Viking runes found in Oklahoma? | Hacker News Reader

Viking runes found in Oklahoma?

bbc.com

54 pointsclouddrover51 comments

I may not be an expert but it seems intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that they were carved by a Sasquatch and describe when aliens visited Earth and taught the Egyptians how to build the pyramids.

Sarcasm aside, in the top picture you can see tool marks flanking the downstrokes on the closest runes. Truly, I am no expert but they certainly don't look like they've withstood 1,000 years of Oklahoman weathering. Then again, "layman" is just a polite work for idiot.

UFOs would like an FOUO word.

I visited these ruins with my grandfather (a geologist) when I was young. He rolled his eyes and said there's no way they were that old. In person it's easy to tell, even for a child, but how else are you supposed to attract tourists to Heavener, OK? For the BBC, it's a classic illustration of Betteridge's law of headlines.

Nope. Seems like a scam like the Kensington Stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_Runestone

Most likely scratched by a Norwegian Blue Parrot... blown far off his normal migratory route... the sad text recounts extreme pining for the fjords...

What is the average scratching speed of a parrot?

The African Parrot or the Norwegian Blue Parrot?

What? AHHHHHHHHH!!!!

Laden or unladen?

> However, historical evidence from the 19th Century… strongly suggests the stone is a 19th-Century creation of a Scandinavian immigrant (likely a Swedish immigrant working at the local train depot)."

> The inscriptions are not a Viking script, but a combination of [runic languages] Elder Futhark and Younger Futhark, which predates when the Vikings would have been traveling

Well there you have it, it's not from when it's claimed. There is a similar out-of-place rock in New Mexico called the Decalogue rock that has the 10-commandments carved into it in old hebrew. The problem is that it uses more modern punctuation and it's more likely the product of some UNM students who were messing around or Spanish settlers at the very least. Nevertheless, people use the rock to claim it's evidence of a lost tribe of Israelites.

There's a similar hoax in the Turtle Mountains in North Dakota. It seemed to me like a thing for white people to say "we were here first"

https://www.walkermn.com/news/chapter-693-vikings-in-the-tur...

https://sites.google.com/site/stonebankorg/fabulous-nd/moori...

https://www.dmr.nd.gov/ndgs/ndnotes/ndn17_h.htm

I looked at the "mooring stone" example in your stone bank link. I had heard of these stones being possible mooring stones a long time ago but had never seen one.

From memory, they were linked to Vikings as mooring stones due to the similarity between the holes found in the rocks here in the US and similar holes in rocks present in Scandinavia that are known to have been used as mooring stones back in the day. I had never seen an example from either place though.

Recognizing the obvious glacial history of the region and the present absence of any large body of water in the region and after seeing this example, I wonder if the hole in that rock is a natural hole formed by weathering of one of the less-resistant minerals from the boulder.

I ask because the boulder appears to be a granite pegmatite and there is a natural mineral that forms large roughly triangular cross-section minerals in granite pegmatites. That mineral is tourmaline. I think if you check that boulder and others like it you could rule out a natural origin if you find no evidence of tourmaline in the boulders.

The lichens could also be used to date the weathered surface of the boulder since they have a fairly well-known growth rate and you could calculate the time since a fresh surface from that.

Also, for the "mooring stone" hypothesis to hold any water one would probably need to know where each known example is in relation to known present-day waterways and to remnant erosional features and ancient shorelines. If they all can be established to have been located along a known ancestral shoreline, especially if you could do a geomorphological reconstruction similar to a palinspastic reconstruction and they all came out on a shoreline that would lend credence to the theory.

From the things on your links, I'm not sure that any of them could be contemporaneous even within a few hundred years of the recent past when we know Vikings were in N America and free to travel and explore.

Cool story though.

The claim in the third link implies that vikings were sailing around during the time of the dinosaurs!

That's the elder Futhark isn't it? It was out of fashion during the Viking age.

Project bluebeam

A reminder that there is no such thing as "the Vikings". Really. There's no specific culture or social group in a particular time and place you can point to and say they are "the" vikings. The idea of the Vikings is basically an invention of middle age scholars, and includes a huge variety of cultures and languages. You might compare the Vikings to the mythical "sea peoples" of the bronze age collapse.

Grammatically, that's like saying "there's no such thing as tourists."

I think they were getting to "there's no such thing as the tourists". The "the" is significant. But also it's not in the title of the article...

Why can't there be "the tourists"? When I lived in NYC, at any given time, there was a significant population of people who were "the tourists". The fact that it's a highly dynamic group and not like an ethnicity doesn't invalidate their group validity or the use of the word "the".

Asia is neither a country or a culture.

Is that really true? I agree that there's no ethnicity known as the Vikings, and certainly not "Viking runes". People really mean certain groups of Norse people who have taken up the Viking lifestyle or profession. It's more like being a pirate. But there were Vikings. I don't think Norse travelers to Oklahoma would have been Vikings, though. More likely traders or settlers.

It’s overstating the point that Viking was more of a job description and the people doing that job while primarily Scandinavian peoples tended to include people from other places too. It’s generally a bit vague but so is just about every other division of people into groups.

