The Kensington Runestone

In 1898 a Swedish-born farmer named Olof Ohman said he pulled a two-hundred-pound slab out of a tree’s roots while clearing land near Kensington. Carved into it, in runes, was an account of a party of Norsemen camped here in 1362, ten of them found “red with blood and dead.” Runologists have gone over it for a century and the strong consensus is that the language is nineteenth-century, not medieval, and that the stone is a modern carving. It is still one of the great American mysteries, and you can stand in front of the actual slab in Alexandria and decide what you think.