Authenticity and Scholarship

The case for authenticity rests on the discovery story, on some geological arguments about the weathering of the carved grooves, and on the conviction of local defenders. The scholarly case against it is linguistic and runological, and it has held for over a century. The inscription's grammar and vocabulary contain forms characteristic of nineteenth-century Swedish dialect and of English influence, features that would be anachronistic in a genuine 1362 text, and several rune shapes do not match those used in authentic medieval Scandinavian inscriptions.

Erik Wahlgren's 1958 study set out these problems in detail, and later runologists have concurred. The Minnesota Historical Society, which has studied and displayed material connected to the stone, treats the inscription as of questionable authenticity and the object as a product of its immigrant milieu. The honest record is a firm scholarly verdict of forgery alongside a genuine, and openly noted, tradition of local belief in the stone's antiquity.