Episode #246 - How Far Did the Vikings Voyage? (Part III)

March 11, 2026·1 hr 27 min·7 clips

A farmer in Minnesota finds a stone with Norse runes that tells a chilling story of 10 men found 'red from blood' in 1362.

1. Our Fake History, hosted by Sebastian Major, concludes a three-part series examining the Viking voyages to North America, focusing on how real Norse history has been distorted by fake archaeological artifacts and racist pseudo-history. 2. Sebastian Major hosts solo, citing scholars Annette Kolodny, Daphne Brooks, Martha Cutter, and historians of the sagas, alongside primary sources including Sims' 1841 magazine article and Roffin's 1837 Antiquitates Americanae. 3. The episode's thesis is that genuine Norse contact with North America has been systematically obscured by 19th-century forgeries and ideologically motivated pseudo-history that served racist and nationalist agendas. 4. The episode opens with the 1898 discovery of the Kensington Runestone near Kensington, Minnesota, by Swedish-American farmer Olaf Oman, who found a 30-inch sandstone slab inscribed with runes dated 1362. 5. The inscription describes a party of 30 Norse explorers — eight Gotlanders and 22 Norwegians — returning from fishing to find ten companions massacred, and closes with 'Ave Maria, save from evil.' 6. Norwegian-American historian Hjalmar Holand became the stone's champion in 1907, arguing it documented King Magnus Eriksson's 1354 expedition led by Paul Knudsen tracking pagan Greenlanders through the Great Lakes and Hudson's Bay to Minnesota. 7. Scholarly analysis has accumulated against the stone's authenticity: the language is closer to 19th-century Swedish grammar than medieval Norse or Swedish, and a 2004 Swedish examination found the unusual symbols match a runic alphabet invented by journeyman tailors in the 1800s. 8. That modern runic system was most popular in the specific Swedish region where Olaf Oman was born, making him the most likely forger; scholarly consensus now overwhelmingly identifies the stone as a 19th-century fabrication. 9. Major then traces the origins of Viking pseudo-history to 1705, when Icelander Þormod Torfason published a history arguing Vinland was real, and to 1837, when Danish philologist Carl Christian Roffin published Antiquitates Americanae, assembling 18 medieval Icelandic documents. 10. Roffin's 40-page English-language summary, America Discovered in the Tenth Century, popularized the claim that the Norse arrived in Massachusetts and Rhode Island 500 years before other Europeans, citing Dighton Rock and the Newport Tower as physical evidence. 11. Experts in Norse runes have since demonstrated that Dighton Rock's carvings are consistent with Algonquin-speaking indigenous people, with later European colonial graffiti added over centuries. 12. The Newport Tower has been demonstrated to be the ruins of a windmill built by Rhode Island's first English governor, Benedict Arnold — whose 1677 will refers to 'my stone windmill' — with its original design traced to a windmill in Warwick, England. 13. Scholar Annette Kolodny has argued that 19th-century Americans craved the medieval heritage romanticized in Sir Walter Scott's works, and Roffin's work gave New Englanders a Viking pedigree — novelist Sarah Orne Jewett wrote in 1886 that Vinland waited 'for the hearty Icelanders' kindred' (i.e., English settlers) to arrive. 14. Benjamin Franklin and Washington Irving, Columbus's most consequential 19th-century biographer, both engaged seriously with claims of Norse contact, helping mainstream Roffin's ideas. 15. Pro-slavery novelist William Gilmore Sims published 'The Discoveries of the Northmen' in The Magnolia in 1841, combining Roffin's work with an Irish writer's claims about a 'Great Ireland' in the American South to propose that Georgia and the Carolinas had a history as 'White Man's Land.' 16. Sims quoted a fabricated 'indigenous tradition' — claiming native peoples said they arrived from the Southwest and found 'a white people who used iron instruments' — which Major states flatly was 'absolutely not a real indigenous tradition: this is fake information.' 17. Sims used this pseudo-history to argue that the sacred mounds of the American South were built by a lost Norse-Irish civilization later destroyed by indigenous invaders — denying indigenous people credit for their own architectural achievements. 18. Major explicitly connects Sims' 1841 article to the Trail of Tears, noting it was published in the decade Georgia completed forced relocations of Cherokee, Muskogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw peoples, and that Sims' ideas eventually found their way into South Carolina history textbooks. 19. The episode is discursive and energetic, moving freely between primary source quotations, academic citations, and sardonic commentary — Major describes 19th-century lecture circuits as 'really the podcasts of the 19th century.' 20. Listeners interested in the intersection of archaeology, nationalism, and racial ideology in American history will find the episode dense and well-sourced; those expecting a straightforward account of Norse exploration without the pseudo-history detour may find it slow.

As heard by us

A measured look at how the Kensington Runestone fed broader debates over Norse claims and an ancient American past.

This episode uses the Kensington Runestone to open a wider debate about Norse presence in North America. Sebastian Major starts with Olaf Oman's 1898 find near Kensington, Minnesota, then follows how the stone moved from a possible local calendar into a medieval-runes story…

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Follow a Minnesota stone into the long, messy debate over Viking voyages.

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