Word: kensington
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Enthusiastic believers in Viking lore have no trouble accepting the Kensington stone. Allegedly found near Kensington, Minn, by Farmer Olof Ohman in 1898, the stone, inscribed in runic characters, tells of a band of Norsemen who wandered to Minnesota in 1362 and presumably died there of Indian-trouble.* Last week Professor (of Germanic languages) Erik Wahlgren of U.C.L.A. pooh-poohed the petrophiles. He had positive proof, he said, that the stone was faked by the late Farmer Ohman...
Chief champion of the Kensington stone is Hjalmar Holand, 81, of Ephraim, Wis., who has made a career out of writing and lecturing about it. His principal argument: Farmer Ohman was too unlettered (six weeks of schooling) to fake the runic inscription, and he had no books to help him. Skeptical scholars have pointed to many oddities in the stone's language, but this pale, negative tactic has not laid the ghosts of the Minnesota Vikings. Both popular and learned belief in it is still strong. Professor Wahlgren felt that positive action was needed...
...After settling this critical point, Wahlgren sat down with a Swedish encyclopedia which was the duplicate of Farmer Ohman's. In it were four pages about runes, and he found to his delight that the information in them would have enabled Ohman to carve the inscription on the Kensington stone. Its language, he decided, was ordinary Swedish embellished with just those "linguistic petrifacts" (archaic- features) that Ohman could have found in his encyclopedia...
There were many such examples, and more came from Holvik's copy of the scrapbook. One erudite article in it, for instance, ends with the Sanskrit expression "AUM," an esoteric syllable meaning "power." Toward the end of the Kensington inscription is the word "AVM," which has long baffled scholars. Some thought it meant "Ave Maria." Wahlgren is sure that crafty old Farmer Ohman intended it as a learned pun, his way of having fun with the experts...
Alice's Present. It has been growing ever since. Late in the 19th century, the Natural History section was moved to Kensington, and today the Bloomsbury institution consists of two main parts:' the Library, with its Reading Room, and the Museum. The library, Britain's national bookshelf, contains between seven and eight million volumes on 64 miles of shelves. It receives everything published in Britain and its colonies, from poetry anthologies to comic books (about 37,000 new volumes a year, plus 162,540 single copies of newspapers). Among the treasures: eight copies of the first folio...