Vikings! In Oklahoma?

[Richard]

By Tracy Morris Published Yesterday

Heavener Runestone proof of a directionally challenged Norsemen?

These days you could say that Heavener Oklahoma is off the beaten path. The town, which sits nestled under the Poteau Mountain, is a little out of my cell phone range. So risking breakdown without the help of Triple A feels like an adventure. But if I feel a little lost in the wilds of Oklahoma, how much more lost would the Vikings have been if they had indeed settled here?

It sounds a little bit like the plot of a Hollywood movie starring Antonio Bandaras. But residents of Heavener maintain that around 900 A.D, Vikings paddled their longships down the Eastern Seaboard, around the tip of Florida, through the Gulf of Mexico, up the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers and then traveled overland into Eastern Oklahoma – where they put up a billboard.

Okay, they may have built settlements and planted crops, but none of those things have been found. What has been found is a large flat stone – twelve feet high, ten feet wide, sixteen inches thick, rectangular in shape and sitting in a mountaintop ravine – with six-inch high Norse runes carved deeply into it.

Translations of the runes vary. Some people maintain that they're a date – November 11, 1012, while others say that they read “Glome's Valley,” as either a land claim or a kind of early Viking graffiti.

Whether Vikings actually were in Oklahoma, they came and left long ago. And the evidence that they were here might have lived on in obscurity if not for a few key events.

Flash forward in time to 1838, when thousands of Native Americans were forcibly moved from Tennessee into Eastern Oklahoma. The new arrivals noticed the stone, which became known as Indian Rock by European settlers – even though the carvings were not recognized by anyone as either Native or Latin writing.

In the 1920's a Heavener resident sent copies of the runes to the Smithsonian for identification. The Museum wrote back to say that the writing was Norse, but that it didn't make sense for Norsemen to have made them. In all likelihood, museum officials reasoned, a Scandinavian settler must have made the carvings by working from a primary school grammar book from his homeland.

As settlers moved into the area, they found more and more of these engraved stones. However most of them were destroyed by treasure hunters. The same fate might have befallen the runestone, if not for the efforts of Gloria Farley, a local school teacher.

Farley researched and wrote extensively about the stone. Through her efforts, the name of the stone was changed from Indian Rock to The Heavener Runestone, and the Heavener Runestone State park was established. Eventually, she found four more examples of Viking Runes carved into the Oklahoma landscape. Some of these are now on display in the Heavner Runestone State park.

So did Vikings settle in rural Eastern Oklahoma? Authorities in history say no. What is known however is that Norsemen did establish settlements in Newfoundland and similar stones with Runic writing have been found in Minnesota.

More importantly, stranger things have happened. In 1939, two fishermen pulled a small Bull Shark out of the Mississippi river near in Alton, Illinois, about 1,750 freshwater miles outside of its natural habitat.

If a shark can be thousands of miles away from where it's supposed to be, why not a Viking?

http://firefox.org/news/articles/1210/1/...Page1.html

[Avatar]

By Tracy Morris Published Yesterday

Heavener Runestone proof of a directionally challenged Norsemen?

These days you could say that Heavener Oklahoma is off the beaten path. The town, which sits nestled under the Poteau Mountain, is a little out of my cell phone range. So risking breakdown without the help of Triple A feels like an adventure. But if I feel a little lost in the wilds of Oklahoma, how much more lost would the Vikings have been if they had indeed settled here?

It sounds a little bit like the plot of a Hollywood movie starring Antonio Bandaras. But residents of Heavener maintain that around 900 A.D, Vikings paddled their longships down the Eastern Seaboard, around the tip of Florida, through the Gulf of Mexico, up the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers and then traveled overland into Eastern Oklahoma – where they put up a billboard.

Okay, they may have built settlements and planted crops, but none of those things have been found. What has been found is a large flat stone – twelve feet high, ten feet wide, sixteen inches thick, rectangular in shape and sitting in a mountaintop ravine – with six-inch high Norse runes carved deeply into it.

Translations of the runes vary. Some people maintain that they're a date – November 11, 1012, while others say that they read “Glome's Valley,” as either a land claim or a kind of early Viking graffiti.

Whether Vikings actually were in Oklahoma, they came and left long ago. And the evidence that they were here might have lived on in obscurity if not for a few key events.

Flash forward in time to 1838, when thousands of Native Americans were forcibly moved from Tennessee into Eastern Oklahoma. The new arrivals noticed the stone, which became known as Indian Rock by European settlers – even though the carvings were not recognized by anyone as either Native or Latin writing.

