Runes in Maine

Ready for a convoluted story?

Today's journey is about the twistiest trip through mythology, fakery, and pseudohistory I have ever seen, linking the Vikings, the Templars, first century Judaea, and a farm in Maine.  It's the story of the Spirit Pond runestones, an alleged pre-Columbian runic inscription that one guy thinks proves that the Native Americans of the northeastern United States are direct descendants of Jesus Christ.

So pop yourself some popcorn, sit back, and let me tell you a tall tale.

In 1971, Walter Elliott, a carpenter from Phippsburg, Maine, claimed that he had found a stone with some odd inscriptions near a place called Spirit Pond. The inscriptions, he said, looked like Norse runes, so could this possibly be proof that the Norse explorers of the eleventh century, especially Leif Eiríksson and Thorfinn Karlsefni, had made their way to New England?

Part of the inscription on the Spirit Pond runestone [Image is in the Public Domain]

The claim came to the attention of Einar Haugen, Harvard University professor of linguistics, and one of the world's experts on Norse runes.  Haugen pronounced the inscription a fake, claiming that the inscription has "a few Norse words in a sea of gibberish."  Specifically, he said that the use of the "hooked X" or "stung A" character (it can be seen in the top right word above, the second character from the right) was inconsistent with verified eleventh century Norse inscriptions, and in fact was eerily similar to the inscription on the Kensington runestone, found in Minnesota in 1898, which is universally considered to be a modern fake.

Pretty decisive, no?  But as we've seen over and over, a silly old Ph.D. and professorship in a subject doesn't mean that amateurs can't know more.  So the Spirit Pond stone has gained quite a following amongst the Vikings-in-the-Americas crowd.

And as we've also seen, there is no wild theory that can't be made even more bizarre.

Enter geologist Scott Wolter.  Wolter thinks that the Spirit Pond runestone is a genuine archaeological find, but it doesn't mean what its finder claimed -- that it was proof that Eiríksson, Karlsefni, et al. had made it to North America in the eleventh century.  He claims that it was brought to what is now Maine in the fourteenth century...

... by the Knights Templar.

Yes, the Knights Templar, that fertile source of speculation for aficionados of secret societies, which was forcefully disbanded in 1314 and has spawned wacky conspiracy theories ever since.  The Templars ran afoul of the powers-that-be, especially Pope Clement V and King Philip IV of France, mostly because of their money, power, and influence, and Clement and Philip had the leaders arrested on trumped-up charges of sorcery.  (To be fair, some of their rituals were pretty bizarre.)  Templars who weren't willing to confess -- and this included their head, Jacques de Molay -- were burned at the stake.

So, so much for the Templars.  Except for the aforementioned conspiracy theories, of course, which suggest that the main body of the Templars escaped, letting de Molay take the fall (some say de Molay willingly sacrificed himself to let the others get away).  But the question remained; get away to where?

Scott Wolter has the answer.

To Maine, of course.

So they sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to Maine, bringing along Cistercian monks who (for some reason) wrote in Norse runes, and the monks inscribed the Spirit Pond stone.  And Wolter says he knows what the runic inscription means.  Haugen, and other so-called experts, are wrong to say it's gibberish.  The Spirit Pond stone is an incredibly important artifact because it tells how the Templars came to North America, bringing with them the Holy Grail.

And you thought that its final resting place was the "Castle Arrrrggggghhh."

But that's another mistake people make, Wolter said.  The "San Gréal" -- Holy Grail -- is actually a mistranscription of "Sang Réal" -- meaning "royal blood."  In other words, the bloodline of Jesus.  Which means that the Templars were Jesus's direct descendants.  So they arrived in Maine, carrying the Sang Réal, and proceeded to have lots of sex with Native women (apparently ignoring the Templars' compulsory vow of celibacy), meaning that the Native inhabitants of eastern North America are descended from Jesus Christ.

All of this is just jolly news for me, because I am descended through my mom from various members of the Micmac and Maliseet tribes of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.  So here's yet another branch I can add to my family tree.

Of course, the linguistic world isn't paying this much attention, which pisses Wolter right off.  "These archaeologists have all been programmed [to believe the stones are fakes] and they can’t think outside the box," he said.

Well, sorry, Mr. Wolter.  "Decades of scholarly study" does not equal being "programmed," it equals "knowing what the fuck you're talking about."  Haugen's work in the field of Norse linguistics is the epitome of careful research and thorough study.  So I'm not ready to jettison his expertise because you'd like the northeastern Natives to be Jesus's great-great-great (etc.) grandchildren.

And as far as I can tell, Wolter seems to be thinking so far outside the box that from where he's standing, he couldn't even see the box with a powerful telescope.

