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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Relics of the distant past

Today we'll stay in an archaeological vein, mostly because a couple of loyal readers of Skeptophilia read yesterday's post and responded with links of their own and messages which basically boil down to, "Yes, but have you seen this?"

The first one comes to us from the ever-entertaining site Mysterious Universe, but unlike their usual fare of Bigfoots and UFOs, this one is about legitimate scientific research.  Not that you could tell from the title, which is "Yorkshire's Atlantis May Have Finally Been Found."  To be fair, the appellation of "Atlantis" isn't the fault of the author, Paul Seaburn; apparently this site, Ravenser Odd, has been called that before.  But unlike Atlantis, Ravenser Odd is a real place.  It was a port city on the estuary of the River Humber, attested thoroughly in records of the time until in 1362 there was a storm that breached the sand-based seawall and swamped it completely, and the once thriving town -- like its mythological namesake -- sank beneath the waves.

The shape of the long, narrow seawall is what gave the place its name, all the way back in Viking times, some four hundred years earlier; Ravenser Odd is a mangled version of hrafns eyr, which means "raven's eye" in Old Norse.  In its time it was a busy place.  It was one of the most thriving ports in the region, and a record from 1299 describes it as containing a central marketplace, wharves, warehouses, a court, a prison, a chapel, two mills, a tannery, an annual fair, and over a thousand residences.  The coastal region near the original submerged town retained the name, and in fact it's mentioned twice in Shakespeare, where he calls it "Ravenspurgh" (Richard II, act 2, scene 1, line 298, and Henry IV Part 1, act 1, scene 3, line 245).

Despite multiple attestations in the records, no one was able to find where the original Ravenser Odd had stood -- until now.

An amateur archaeologist named Philip Mathison, who is something of an expert on Ravenser Odd, stumbled upon an 1892 document on eBay that mentioned "submarine remains" at Spurn, a tidal island north of the mouth of the Humber -- and gave directions on how to find them.  Mathison went out in a boat with an echo sounder, and found what looked like a human-made rock wall, exactly where the document had said it would be.

"People had assumed it was way out to sea, as the shape of the peninsula now is very different to how it was in the thirteenth century," Mathison said.  "This document showed a stone ledge to the east of Spurn which I believe could be the walls of a dock or quay... The ridge was most likely rock armor to protect the port, as it was under threat from erosion way before it was abandoned.  The bulk of the town's buildings were on a shingle bank called The Old Den, to the west side of Spurn, and some brickwork from them has been found in the past.  The town curved around like a fish hook and the wharves were at the other end... But it needs a proper dive to find out."

Seems like Mathison is going to get his wish -- two archaeologists from the University of Hull have already purchased scanning equipment and obtained funding for other supplies for an expedition this summer, when the weather in the North Sea improves.

Also with a Viking connection is a study done at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst that seems to upend a long-held theory about why the Norse settlements of Greenland died out in the late fourteenth century.  Previous models had attributed the collapse to the onset of the Little Ice Age, a worldwide drop in global average temperature that (among other things) caused the Greenland sea access to freeze up year round and made it an even more miserable place to live than it already is.  But the new study -- using two organic molecules as markers that are known to indicate, respectively, temperature and water availability -- showed that during the period of the collapse, the temperature didn't drop much, but it became significantly drier.

The harsh winters were one thing, but when the rain stopped falling even in the warmest months of summer, that was the kiss of death for the crops and domesticated animals at the Norse settlements, and ultimately, the Norse themselves.  

For the last story, we return to the British Isles, where a geophysical survey near the town of Aberlemno uncovered a 1.7-meter-long stone carved with designs identified with the Picts, the mysterious people who inhabited northern and eastern Scotland before the Dál Riada Scots moved in and kind of took over in the tenth century.  There aren't many Pictish records around; they were Celtic, but appear to have spoken a Brythonic language related to Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, not a Goidelic language like Gaelic, Irish, and Manx.

The discovery was made quite by accident.  While moving some surveying equipment, they noticed some anomalies that seemed to indicate the buried foundation of a settlement.  They dug into the soil, and hit a rock. "I just brushed my hand, and there was a symbol," said Zack Hinckley, an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen.  "And we had a freakout... there were genuine tears."

The Pictish stone from Aberlemno, Scotland

The difficulty is that given the paucity of Pictish records, little is known of the script, and it's currently unknown whether these were written language, or simply decorative symbols.  The stone has been removed to an archaeological conservation lab in Edinburgh for further study.

So there you are.  The world of archaeology has been hopping lately.  It's always amazing to me that despite the extensive research that's been done, with state-of-the-art mapping and surveying tools, that there are still plenty of astonishing artifacts out there to find.

Some of them, apparently, right underneath our feet.

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Mapping out a fraud

Ever heard of the Vinland Map?

Supposedly dating from the fifteenth century, this map shows the outlines of Europe, Greenland, Asia, Africa... and North America, which is labeled "Vinland Insula" (the island of Vinland).  The map surfaced in 1957, and was widely hailed as a genuine depiction of the Norse exploration of northeastern North America, drawn using information gathered as far back as the tenth century C.E.

Interestingly, the map surfaced three years before the discovery of the (authentic) Viking-era archaeological site at L'Anse-aux-Meadows, Newfoundland, the first (and at this point, only) certain Norse site in North America.  When tenth-century Norse artifacts were found there in 1960, it bolstered the claims that the map was genuine.  We know the Vikings made it to "Vinland," as per the stories of Leif Eiriksson and Thorfinn Karlsefni, and the Map seemed to indicate they'd made it a lot farther, possibly to what is now coastal New England and points south.

