THE NORSE CODE-STONES

This blog post is about a puzzling occurrence involving stoneholes chiseled into rocks, I believe in both the pioneering days of the late 1800s and in medieval times, perhaps as early as the 12th century.  This multiple stonehole-making happened near the border of Minnesota and South Dakota, near the town of Appleton, in Minnesota.  It is my firm belief that the stoneholes were chiseled out to mark a spot of earth along a ridgeline directly south of the Pomme de Terre River, a river that empties into the Minnesota River, not far from where the Minnesota river begins near the bottom of Big Stone Lake.  Significantly, the Pomme de Terre River reaches the farthest north of any river discharging into the Minnesota River.  This is important because I think the Norse Code-stone may possibly have been created to indicate an attempted medieval Scandinavian land-claim, and placing the seemingly encoded stonehole rocks by the Pomme de Terre River might have been intended to maximize a land-claim.

It was in 2013 that I first learned of this odd site containing perhaps forty or so "stonehole rocks."  In the tradition of obtaining help from local persons with knowledge of such history-related oddities--as happened at Leif Ericson's old settlement in Newfoundland, it was with this same kind of help from locals that started me off on my odyssey with the proposed Norse Code-stone.  However, I didn't discover the Code-stone itself until April 2, 2015, two years after the site containing the many stonehole rocks was first pointed out to me.

I first learned about the site while out exploring the countryside one summer day after I stopped to admire and take a few photos of a huge rock with a quartz vein running through it--perhaps six feet in diameter--sitting by the edge of the road.  A man operating a front-end loader full of rocks came into view from behind the large boulder, so I ventured forth to strike up a conversation with him about what else, but rocks.  Ryan B. turned out to be a very friendly fellow, definitely "Minnesota Nice" in character.  He not only told me about the site containing the many stonehole rocks--which he had stumbled across while deer hunting years earlier, but he also volunteered to show me approximately where the site was located...about a twenty-minute drive from his home northwest of Appleton.  His farmer friend near the site wasn't home, but Ryan pointed in the general direction of the site, which turned out to be just barely within State of Minnesota property set aside for quail habitat.

I didn't find the site that day, but I returned a few days later and asked Ryan's farmer friend, Brad F. about the site, which he accurately pointed out to me, several hundred yards away.  I was astonished by what I found, and I've included in this blog posting a good representation of many of the stonehole rocks I found.  I was perplexed about the assortment of rocks until two years passed by and I found what I call the Code-stone, which is located a few dozen or so paces apart from the other stonehole rocks on the ridgeline.  For two years, I had been puzzled about why some of the smaller rocks have two small holes chiseled into them, rather than one large single hole, which was typical of the others.  Over time, it had become fairly obvious to me that the larger stoneholes were machine-made, while the smaller ones appeared to have been hand-made, characterized by imperfectly round holes, which happens when a stonehole is hand-carved.  The smaller stoneholes also appeared to be much older than the large machine-made holes, apparent to the naked eye because of the advanced degree of mica degeneration.

Naturally, I wondered why the Code-stone was positioned away from the other rocks, and I was most curious about why the Code-stone had three holes carved into it, rather than just one or two, as with the other stonehole rocks.  I then isolated the smaller two-hole rocks from the others by putting wooden stakes with white tissue paper attached into a hole in each of the rocks and discovered that three of them in a line presented the same pattern as the three stoneholes on the recently found Code-stone itself:  two holes, a blank space, and then a third hole.  I was quite astonished, because there was no mistaking that this had been done on purpose.

Even more strange, a fourth small two-hole rock like the other three forming a line on the ridge was positioned adjacent to one of the two-hole rocks at the end of the line...only about four feet away.  A closer examination revealed that a chunk of rock had been broken off this rock from a third stonehole that had been carved into it.  The degree of decay seemed to indicate that the chunk of rock likely was broken off in the same timeframe as when the stonehole itself was made.  This was not the first time I had come across such an odd situation...a chunk of rock appears to have been broken off on purpose from a stonehole in one of the two stonehole rocks on Runestone Hill, too, and I had also discovered a similar situation on a large white, flat-topped rock near Wilmot, SD, where a large slab was apparently cracked off on purpose--I think maybe to grab a returning Norseman's attention.

