A runestone, which was exposed in 2015 after the collapse of two trees on private property near the town of Wawa, in northern Ontario. Researchers spent years quietly studying the stone carved with 255 runes and the image of a boat. Now, revealing the stone’s existence, they’re asking the public for help. Photo / Ryan Primrose via the New York Times
A runestone, which was exposed in 2015 after the collapse of two trees on private property near the town of Wawa, in northern Ontario. Researchers spent years quietly studying the stone carved with 255 runes and the image of a boat. Now, revealing the stone’s existence, they’re asking the public for help. Photo / Ryan Primrose via the New York Times
Two trees fell in the forest. Whether or not anyone heard, the fall eventually revealed runes below.
A stone carved with 255 runes had lain beneath the trees, long hidden by soil, moss and roots in a densely forested corner of Canadian wilderness. On the same stone, someone had carvedan image of a boat with passengers.
Who carved it? When? Why? First a historian was summoned, then an archaeologist, and then an expert in runes. Finally, this month, they told the public about the discovery.
The runestone was found on private property in 2015, after the trees’ collapse exposed it again to the elements of Ontario.
The carvings quickly raised the spectre of Vikings — there is only one confirmed Viking settlement in North America, in Newfoundland — but investigation soon knocked that idea down.
Nor was the stone a forgery, researchers said, like the Kensington Runestone of Minnesota, which scholars found to be a 19th-century hoax.
The Ontario runestone is “a remarkable find”, said Kristel Zilmer, a runologist at the University of Oslo who was not involved in the project. The stone, she said, “shows how such knowledge sometimes travelled with people, occasionally leaving behind finds like this one in rather unexpected places.”
Ryan Primrose, the archaeologist called to the site, near the town of Wawa, was among the surprised. “I had never expected to encounter a runestone during my career,” he said.
He soon reached Henrik Williams, a runologist and professor at Uppsala University in Sweden, who spent hours under a tarp studying the runes in a cold October rain. “It was a drizzly day — even for a Swede,” Williams said.
The runes puzzled him at first, so he searched online for some of the words that he couldn’t make sense of.
He finally landed on a book he had seen before but never much considered: a runic guide published in 1611 by Johannes Bureus, who thought Swedes should use runes. “I agree with him,” Williams said, “but that ship has sailed.”
He then pieced together the script, finding that it lined up with a Swedish and Protestant version of the Lord’s Prayer. As for the boat? “We’re still working on it,” Primrose said.
The carving was likely to have taken several weeks, and a Swede was probably responsible, Williams said. “I don’t think anybody else would have taken it upon themselves and reproduced it with such exactness,” he said.
But although this gave the researchers a time frame — after 1611 — they have found no artifacts to provide a clearer date or purpose for the carving.
The trees that fell were about 80 years old, Williams said, so the carving was most likely made at least a century ago. “How much further back you go, I have no idea,” he said.
The runestone on private property near the town of Wawa, in northern Ontario. Photo / Ryan Primrose via the New York Times
The discovery puts the runestone among a handful found in Canada and the United States; the oldest to be dated with confidence is from the 1880s.
Most “do not pretend to be old at all”, Williams said, and a few are mysteries — their runes obscure and the purposes unknown.
The one in Ontario “could very well be the oldest one yet. I think it probably is.”
In Canada, the researchers scoured regional archives, finding that at least a handful of Swedes were among those employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company on Lake Superior in the 1800s, said Johanna Rowe, the local historian.
Primrose said the stone may have been carved as a personal act of devotion, or to be a point of congregation. “It still remains a mystery,” he said.
“Most people don’t realise what’s in their own backyard unless they look,” Rowe said. “Every community should do a little digging.”
Shannon Lewis-Simpson, an archaeologist at Memorial University in Newfoundland who was not involved in the research, said the team was “probably right” that a 19th-century Swede had made the carving.
“There’s a lot of long winter nights up there,” she said. “Why not carve up a runestone with the Lord’s Prayer? But why cover it up with dirt afterward? Humans are strange, and that’s why archaeology is fascinating.”
The researchers did not immediately share news of the discovery, in part because they had to work out terms with the property’s owner.
Primrose hopes the site will eventually be open to visitors, but the team has not disclosed the owner’s identity or the stone’s exact location.
Even Wawa’s Mayor, Melanie Pilon, found out about the stone only a few years ago. “It was definitely on a need-to-know basis,” she said. When she visited, she said, she felt “an aura about the site”, calling it “magnificent”.
Primrose said that the researchers now hoped the public could offer more information. “We invite anyone to please reach out if they have it, especially historical records,” he said.
Lewis-Simpson commended the researchers for their caution, noting that many people might jump to conclusions about a newly found runestone. “If anyone turns up anything that’s slightly runic everyone thinks it must be ‘lost Vikings,’” she said.