In any case, I hope you've enjoyed today's journey through time.  It's not bad as fiction; kind of the bastard child of The DaVinci Code and Foucault's Pendulum.  But as a real historical claim, it's a bit of a non-starter.

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For sale: One castle. Three bedrooms, three bathrooms, one ghost.

I've said for ages that I would love to spend a night in a haunted house.

I would prefer not to spend said night alone, because I may be a skeptic, but I'm also (1) highly suggestible and (2) a great big coward.  I'd like to think that my generally rational view of the world would inoculate me against jumping to conclusions in scary situations, but the reality is that I adopted skepticism as a worldview largely because the other option was letting my anxiety drive me completely batshit crazy.

Anyhow, this all comes up because yesterday I stumbled upon a haunted house for sale.  Actually, not a haunted house; a haunted castle.  Better still, it's right here in the United States, obviating the need for my obtaining a resident visa from one of your usual castle-having nations.  (Although in all honesty, given the current administration, I've been considering emigrating to a small uncharted island off the coast of Mozambique anyhow, even though small uncharted islands rarely have castles, haunted or otherwise.)

This particular haunted castle is Beckett Castle, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.  Cape Elizabeth is right on the Atlantic Ocean -- another appealing point -- and is an easy drive from Portland.  This is a definite advantage, because for much of Maine, the only thing you're in an easy drive from is a shitload of spruce trees.  So the site is pretty much ideal.

Beckett Castle was built in 1874 by the eponymous Sylvester Beckett, who was a lawyer, writer, and publisher.  It has 1,981 square feet of living space, which strikes me as a little small for a castle, but after all, Maine is not generally considered castle country, so I guess you take what you can get.  It has three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and -- best of all -- a three-story tower.  It's built of local gray fieldstone, but has been recently "extensively remodeled," so it doesn't feature the usual downside of castles, which is lack of indoor plumbing.

It also has a huge rose garden and a "carriage house" that would be perfect as an artist's studio, so Carol would be happy.

Of course, there's the "haunted" part.  Paul Seaburn, over at Mysterious Universe, says that the "primary ghost" is Sylvester Beckett himself, which brings up an interesting question; how do you get appointed "primary ghost?"  Does the class system transfer directly into the afterlife?  Because that hardly seems fair.  You spend your whole life working your ass off as a servant, then you die and become a ghost, and damned if you're not still scrubbing the floors in spirit form.  If that happened to me, I'd say, "fuck it," and leave.  I mean, what are they going to do?  Withhold my ghostly paycheck?  Write a bad letter of reference for the next place I'm planning to haunt?  They could get as mad at me as they want.  I mean they couldn't even kill me, because I'm already dead.

Seems like a nice position to be in.

But I digress.

The previous owner, Nancy Harvey (who died in 2016; her family is handling the sale) was interviewed prior to her death and went on record as saying that she'd never had any paranormal experiences in the place, despite Sylvester's reputation for appearing as a "radiant blue orb" and pulling the sheets off you while you sleep.  Harvey, however, didn't attribute this lack of ghostly goings-on as evidence that the place wasn't haunted; she said that Sylvester didn't disturb her sleep because he was happy about the renovations she'd done.

I guess even when you're a ghost, you care that people are keeping your house in good shape.

Unfortunately, I don't think I'm going to put an offer on Beckett Castle, as attractive as it seems, for the very good reason that the asking price is $2.5 million.  I just don't have that kind of cash lying around.  Plus, I'm not known for my housekeeping skills.  Most of the time, my approach to housekeeping can be best summed up as "There appears to have been a struggle."  One friend said the interior of my house looks like "a museum maintained by toddlers."  So buying Beckett Castle seems to me to be asking for Sylvester to come back and rip the sheets off my bed at one AM and demand to know why I didn't do last night's dinner dishes.

It's a pity, because the place is beautiful, and it's a great location.  But I think for the foreseeable future, we're going to stay here in upstate New York.  If our current house is haunted, I've seen no evidence of it.  Or maybe the ghosts were people who, when they were alive, were also terrible housekeepers, and are happy the place is owned by kindred spirits (as it were).  That'd also explain it.

******************************

This week's book recommendation is the biography of one of the most inspirational figures in science; the geneticist Barbara McClintock.  A Feeling for the Organism by Evelyn Fox Keller not only explains to the reader McClintock's groundbreaking research into how transposable elements ("jumping genes") work, but is a deft portrait of a researcher who refused to accept no for an answer.  McClintock did her work at a time when few women were scientists, and even fewer were mavericks who stood their ground and went against the conventional paradigm of how things are.  McClintock was one -- and eventually found the recognition she deserved for her pioneering work with a Nobel Prize.