But why do the three holes in a line on the Code-stone get progressively deeper?  Admittedly, I first thought it might have been to indicate going down...in other words, a clue to dig.  But, someone from Denmark on Facebook's Kensington Runestone International Supporters Group gave me a somewhat better explanation, I believe.  Erik T. thinks the Code-stone is likely a sun-stone, or compass-stone, and sure enough, the line of deepening stoneholes seemed to be pointing eastward.  So, could it be that the Code-stone was actually a "compass on the prairie?"  After studying Erik's website further, it did seem possible that the Code-stone could be a sort of compass on the ground...which was possibly bearing a latitude, or parallel, to the east.  Maybe it was meant to establish a sort of "fix-point on the horizon."    Further, it seemed to me that maybe the Code-stone was meant to indicate a special "amplitude on a selected latitude," perhaps because the spot was only about ten miles from the 45th parallel.  Just a guess.  But, it also seemed possible that part of this so-called fixed-point on the horizon may also have been meant to establish a special meridian, too, which would be the longitudinal line shooting straight north.  Not too surprisingly, this line going north did in fact point to a watery visual from the ridge, showing where the Pomme de Terre River was discharging into the Minnesota River (Marsh Lake at this beginning stage of the river).

It still seemed likely to me that the Code-stone was indicating that something was probably buried in association with a possible attempted land-claim, but it also seemed likely that the Code-stone was, in essence, a medieval Norse compass, too, which has caused me to wonder if maybe a future community had been planned to spring up around the special site--which does have a supply of fresh spring-water.  If I was understanding this correctly, the Code-stone was perhaps the result of a stationary sun reading taken using a bearing-dial, or "sun compass," the reading then being transferred to the Code-stone via the line of stoneholes, in a pattern pointing east.  I hoped that the three-hole rock might now be assessed from a scientific point of view, rather than from only a speculative point of view based on knowledge of medieval stoneholes.  Still, the modern technology of metal detectors does show that something made of iron is buried at the site, and in my mind whatever was buried was likely connected to surveying and mapping, and likely to a land-claim, too.  It does still seem to me that the Code-stone is showing in miniature the same pattern of stonehole rocks as on the nearby ridge.  I figure the site likely represents a medieval Scandinavian land-claim deep within America's interior, from a probable post-Viking but pre-Kensington Runestone timeframe--roughly between AD 1150 and AD 1350.

A mysterious Viking-age Norse code was decrypted a few yers ago, according to a February 2014 article in ScienceNordic.  "It's like solving a riddle," the code-breaker, runologist Jonas Nordby, was quoted as saying.  He also made the following comments:  "It was very common to use codes," and, "People challenged one another with codes," and "Many think the Vikings used cryptography to conceal secret messages."  I need to quickly point out that Nordby's comments were dealing with runes, not with stoneholes...but the takeaway I want to exploit here is that the Norse did enjoy using codes, and sometimes in stone.

In the same article mentioned above, Henrik Williams, a professor at Uppsala University's Department of Scandinavian Languages and a Swedish expert on runes, was quoted as agreeing that Norby's discovery is important.  He said, "Above all, it helps us understand that there were more codes than we were aware of."  Williams went on to say, "They tell us much about people's playfulness and innovation.  We come closer to the thoughts of people living at the time through understanding their codes."  Though Williams, too, was specifically referring to runes, we can see by example how this historic Scandinavian tendency towards playfulness with codes might have been employed by medieval Norsemen visiting Minnesota.  But they apparently used stoneholes instead of runes to possibly point to where something is buried--only a mere half-hour's drive from known medieval stonehole clusters and Norse petroglyphs just across the border in South Dakota.

