wink. There's
this website that I put up on the research that
I know, Steve loved. Yeah, if you mean loved equals loathed. Yeah.
It was one of those black background white texts websites.
I didn't spend a whole lot of time on it,
but it just I don't know why you did that.

(46:46):
I thought it was a real source. Okay, that was
a mistake, Steve. It's always a mistake. Uh. It takes
aerial photos that they've enhanced of the area surrounding where
the stone was found, and they say they're carvings in
the earth and if you just draw these lines, they
point directly to the temple or the tower in Rhode Island,

(47:09):
and also all these other places that are totally knights
templar places. So the stone was actually just like a
cipher that the Templar Knights left for people. So it's
actually a coded message. Act. It is an insanely detailed
encoded message, Like there are numbers and coordinates and degrees

(47:33):
in all of this stuff buried in it. And I
was reading through the descriptions and I actually started laughing
out loud when at one point it said something something, something,
which is referenced in the room Stone, and I went
back to their translation and couldn't find that in their translation,

(47:56):
Like it's a it's a lot of leaps of faith. Yeah,
maybe it's a parody. No, no, no, that's a lot
of work for a parody website, those huge seven pages. Anyway,
I think that if they were if they arrived in
America sometime in the fourteenth century, is this the Night's
Templar fleeing persecution, they really didn't need to go as

(48:16):
far as as far as Minnesota, because remember, nobody in
Europe had any idea that America was here. Well that's
not true, but well yeah, but I means still, they
could have just chilled on the coast for quite a
long time. They could have. But you know, maybe they
were bored. Yeah, you know, maybe they just thought curious,
or maybe they were driven off of the coast by
the indigenous people. Yeah, I mean, that's that's the thing,

(48:39):
is that we've got to remember they weren't the only
ones there, and being an alien culture, they're going to
be a pariah. They're gonna be chased away every time. Yeah,
pretty much, no matter where they go. So this is
the reason that this is also referred to as the
hooked X theory is because the X run has a
very it's a distinct little hook that you apparently only

(49:01):
see with Knights Templar writing. Oh, I didn't make that connection. Okay,
it's a distinct style apparent allegedly, I don't. I don't.
I can't say for certain if that's true or not.
I guess. The last little interesting bit about the Knights
Templar is the Scottish prince slash Templar Knight Henry Sinclair

(49:22):
apparently tried to explore North America in thirteen sixty two,
So meaning why you got up to a ship and
attempted to crossover. Yep, it never was heard from again, Yep,
got it. So that's kind of interesting. That isn't true.
I don't know why a Scottish prince would write in
Norse rooms, but okay, sure, yeah, we don't even know

(49:45):
if you made it to America. Maybe that's what ascribe
wrote in maybe. So here are my two favorite theories. Well,
these are the ones that are not it is or
is not a hope. Well they are kind of well
under the main bullets. Yes, that I'm making fun of again.
This one is it's not a hoax, but it was
carved somewhere else. Well, it's a pretty good theory. It

(50:09):
is documented that Newfoundland was found by Norse explorers in
uh year one thousand or something like that. Uh, it
wasn't explored. I mean, it wasn't settled or anything, but
they kind of thought, but oh look there's land over there. Cool. Yeah,
I think that they've found some smart effects, haven't they. Yeah,
they have. So it's not impossible. I mean, how it

(50:29):
would have made its way all the way to Minnesota,
who knows. But it's not impossible to think that interesting
journeys had been made back to the New World from
Scandinavia over the course of the years, and that they
just happened to leave this stone. Wait, so if I
understand what you're saying, you're saying that it is a

(50:50):
stone from their native land that they brought with them
somehow as a ballast or something. No, I'm saying that
it would have been carved like on the coast in
new in Newfoundland, in Newfoundland, Yeah, and then brought over, right,
So they brought it from their native land. Not necessarily,
I don't. I don't even know, but sandstone possibly is

(51:11):
indigenous to Newfoundland's I don't know. Somebody go check a
website because that just seems I mean, other than a
ballast stone, which I don't know if they used I
don't know why they would have packed that stupid thing
all that way. They might have. They might have actually
had it for a ballast stone. But typically speaking ballast
and ships, back in those days, the rocks were used
a lot, but you don't usually use enormous ones like that. Yeah,

(51:34):
that's that's my point. Yeah, they take up a lot,
a lot of space. There's a lot of air gaps,
and they're really hard to get down below decks without
breaking your back. And you're in your ship. Yeah, exactly,
when guy slips and well that chips under yeah, but
so you know, but I maybe they just got it
somewhere in Newfoundland and maybe they were actually in places
other than Newfoundland, not just maybe they actually had other

(51:56):
parts of North America also, Well, I know that type
of stone is owned in New England. Yeah, so I
know that it is. It is found in more than
one place. It's you know, rocks or rocks. Yeahstone is common. Yeah,
and and that that kind of I think they called
it what a greystone? Is that right Devon? Yeah? Yeah,
greystone is found in a lot of different places. But