Runes in Maine

Ready for a convoluted story?

Today's journey is about the twistiest trip through mythology, fakery, and pseudohistory I have ever seen, linking the Vikings, the Templars, 1st century Judea, and a farm in Maine.  It's the story of the Spirit Pond runestones, an alleged pre-Columbian runic inscription that one guy thinks proves that the Native Americans of the northeastern United States are direct descendants of Jesus Christ.

So pop yourself some popcorn, sit back, and let me tell you a tall tale.

In 1971, Walter Elliott, a carpenter from Phippsburg, Maine, claimed that he had found a stone with some odd inscriptions near a place called Spirit Pond.  The inscriptions, he said, looked like Norse runes, so could this possibly be proof that the Norse explorers of the 11th century, especially Leif Eriksson and Thorfinn Karlsefni, had made their way to New England?

Part of the inscription on the Spirit Pond runestone [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The claim came to the attention of Einar Haugen, Harvard University professor of linguistics, and one of the world's experts on Norse runes.  Haugen pronounced the inscription a fake, claiming that the inscription has "a few Norse words in a sea of gibberish."  Specifically, he said that the use of the "hooked X" or "stung A" character (it can be seen in the top right word above, the second character from the right) was inconsistent with verified 11th century Norse inscriptions, and in fact was eerily similar to the inscription on the Kensington runestone, found in Minnesota in 1898, which is universally considered to be a modern fake.

Pretty decisive, no?  But as we've seen over and over, a silly old Ph.D. and professorship in a subject doesn't mean that amateurs can't know more.  So the Spirit Pond stone has gained quite a following amongst the Vikings-in-the-Americas crowd.

And as we've also seen, there is no wild theory that can't be made even more bizarre.

Enter geologist Scott Wolter.  Wolter thinks that the Spirit Pond runestone is a genuine archaeological find, but it doesn't mean what its finder claimed -- that it was proof that Eriksson, Karlsefni, et al. had made it to North America in the 11th century.  He claims that it was brought to what is now Maine in the 14th century...

... by the Knights Templar.

Yes, the Knights Templar, that fertile source of speculation for aficionados of secret societies, which was forcefully disbanded in 1314 and has spawned wacky conspiracy theories ever since.  The Templars ran afoul of the powers-that-be, especially Pope Clement V and King Philip IV of France, mostly because of their money, power, and influence, and Clement and Philip had the leaders arrested on trumped-up charges of sorcery.  (To be fair, some of their rituals were pretty bizarre.)  Templars who weren't willing to confess -- and this included their head, Jacques de Molay -- were burned at the stake.

So, so much for the Templars.  Except for the aforementioned conspiracy theories, of course, which suggest that the main body of the Templars escaped, letting de Molay take the fall (some say de Molay willingly sacrificed himself to let the others get away).  But the question remained; get away to where?

Scott Wolter has the answer.

To Maine, of course.

So they sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to Maine, bringing along Cistercian monks who (for some reason) wrote in Norse runes, and the monks inscribed the Spirit Pond stone.  And Wolter says he knows what the runic inscription means.  Haugen, and other so-called experts, are wrong to say it's gibberish.  The Spirit Pond stone is an incredibly important artifact because it tells how the Templars came to North America, bringing with them the Holy Grail.

And you thought that its final resting place was the "Castle Arrrrggggghhh."

But that's another mistake people make, Wolter said.  The "San Greal" -- Holy Grail -- is actually a mistranscription of "Sang Real" -- meaning "royal blood."  In other words, the bloodline of Jesus.  Which means that the Templars were Jesus's direct descendants.  So they arrived in Maine, carrying the Sang Real, and proceeded to have lots of sex with Native women, meaning that the Native inhabitants of eastern North America are descended from Jesus Christ.

All of this is just jolly news for me, because I am descended through my mom from various members of the Micmac and Maliseet tribes of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.  So here's yet another branch I can add to my family tree.

Of course, the linguistic world isn't paying this much attention, which pisses Wolter right off.  "These archaeologists have all been programmed [to believe the stones are fakes] and they can’t think outside the box," he said.

Well, sorry, Mr. Wolter.  "Decades of scholarly study" does not equal being "programmed," it equals "knowing what you're talking about."  Haugen's work in the field of Norse linguistics is the epitome of careful research and thorough study.  So I'm not ready to jettison his expertise because you'd like the northeastern Natives to be Jesus's great-great-great (etc.) grandchildren.

In any case, I hope you've enjoyed today's journey through time.  It's not bad as fiction; kind of the bastard child of The DaVinci Code and Foucault's Pendulum.  But as a real historical claim, it's a bit of a non-starter.