Mysterious Viking Inscriptions in Remote South Central Village

Could the Vikings have made it to a remote part of the state of Oklahoma, right in the middle of the United States?

Faith Rogers is an environmental science volunteer and intern at Heavener Runestone Park in far eastern Oklahoma. She led me along a gravel path that leads to one of the biggest attractions in the 22 hectares of forest – and also one of the biggest historical mysteries in the United States.

We were among the bushes in the foothills of the Ouachita Mountains, making our way to an ancient sandstone slab that still has many experts scratching their heads and debating the eight symbols carved into it.

Some believe these mysterious inscriptions to be runes (ancient alphabetic characters), which were carved out of the massive rock around the year 1000 by Norse explorers who traveled up the Arkansas River into this remote part of what is now the United States.

“Do I think the Vikings excavated this? Yes,” says Rogers, after we arrive at the wood and glass “house” built to protect the 3 x 3.6 meter slab. 🇧🇷[A historiadora local] Gloria Farley has spent her entire life researching and has plenty of evidence to back up the story.”

Farley grew up in the town of Heavener, where the slab was found. She died in 2006 and is a legend in the region.

Farley first saw the relic on a hike as a young girl in 1928 and was fascinated by the rock. Two decades later, she returned to study it, as an amateur runologist and self-taught epigraphist.

The first modern knowledge of the runestone dates back to the 1830s, when it was found at a hunting party by the Choctaw Native American people. White Oklahoma residents spent years erroneously calling the slab an Indian Rock, believing the markings to be the work of Native Americans.

🇧🇷[Farley] spent most of his adult life researching the stone,” says Amanda Garcia, manager of Heavener’s Runestone Park.

“She traveled across the United States, went to Egypt and other places to look at various inscriptions.”

Farley even got in touch with the Smithsonian Institution and learned that they had already reached a conclusion about the applications in 1923.

For them, the characters were from a Scandinavian language and meant “GNOMEDAL” – a portmanteau of “gnome” and “dal”, translated as “sundial valley” or “monumental valley”. Other scholars later translated the symbols as “GLOMEDAL”, which meant “Valley of Glomus”.

With the language issue clarified, two other questions remained unanswered: who carved those symbols and when?

“I began to believe that the symbols on the stone indicated that Norsemen had visited the region before Columbus. I changed the name of the rock to ‘The Runestone of Heavener’ and began my search for similar inscriptions in the region,” wrote Farley in his book In Plain Sight: Old World Records in Ancient America (“In plain sight: Old World records in ancient America”, in free translation).

Throughout his career, Farley consulted with Norse historians, geologists, and other epigraphers. She gathered evidence to support her contention that the Vikings had visited North America and were very skilled at traveling up rivers and streams in boats that floated in shallow water.

“A study of the fascinating Norse sagas has revealed the efforts of the Norse peoples who inhabited Greenland to colonize the east coast of North America between about 1002 and 1010 [d.C.],” she wrote.

“If the Vikings traveled to Russia, Ireland, England, France and the farthest reaches of the Mediterranean, why wouldn’t it have been possible for them to reach Oklahoma across the Mississippi River?”

Farley even defended the hypothesis that the Vikings left their mark in this canyon after traveling inland from the Gulf of Mexico between 600 and 800 years ago.

Another two sandstone slabs with rune markings (insufficient to be translated) were found 1.5 km north and south of Heavener’s Runestone. Park administrators say they indicate the stones were boundary marks.

Studies and controversies

The idea that Vikings sailed the mighty Mississippi is not as far-fetched as it might seem.

Runestones attributed to Vikings have been found elsewhere in the United States, including Kensington, Minnesota, and Spirit Pond, Maine. Even in Oklahoma, six of these stones have been unearthed (the most in any American state), but their authenticity is still questioned.

One Norse settlement — L’Anse aux Meadows, a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the northern tip of Newfoundland Island, Canada — has been proven to date to at least 1021 AD. It offers a concrete date for Viking activity in North America. North, which matches the estimated age of the Heavener Runestone.

According to Farley, the Vikings could have easily traveled south from Newfoundland along the east coast of North America and around the Florida peninsula to the Gulf of Mexico, where they could enter the Mississippi River, thence into the Arkansas (its tributary), which would lead them to the Poteau River in Oklahoma.

“The Poteau River is just a few kilometers from here,” says Garcia. “Disregard what waterways look like today. Back then, before all the artificial lakes and dams, those little streams were big rivers and waterways.”

But not everyone is convinced. In 2011, Viking-era archaeologist Lyle Tompsen analyzed the runestone and wrote a study about it.

For this expert, “the veracity of the Heavener Stone as a Viking artifact is problematic. The linguistic evidence is ambiguous. But historical evidence from the 19th century… (probably a Swedish immigrant who worked at the local railway depot).”

Other theories are emerging. One says the stone was excavated by a member of La Salle’s expedition around 1687, when French explorer René-Robert Cavelier claimed the region for France, naming it Louisiana. Another says the inscription is the work of a Swedish captain who guided German settlers to the region between 1718 and 1720.

And the language of the runes also continues to be questioned.

“The inscriptions are not in Viking script, but in a combination of [idiomas rúnicos] Old Futhark and New Futhark, before the Vikings would have travelled,” says Dennis Peterson, archaeologist and administrator of the Spiro Mounds Archaeological Center near Heavener, which houses the largest collection of prehistoric Native American relics in the United States. .

“But they could also be more recent, as the same style of writing was being taught in northern Europe in the 1800s, the same way we used to learn Latin or Greek,” he said. “So there’s a greater chance that someone who learned old futhark in school has been around here and left the equivalent of a type of graffiti.”

Peterson also argues that, as the town of Spiro, near the Spiro Mounds archaeological site, was an important trading metropolis at the same time, it is likely that there would have been some record of strange Norse men arriving in the region.

As it is not possible to date the stone engravings using traditional scientific methods (such as carbon dating or comparing the rate of decay of organic materials), Heavener Runestone researchers needed to look at contextual evidence such as other artifacts or Viking activity in the region. . But nothing was found.

“There just isn’t a lot of evidence that the Vikings came to Oklahoma,” according to Larry O’Dell, director of the Oklahoma Historical Society.

Despite all these misgivings, admirers of Viking lore come from all over the world to visit Heavener’s Runestone Park.

“We had a gentleman from Austria who came to the US just to see the runestone,” recalls Garcia.

“When I started here five years ago we had about 400 people a month, now we have that number a week,” he says. “Depending on the time of year, we can have 2,000 people or more on a typical weekend.”

The park even hosted a Viking Runestone Festival for 10 years, which attracted thousands of visitors, re-enactors and Scandinavian vendors in the past. In fact, the festival has grown so large that it is currently on hold while its organizers consider how to accommodate the crowd.

When I came face to face with those ancient letters, I also wanted to believe in the legend of the Vikings sailing to Oklahoma. I left the park with visions of bearded warriors charging through the same rock-strewn forests and thick woods I had been visiting.

Perhaps no evidence proves that they actually came, but there is no definitive proof that they weren’t here either.

This text was originally published here.