The Kensington Runestone

The Kensington Runestone

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The Kensington runestone is generally considered by scholars not to be medieval. However, there are those who believe that it is a genuine artefact demonstrating the presence of medieval Scandinavians in the Midwest. The runes state that a group of Geats and Norwegians travelled through the area in 1362, that ten of their number were killed and that their ships lay 14 days' travel away. The fact that the language used on it is closer to nineteenth-century Swedish than it is to fourteenth-century Swedish is one of the reasons why its authenticity is doubted. It is one of several runestones from America's Midwest, none of which have been authenticated as Viking Age or medieval.