The Spirit Pond runestones are three stones with runic inscriptions, allegedly found at Spirit Pond in Phippsburg

Phippsburg, Maine

Phippsburg is a town in Sagadahoc County, Maine, United States, on the west side of the mouth of the Kennebec River. The population was 2,106 at the 2000 census. It is within the Portland–South Portland–Biddeford, Maine metropolitan statistical rea...

, Maine

Maine

Maine is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and south, New Hampshire to the west, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec to the northwest and New Brunswick to the northeast. Maine is both the northernmost and easternmost...

 in 1971 by a Walter J. Elliott, Jr., a carpenter born in Bath

Bath, Maine

Bath is a city in Sagadahoc County, Maine, in the United States. As of the 2000 census, the city population was 9,266. It is the county seat of Sagadahoc County. Located on the Kennebec River, Bath is a port of entry with a good harbor. The city is popular with tourists, many drawn by its...

, Maine. The stones, currently housed at the Maine State Museum

Maine State Museum

The Maine State Museum is the official Maine government's museum and is located at 230 State Street, adjacent to the Maine State House, in Augusta. The State Museum has a large collection of Maine-related topics. The Lion is displayed at the museum and is the oldest American-made locomotive in New...

, are widely dismissed as a hoax or a fraud. If authentic, they would be evidence of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact

Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact

Theories of Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact are those theories that propose interaction between indigenous peoples of the Americas who settled the Americas before 10,000 BC, and peoples of other continents , which occurred before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean in 1492.Many...

 and Norse colonization of the Americas

Norse colonization of the Americas

The Norse colonization of the Americas began as early as the 10th century, when Norse sailors explored and settled areas of the North Atlantic, including the northeastern fringes of North America....

.

Unlike the prehistoric monumental runestones raised in Scandinavia

Scandinavia

Scandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...

, the stones are small handheld objects. A similar stone is the authentic Kingittorsuaq Runestone found in Greenland

Greenland

Greenland is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Though physiographically a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been politically and culturally associated with Europe for...

 in 1824. Of the three stones, one contains a total of 15 lines of text on two sides. The map stone contains a map with some inscription; in different papers Paul H. Chapman proposes that the map depicts the landscape visible from the 1075 feet (328 m) high White Mountain, the highest point in the vicinity of Spirit Pond, or the northern tip of Newfoundland.

The inscriptions contain several instances of the use of pentadic numerals in arabic placement. The number 1011 appearing on the inscription (represented as "011") has been interpreted as a date, leading to speculation that the stones are connected to the expedition of Thorfinn Karlsefni

Thorfinn Karlsefni

Thorfinn Karlsefni was an Icelandic explorer who circa 1010 AD led an attempt to settle Vínland with three ships and 160 settlers. Among the settlers was Freydís Eiríksdóttir, according to Grœnlendinga saga and Eiríks saga rauða, sister or half-sister of Leif Eriksson...

. Linguistic analysis however points to a later date. The first to study the stones scientifically was Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 professor Einar Haugen

Einar Haugen

Einar Ingvald Haugen was an American linguist, author and Professor at University of Wisconsin–Madison and Harvard University.-Biography:Haugen was born in Sioux City, Iowa to Norwegians from the town of Oppdal in Norway. When he was a young child, the family moved back to Oppdal for a few years,...

. In 1974, after transcribing the runes, he found the runes used and the language of the inscription to be inconsistent with 11th century Old Norse

Old Norse

Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....

. He also noted peculiarities relating the inscriptions directly to the Kensington Runestone

Kensington Runestone

The Kensington Runestone is a 200-pound slab of greywacke covered in runes on its face and side which, if genuine, would suggest that Scandinavian explorers reached the middle of North America in the 14th century. It was found in 1898 in the largely rural township of Solem, Douglas County,...

 inscription. He concluded that the inscriptions were most likely created after 1932.

Amateur researchers have been more sympathetic to a medieval origin of the stones. Suzanne Carlson of NEARA, a group of enthusiasts who advocate for widespread Viking presence in North America, suggests a mid 14th century date for the inscriptions, although it is unclear how Carlson arrived at this date. Similarly, amateur rune-enthusiast Richard Nielsen

Richard Nielsen

Richard Nielsen of Houston, Texas, an amateur researcher on the linguistics and runology of the Kensington Runestone, grew up in a Danish-speaking home in California, earned a doctorate in materials science from the Technical University of Denmark, and developed an intense interest in the...

 claims a precise date of 1401.

Analyzing and authenticating Christian era (post-Viking era) Norse runic inscriptions poses challenges. While runes remained in use in Scandinavia outside the Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 learned circles well into the Middle Ages, the corpus

Text corpus

In linguistics, a corpus or text corpus is a large and structured set of texts...

 of surviving inscriptions is very small; the largest part consist of the Bryggen inscriptions

Bryggen inscriptions

The Bryggen inscriptions are a find of some 670 medieval runic inscriptions on wood and bone found from 1955 and forth at Bryggen in Bergen, Norway. It has been called the most important runic find in the twentieth century...

, sticks of pine with a few runes. The only major manuscript is the Codex Runicus

Codex Runicus

The Codex Runicus is a codex of 202 pages written in medieval runes around the year 1300 which includes the oldest preserved Nordic provincial law, Scanian Law pertaining to the Danish land Scania . Codex Runicus is one of the few runic texts found on parchment. The manuscript's initials are...

 from 1300. One of many objections to the authenticity of North American runestones is the use of pentadic or "runic" numerals, used in both the Kensington and the Spirit Pond stones; their earliest authenticated use in an Arabic positional system is from 1885, in the notes of an 18-year-old journeyman tailor.

Transcribing the Spirit Pond inscriptions is in itself a challenge, and no authoritative transcription or translation exists. Even those amateur researchers who are sympathetic to the stones authenticity can not agree on the text. Suzanne Carlson claims that the stones tell a story of a sudden storm and fearful Vikings trying to save their ship from "the foamy arms of Aegir, angry god of the sea", Linguist Einar Haugen

Einar Haugen

Einar Ingvald Haugen was an American linguist, author and Professor at University of Wisconsin–Madison and Harvard University.-Biography:Haugen was born in Sioux City, Iowa to Norwegians from the town of Oppdal in Norway. When he was a young child, the family moved back to Oppdal for a few years,...

 say that the text contains only "a few Norse words in a sea of gibberish", while according to American Heritage mathematician O.G. Landsverk's attempts to make sense of the stone has "milked the gibberish found on clumsy fakes and plow-scarred boulders by declaring them to be cryptographic, a device that permits the stones to say virtually anything."

Literature

• Carlson, Suzanne: The Spirit Pond Inscription Stone: Rhyme and Reason, NEARA Journal, 28:1, Summer/Fall 1993.
• Chapman, Paul H: Spirit Pond Runestones, a Study in Linguistics, Epigraphic Society Occasional Papers (ESOP), Volume 22, Part II (Vienna, VA 1994)
• Richard Neilsen: New Evidence on the Scandinavian Language, Numbers, and Runes found on the Spirit Pond Rune Stones
• Erik Wahlgren: American runes: From Kensington to Spirit Pond

External links

• North American Rune Stones
• Spirit Pond Stones - high-res photos of stones
• Transcription of Spirit Pond Number 3 (Figure 109) - Facsimile of "inscription stone"