Very quickly, it became the center of a lot of wilder claims.  Ancient Aliens aficionados said that not only did it show that the Norse had visited North America and surveyed it closely enough to get a lot of the details of the coastline correct, it contained enough information to support that the drawing had been made from a higher vantage point -- i.e., from the air.  In a spaceship.  Because the Norse gods were actually Ancient Astronauts.

Even the less up-in-the-stratosphere claims were given substantial momentum by the Vinland Map.  I remember when I was working on my master's thesis -- about the effects of the Viking invasions on the Old English and Old Gaelic languages -- running into an apparently serious study purporting to find evidence of borrow-words from Old Norse into various Algonkian languages, including Malecite, Abenaki, and Mi'kmaq.  The difficulty with this sort of thing is in determining whether pairs of similar words from otherwise unrelated languages are related genetically (i.e. from a common root) or are just chance correspondences; in fact, that was one of the more difficult parts of my own research.  Sometimes it's obvious, but that's the exception.  An example is the English word window -- the Old English word was eagþyrl and the Norse word at the same time was vindauga.

Doesn't take a linguist to figure that one out.

Most, however, are not that clear-cut, and it takes more evidence than "they sound kind of the same" to establish a genetic connection.  And the vast majority of linguists think that any similarities between Norse words and Algonkian words are chance -- and cherry-picking.  You can find those sorts of accidental correspondences between just about any two languages you pick if you're allowed to ignore all the pairs of words that don't sound alike.

In any case, the Vinland Map was considered support for the contention that the Vikings did get south of L'Anse-aux-Meadows, whether or not they left linguistic and/or archaeological traces.  This claim gained some credence when a physicist tested the parchment of the Map back in 1995 and found that it dated somewhere between 1432 and 1445, exactly as advertised.

Unfortunately, the age of the parchment is irrelevant -- because a study published last week by some researchers at Yale University, where the map is housed, found that beyond question, the Vinland Map is a fake.

The researchers were able to do an analysis of the ink used on the Map without destroying it, and found that it is unquestionably modern ink.  It contains anatase, a form of titanium dioxide first used in inks in the 1920s.  Also, it was discovered that one of the inscriptions on the map had been overwritten to appear as if it was a bookbinder's instructions to assemble the map pages in concordance with the Speculum Historiale, a thirteenth-century encyclopedia intended as a compendium of everything known to the intelligentsia of Europe at the time.

"The Vinland Map is a fake," said Raymond Clemens, curator of early books and manuscripts at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.  "There is no reasonable doubt here. This new analysis should put the matter to rest...  The altered inscription certainly seems like an attempt to make people believe the map was created at the same time as the Speculum Historiale.  It’s powerful evidence that this is a forgery, not an innocent creation by a third party that was co-opted by someone else, although it doesn’t tell us who perpetrated the deception."

My first response to reading this was to get really pissed off.  Not only does this claim have significant bearing on the subject of my own research, it muddies the waters considerably with respect to any legitimate claims that the Norse reached mainland North America.  Historical linguistics is hard enough; having some asshole create a highly-plausible fake -- good enough that it took sophisticated ink analysis to detect it -- makes it more difficult for those of us who just want to know what really happened.

Fakes in general really make me see red.  We already have the natural biases all humans come equipped with (confirmation bias, correlation/causation errors, and dart-thrower's bias, particularly) gumming up the works even for reputable scientists who are trying their hardest to see things clearly.  It may seem like a minor concern -- who really cares if a particular old document is genuine?  But truth matters, even if it's an argument about what might seem like academic trivia.

Or it should matter.  What's most troubling about this is that whoever created the Vinland Map evidently knew what (s)he was doing, and knew the subject well enough to fool historians for over fifty years.  (Well, some historians -- there were researchers who doubted it pretty much from the get-go.)  So the great likelihood is whoever perpetrated this fake was an academic him/herself.

And to me, that's unconscionable.

So that's our disappointing piece of news for the day.  It still seems pretty likely to me that the Norse did make it to mainland North America, but even if I'm right we're back to having zero hard evidence.  I guess I'm lucky that I chose the thesis research I did; there's no doubt the Vikings made it to Britain.  The monks at Lindisfarne would have been happy to tell you all about it.

At least the ones who survived.

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My friends know, as do regular readers of Skeptophilia, that I have a tendency toward swearing.

My prim and proper mom tried for years -- decades, really -- to break me of the habit.  "Bad language indicates you don't have the vocabulary to express yourself properly," she used to tell me.  But after many years, I finally came to the conclusion that there was nothing amiss with my vocabulary.  I simply found that in the right context, a pungent turn of phrase was entirely called for.

It can get away with you, of course, just like any habit.  I recall when I was in graduate school at the University of Washington in the 1980s that my fellow students were some of the hardest-drinking, hardest-partying, hardest-swearing people I've ever known.  (There was nothing wrong with their vocabularies, either.)  I came to find, though, that if every sentence is punctuated by a swear word, they lose their power, becoming no more than a less-appropriate version of "umm" and "uhh" and "like."

Anyhow, for those of you who are also fond of peppering your speech with spicy words, I have a book for you.  Science writer Emma Byrne has written a book called Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language.  In it, you'll read about honest scientific studies that have shown that swearing decreases stress and improves pain tolerance -- and about fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious anecdotes like the chimpanzee who uses American Sign Language to swear at her keeper.

I guess our penchant for the ribald goes back a ways.

It's funny, thought-provoking, and will provide you with good ammunition the next time someone throws "swearing is an indication of low intelligence" at you.  

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

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.