History and Provenance

Ohman reported the find in the autumn of 1898, and transcriptions soon reached universities in Scandinavia and the United States. In 1899 three professors at Christiania (now Oslo) University pronounced the inscription a clumsy forgery, and the Norwegian-American scholar Olaus Breda published a discrediting analysis. The stone was reportedly used for a time as a step or slab on the Ohman farm before interest revived around 1907-1910, when the businessman and writer Hjalmar Holand took up its cause and promoted it energetically for decades.

The Minnesota Historical Society examined it, and it was eventually installed in the Runestone Museum in Alexandria, Minnesota, where it remains a regional icon. The provenance depends entirely on Ohman's account; no independent record predates 1898, and the surrounding mounds and landscape have yielded nothing corroborating a fourteenth-century Norse presence.