Before ending this posting, I would like to point out that a trifecta of historical medieval icons seems to be pointing to Scandinavian Catholics as being the sponsors of stone oddities in long-ago America...speaking of the Kensington Runestone, the Sauk Lake Altar Rock and of course the Newport Tower.  I strongly believe that these three icons serve to corroborate one another.  I also find it very interesting that St. Barnard established dozens upon dozens of abbeys across much of Europe--including Scandinavia--just before he died in the middle of the 12th century.  Because of this, I cannot help wondering if it's possible that the stonehole encoding on the lonely ridgeline south of Appleton might have been associated with Catholic monks, perhaps even "fighting monks," (Knights Templar) long before disease and cold weather hit Europe.  And I cannot help further wondering if it's possible that the encoding might be an indication of the Templars' interest in founding their own monastic state in this faraway, isolated region of America--much as the Knights Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights had been keen to do, though elsewhere.  (Strangely enough, if the number of stoneholes in the encoding are added up--giving half a value to the single split stonehole, they add up to the year AD 1150...which is within the timeframe of the early Crusades.  Just speculation, of course.)   

So, it appears that a medieval Norseman with a hammer and chisel may have offered "the future" a coded message using a small cluster of stonehole rocks...as though the landscape was surveyed and marked by Scandinavian Europeans, and hundreds of years before the time of Columbus!  But unfortunately, for now at least--as concerns a possible professional archaeological dig, we must all wait for a change of heart from the academics and scholars in Minnesota, and from those State of Minnesota officials currently in charge of our history.  For we are talking about a possible "miracle of discovery" on sensitive State of Minnesota prairie land, and unfortunately, the current State Archaeologist will call the shots on the likelihood of a professional dig.  In fact, last year (2018), after visiting and filming the remote prairie site, the actor Peter Stormare (think Fargo) was willing to sponsor a dig, but the State Archaeologist wrongfully (in my view) passed the decision down to the DNR, who would not allow a dig due to the sensitive nature of the State-owned prairie land the site is located on.  But, I wonder if the professionals--ever hidebound, believing the French came to this region before Scandinavians--are afraid of what may be found.

 

Here is a clip from the TV series "Secrets of the Viking Stone," filmed in 2018 and shown this year, 2021.  From left to right, three archaeologists, Peter Stormare, myself (Bob Voyles) and Elroy Balgaard.

UPDATE, September 2023

Following are several essays on this blog that I wrote after writing the "Norse Code-Stones" article, which you have just read.  Probably the most important update is that another small-diameter stonehole was found (by my wife) after a powerful rainstorm, about eight feet due north of the three-hole code-stone.  I believe the newly discovered stonehole last year helps to make clear that the small collection of stonehole rocks are likely making up a "Compass on the Prairie" to help visiting Norsemen with knowing their directions.  But again, a metal detector shows that something is buried within this rare collection of aged stonehole rocks.

But before listing the update essays about the Norse Code-Stones site, I want to let readers know about an article I wrote for the Norwegian American back on March 11, 2016, telling about the site.  That article is entitled "In Defense of the KRS: A Code-stone."  I believe that the Kensington Runestone and the Norse Code-Stones sites are both "medieval Norse," giving corroboration to one another's existance.  Here then, are the other essays on this website having anything to do with updates about the Norse Code-Stones site:

Welcoming Spring and Pond Located Near Minnesota's "Norse Code-Stones" Site.  (12/1/22).

Another Norse Stonehole Rock Discovered:  Indications of a "Compass on the Prairie" and Something buried.  (7/12/22).

Top View of Minnesota's "Norse Code-Stones" site.  (11/19/22.}

"Norse Code-Stones" Site Evidence Indicates Contrastive Aging of Medieval and "Modern" Stoneholes.  (5/22/22.)

Photo-Visit to Minnesota's Norse Code-Stones Site.  (5/17/22.)