(52:16):
I just don't know, is it do you know if
it's found in Newfoundland? Yeah, it is. I just just
to clarify, in Newfoundland is like Northern Canada. It's like
Eastern Canada, eastern northeastern Canada. Right, I'm just I'm just
trying to figure out if for the geology. B oh yeah, yeah,
it's found all over yeah, so it could have been there.
So yeah, yeah, so I can I can see it's

(52:38):
it's carved there and it's like left there, and there's
certain certain settlers later on find it and they just think,
you know, if they happen to be Scandinavian and they
think I've got a great idea. Let's let's ship it
to the mainland, and I will pass it on to
other Scandinavians and essentially move it far inland as far
and known as we can, and and then whom we'll

(53:00):
bring it to a lot and say, hey, look how
far the Northman went. It's kind of kind of a
matter of ethnic pride. Yeah, you know, I can also
see there being a settlement, you know, in Newfoundland, and
then as they kind of migrate through, somebody's like, well,
this is important, we're abandoning this area, so let's take
it with us, you know. But as as you were saying,

(53:21):
they found artifacts, and there have been no artifacts found
except for the stone in this area, so that's pretty
big issue for me. Yeah. Next theory is it's not
a hoax, but it's not from thirteen sixty two either.
I believe this one. It is a historical fact that

(53:42):
ten Norwegian settlers were killed pretty close to the spot
where that stone was found as part of the Sioux Wars.
About this, the Sioux Wars that happened in eighteen sixty two. Vaguely,
that's that that actually makes a lot of sense. Yeah,
for me, that was kind of. I read that and
I was like, Oh, that's an AHA moment for me

(54:03):
that it happened close by. You know, there weren't officially
a lot of white people living around in that area,
but likely there were some, given that some white people
died in that area at that time. The carbon the
numbers match up pretty well. You know, it could be
that it's the typo essentially, is what this all boils
down to, Either a typo or maybe a little bit

(54:25):
of erosion, Yeah, something like that, And that it was
left there as the marker for their fallen comrades. Yeah,
that makes sense got buried. It would have been there
forty years, which would fall in line with the whole
tree root thing. Yeah, I guess that's what thirty six years.
It would explain the weird grammar stuff that's going on right,

(54:46):
that it was a mix, because it would have been
it wasn't a thing that continued to happen. They're like
carving of ruin stones. Run stones were used as like
headstones and markers of important events. So it would have
been something that somebody would have harved as a tribute
and that they would have probably tried to be hearkening
on the traditions of old but probably not knowing enough

(55:08):
to do it accurately. Well yeah, well, I mean a
lot of people were not that well educated. There were
lots of people who could read and sort of read
and write, but lots of bad grammar and spelling and stuff.
I mean, it's I would say, it's similar to people
trying to do Old English today. You know, for me,
I've seen those tattoos. Yeah, I mean everybody has, and

(55:28):
it's it's not good old English, but it kind of
looks like old English, And I don't know. For me,
that's it. That's my I'm done. That's my theory. Okay,
like microphone drop right now, don't drop the mic, please canace.
But no, I think that's a really solid theory. I
think that really explains it all pretty well. Yeah, I

(55:51):
think so too. Yeah, I'm with you. Look at that
wrap up, Steve, not convinced. I'm still not convinced. Why not, West,
what's not convincing you? Because if if it's a simple
typo of the three should have been an eight, Yeah,
that's a big typo. Oh. No, they're not like number
like English numbers. They're yeah, not Arabic numerals. There their

(56:16):
room numbers, so they're actually ruins. There's no like Arabic
numerals on there. Uh. And as it turns out, I
can show you a picture if you would like. But
three and eight they're like almost exactly like it's like
the it's it looks kind of like seriously, yeah, it
looks kind of like the P right. But so the
three the protrusion, I guess it looks like yeah, the

(56:41):
flag is half mass yeah, and the on the the
eight it's full mast. Yeah, it's like they've moved it.
It's like they just moved it down about ten percent
of the distance. You know, it's like our of the distance,
it's not even half very small. Okay, yeah, I'm I'm done.

(57:01):
Microphone drop boom. So yeah, I think we solve this one. Yeah,
would yeah, we agree, we're in total agreement. Wow. Well
I'm actually just hot and tired. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you
can find some of our links on our website Thinking

(57:21):
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(57:42):
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(58:03):
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(58:24):
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(58:44):
We're also on Patreon now. It's a pretty cool website
to help support the show. There's a link on our
little sidebar thing, but you can also just go to
Patreon dot com slash thinking sideways and we'll pop right up.
There's a little video explaining everything how the monetary system work. Yeah,
that's that is totally optional, of course, totally totally option.
Absolutely Yeah. I don't wan anybody feeling like they have

(59:05):
to do that, not at all. But after Donald Trump,
well yeah, Donald actually has to I'm looking for him. Yes, yeah,
So that all having been said, I think we're going
to scoot on out of here, hopefully to someplace cooler.
That's rocket. We'll see you all next week, by everybody.
God bye, guys,