Scholars who believe the Kensington Runestone is a 19th-century prank -- and not concrete evidence that Norsemen beat Columbus to America by 100-plus years -- say they have found the smoking gun to prove it.The latest in the century-old Minnesota controversy came in documents written in 1885 by an 18-year-old Swedish tailor named Edward Larsson. He sometimes wrote in runes -- an ancient Scandinavian language that differs from the English alphabet. But Larsson's runes were not the usual runes used over the centuries.The scholars contend that parts of his documents seem to be written in a secret runic alphabet used by tradesmen in Sweden in the late 1800s, rather like codes that tramps have used over time to leave secret messages for each other.Swedish linguists happened upon Larsson's documents recently and found that his writing corresponds to pieces of the Kensington Runestone inscription. They say that the journeymen's code did not exist in medieval times, when the Kensington Runestone is purported to have been carved."My opinion is this once again nails down the case against the Kensington Runestone," said Michael Michlovic, professor of anthropology and chairman of the Department of Anthropology and Earth Science at Minnesota State University Moorhead."This new evidence is really devastating. It comes unexpectedly and from a collection of old letters that have nothing to do with the Kensington Runestone."The Runestone's origin has been hotly debated in Minnesota and beyond since 1898. It was then that a Swedish-American farmer named Olof Ohman said he found a large stone tablet wrapped in the roots of a poplar tree. The tree was in his farm field at Kensington, near Alexandria, Minn. A runic inscription on the stone describes a massacre of 10 members of an exploration party of Swedes and Norwegians in central Minnesota in the year 1362. For more than a century, nonbelievers in the inscription's authenticity have said Ohman or his friends carved it as a joke on scholars. Meanwhile, advocates insist that the Runestone proves that Nordic explorers were in west-central Minnesota in 1362.
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