Word: ohman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
Gumshoe Scholar. Proceeding like a scholarly private eye, Wahlgren got in touch with J. A. Holvik, professor emeritus of Norse at Concordia College. Moorhead, Minn. Holvik went to the Ohman farm; which now belongs to Olof's sons, and made a copy of the old man's scrapbook. He also learned that Ohman had owned a Swedish encyclopedia...
Armed with this information, which less sophisticated scholars seem to have missed, Wahlgren besieged the farm. The Ohman sons, who are sick of the whole business, would not let him see the scrapbook or the encyclopedia, but he satisfied himself that Farmer Ohman really had both of them. Then he gumshoed around the neighborhood and found that Ohman, though uneducated in a formal sense, was a smart man who often expressed an urge to fool the scholars...
...Soon. 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...