At the time there weren’t so many clear large groups of people with a common identity in that general area in europe. You were pretty likely to be attached to a town that would be led by a king and going to war with the next town over would be a common occurrence.

But there certainly were Scandinavian explorers, conquerors, and mercenaries. And these pushed into non-Scandinavian territories across Europe in a way that reshaped the political landscape at the time. For example, the Normans set up kingdoms in England, France, and even Sicily, and were an important player in Byzantine politics. Other Scandinavian conquerors helped establish dynasties in Ukraine and the area around the Black Sea. I'm not saying it wasn't complex, but there does seem that there was genuine phenomenon of Scandinavian raids and conquest in the late first millennium separate from the expected local raids between neighboring peoples.

It's a bit of a stretch to lump all of that in with the term Viking, though. I think the actual settlement and conquest is a different phenomenon. Like, I wouldn't consider the Normans Vikings.

When people think of the Viking age, it's more of the phenomenon of groups of men going on expeditions from Scandinavia to make amphibious assaults on soft targets. Most of the men who did this did a couple big scores and returned to village life back home. This transformed into settlement, adoption of Christianity, and then the carving out of the niches you identified.

The Magyars had a similar arc. The Arabs, too, except that their raiding ended up steamrolling through the ailing Roman and Sassanian empires, leading to their own intercontinental empire and religion, rather than settling into existing systems.

Norsemen who went viking are called vikings these days.

This doesn't seem to reflect mainstream scholarship, or at least I can't find evidence of it in a quick check of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikings . What classification would be better applied to historial figures like Leif Ericsson?

"Viking" may be a modern colloquial term, but at the same time, just saying "Norse" doesn't seem specific enough.

Scandiknavery. They aren’t legit.

Vandalism at its finest. Makes you wonder what a professional could do with the right motives.

> Vandalism at its finest. Makes you wonder what a professional could do with the right motives.

Professional what exactly?

(I pay closer attention to graffiti than I used to.)

Professional shyster making something like the Georgia guides tones or golden tablets to "discover" and then use as the basis of a religion, is the first thing that comes to mind.

If I were going to do something like that, I'd probably come up with an invented language so I could translate it as I needed new commandments.

Ah, you mean the Voynich Manuscript!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

No, he means the Golden Plates found by Joseph Smith in 1823 in New York, which created the Mormon religion.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_plates

Hmm, is it Poe's law or some sort of generalization thereof if I wasn't actually trying to mock any widely-followed religion?

Oh, you mean dinosaurs! There's basically never been a full one found. The closest one ever was found under dubious circumstances. The process for extracting them is to make tiny chips in rock and casts as you go along pretty much allowing you to shape as desired. The sites are of course highly guarded. Of course the most complete was the ever popular TRex.

Dinosaur paleontology is a religious racket. Sure there was lots of megafauna and their were some large flightless birds with various levels of feathering. Like anything though money corrupts and the money behind dinosaurs is huge. Every kid has toys, books, theres movies, TV shows, museums, etc.

They're not carving stone when digging out the fossils. And the average fossil digger is not Michaelangelo or capable of sculpting a negative dinosaur skeleton out of solid rock. Just imagine hundreds of people on a dig trying to get the symmetry and proportions right. The answer is that the material inside the impression left by the decaying bones is softer than the rock it's encased in.

Sure, dinos for kids are big money, but there's just a massive amount of proof they existed. The fact that an industry exists monetizing a natural phenomenon doesn't automatically mean the phenomenon doesn't exist. That's the "anything mainstream must be fake" conspiracy theory. Some mainstream things are real. What proof is there for the world being created in seven days besides a single book of stories invented a couple thousand years ago? And by the way, don't parents buy their kids a lot of religious things... way more than dinosaur dolls?

[edit] if I'm just missing the sarcasm here, sorry, it's been a long day.

I think it's a joke, but it's the internet, so Poe's Law applies.

If you have the opportunity, Dinosaur national monument in Utah is well worth the visit.

They have an exposed fossil bearing rockface that you can get very close to, and you can see how the fossils differ from the surrounding stone.

This is obviously not intended as an informational post or as one that would be likely to be taken as fact by most people. You'll never be able to recover the time you spent typing all that.

Just give whoever a few hundred years to go from cult to religion, though, and they'll burn you at the stake for making fun of their silly tablets.

If I were Musk or Bezos, the temptation to rig a Contact-style scenario would be well beyond merely overwhelming.

Guessing the orbital mechanics needed to station-keep a signal source at a given apparent sidereal position, far enough from Earth to simulate parallax at infinity, are unworkable.

There's surely a low cost version.

Technically, the Vandals were East Germanic, but these are West Germanic-inspired runes.

The key to a great fake is to fake it NOW and leave it to be found two hundred years later.

When the profit motive is removed it becomes harder to track down.

Right, there’s no archaeological evidence of some ancient Scandinavian migration because… they were so eager to get to Oklahoma?

You really have to be committed to some weird Viking romanticism (and to hate those gross Southern European Catholics) to buy something like this.

I don't think it's completely impossible that some kind of wild trip like this happened -- maybe the Norse were captive, sailed around the coast, whatever. Weirder things have happened.

Reading any kind of greater significance into that is of course nonsense. The Vikings didn't settle NA in any meaningful way. If this happened, it's fascinating but just a weird quirk of history.

(to be clear, it's almost certainly a fraud)

I try to avoid framing things this way as a (former) archaeologist. Most human activities are possible in theory. If we don't limit our consideration to "things that are plausible given x, y, and z", the discussion either explodes with combinatorial possibilities or more commonly, we allow our imaginations to take flights of fancy towards the things we find interesting. The latter can be totally fine, but it's rarely (if ever) truth-seeking.

As an aside, these sorts of "mysterious inland viking runes" are a common tale in the US. I've heard of similar claims from Washington, most of the Northeast, Minnesota, Georgia, and even Arizona.

>As an aside, these sorts of "mysterious inland viking runes" are a common tale in the US. I've heard of similar claims from Washington, most of the Northeast, Minnesota, Georgia, and even Arizona.

I've also seen some of these stories. I think one could use Mandan tribal members to help determine whether there is a possibility that Vikings or Norsemen traveled to the mid-continent and left some runestones along their paths. Since later European explorers reported finding blonde members of the Mandan tribe one could have DNA analyzed to discover whether there is a link to Scandinavia.

Personally I see no reason why those who settled and lived at L'Anse aux Meadows would've spent their entire lives holed up in the longhouses there instead of hopping in their boats and sailing the bays and rivers scoping out the territory. We know that they were explorers or they wouldn't have been there in the first place. We also know that it is not difficult for a person to cover a lot of ground if they decide to move somewhere else. They were there for several hundred years and since it only takes a matter of months to travel on foot from the east coast into the interior I see no reason to discount the possibility that it happened. People moved all the time for any number of reasons.

Our problem today is that these people, both the Norse settlers in Newfoundland and the Native Americans or First Nations people they encountered, did not keep detailed written records like later European explorers did in their travels. This introduces a bias in the information used today to reconstruct the history of the exploration of North America.

We know that the Spanish went all over the central and western US since they traveled with a large group of people and documented what they found. They even returned later to flesh out early discoveries and built a network of churches to serve as fortresses and supply points for future exploration.

The record of anything that L'anse aux Meadows settlers did exists only in some sagas and a few royal records. Like the natives they encountered, the story of their travels would have been mostly an oral history to be recounted later to descendants and others who needed to know.

I agree that most human activities are possible in theory and that we need to consider the likelihood as part of a well-formed conclusion. I see no reason why someone traveling with an eye to discovering what the world looks like over that far hill couldn't have covered the entire US on foot in a lot less than a lifetime. It would've been easier then than now especially if you travel in a small party.

I don't know any archaeologists that think Norse greenlanders spent their entire lives farming in the fjords.

We shouldn't discount that the medieval Norse were among the most prolifically literate societies of their day. They wrote a lot, which is why we have so much information about Norse Greenland. It was primarily a local subsistence economy focused on extracting marine resources to trade back east. Greenland and the high north was therefore the center of Norse activities. L'anse aux meadows seems to have been a comparatively minor, sporadically occupied staging point.

The Norse were expert expeditionists, but expeditions are hard and continental North America very remote. Declaring it "not difficult" to travel inland (for unclear / no obvious reasons) is premature. It probably happened to some extent, but we're not talking anything remotely close to the midwest, or even the modern US in all likelihood. Moreover, the basic model for preservation we use involves exponential decay terms. The odds are huge against us finding anything left by a minuscule population sporadically present for a short time (almost certainly <200 years).

As for genetic studies, Native Americans are relatively well-surveyed. Genetics is hard, but it's pretty clear to everyone that the white tribe myth has its roots in colonial cultural narratives, not lost Norse explorers.

There are multiple accounts indicating the Norse settlers on Greenland were, in fact, settlers more than anything else. Erik the Red settled on Greenland after being exiled, after all. Adam of Bremen's mentions about Vinland indicates that knowledge about the area was wide-spread amongst the Norse. Still, no major settlements had been attemted in his time despite the fact that he wrote it down no less than 75 years after Vinland had been discovered.

That being said, the Norse seem to have grasped how vast the North American continent is, if nothing else by describing the various natural features they found noteworthy. They also apparently got into a conflict with the locals.

My guess: L'anse aux Meadows was a logging and resource gathering operation. Logs are not easy to come by on Greenland and shipping them from Europe would have taken longer than getting them from Newfoundland.

Does any of this exclude that the Norse explorers went further than we could ever imagine? No, but a litterate explorer from 990's Scaninavia would most likely have used the younger Futhark rather than the old one. The inscription in the article uses the old one.

That felt wrong to me, so I looked it up. The L'Anse aux Meadows settlement lasted only 3 to 10 years. They wouldn't have had time to explore much.

And you know, the land wasn't as empty then. Eurasian diseases hadn't yet killed 90% of the North American population. No matter where they went, they would have run into natives who probably wouldn't have been thrilled to have them there.

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