In the 1920's a Heavener resident sent copies of the runes to the Smithsonian for identification. The Museum wrote back to say that the writing was Norse, but that it didn't make sense for Norsemen to have made them. In all likelihood, museum officials reasoned, a Scandinavian settler must have made the carvings by working from a primary school grammar book from his homeland.

As settlers moved into the area, they found more and more of these engraved stones. However most of them were destroyed by treasure hunters. The same fate might have befallen the runestone, if not for the efforts of Gloria Farley, a local school teacher.

Farley researched and wrote extensively about the stone. Through her efforts, the name of the stone was changed from Indian Rock to The Heavener Runestone, and the Heavener Runestone State park was established. Eventually, she found four more examples of Viking Runes carved into the Oklahoma landscape. Some of these are now on display in the Heavner Runestone State park.

So did Vikings settle in rural Eastern Oklahoma? Authorities in history say no. What is known however is that Norsemen did establish settlements in Newfoundland and similar stones with Runic writing have been found in Minnesota.

More importantly, stranger things have happened. In 1939, two fishermen pulled a small Bull Shark out of the Mississippi river near in Alton, Illinois, about 1,750 freshwater miles outside of its natural habitat.

If a shark can be thousands of miles away from where it's supposed to be, why not a Viking?

http://firefox.org/news/articles/1210/1/...Page1.html

So "Masonic Science" obviously does not want people to know that the Viking Norsemen established colonies in the United States of America. What an absolutely fascinating article Richard. Thanks for posting it at the HCF.

Do you think the Vikings were part of some "Aryan" colonies established by the Alderbarians across Planet Earth, to develop different cultures all over the world?

[Richard]

I don’t know if it’s they don’t want us to know. It could be just stubbornness on their part. Scientist, archeologist, and most people for that matter look for evidence to confirm what they already believe and they dismiss anything that doesn’t fit in with what they believe. They were taught that Columbus brought the first ships to America and so they dismiss anything that says otherwise.

Here’s another story I ran across.

Vikings in America...does our New World history begin with Columbus, or with ax-swinging sons of Odin?

A great swath of the country apparently favors the redbeards. Viking statues tower over the travel landscape -- from Deerfield, New Jersey, to Kingsburg, California, to Fort Ransom, North Dakota -- humbling our haughty bronze Columbus monuments. 
 
Aside from these, did our fair-haired forefathers leave clues to mark their passing? Some believe that a mysterious stone tower in Newport, RI, is the oldest building in America, built by the Vikings around AD 1050. Most academics think that it was built by a Colonial farmer, or by refugees of a Chinese treasure ship, but since no records exist, how do they know?

Perhaps the most intriguing debris left by Nordic litterbugs are runestones, mighty slabs of rock with cryptic marks carved into them. Alexandria, Minnesota, has the Kensington Runestone, and the story goes that it was found under the roots of an aspen tree by Olaf Ohman, an illiterate local farmer, in 1898. Real or Forgery?

Locals believe that the marks are a runic inscription describing a Viking expedition in 1362. The Smithsonian Institution was less enthusiastic about the runestone's authenticity, but they couldn't disprove it, either. And what about the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Indians that missionaries later reported, living in huts "in the Viking style"?
Alexandria's claim to be "Birthplace of America" rests on their runestone. Big Ole, a 28-ft. tall fiberglass Viking statue, lets visitors know that Alexandria takes the claim seriously, as does a 25-foot-tall replica runestone on Hwy 27, east of the the city. But the authentic item in the Kensington Runestone Museum is at the core of any Nordic parenting claims. "We know there're other runestones out there," says the lady at the museum. "But this is kind of the main runestone."
Glome, the Runestone 

One of those others is the Heavener Runestone, in Heavener, Oklahoma. The 12-foot high monolith stands outside, shielded in a big box. According to the folks inthe interpretive center, the enscription on it dates back to AD 600-900, and tells the story of "Glome" who used the rock to lay claim to this part of the Sooner State.

As in Alexandria, the folks here do not diss other runestones, knowing that Alexandria's rock is yet more evidence that Columbus was a Euro-come-lately. "They've got their runestone, we've got ours," the Heavener folks explain. "Ours is older."

Other, less-glamorous runestones are in nearby Poteau and Shawnee. The Vikings (or some local farmers) were busy boys.

Photos and story here.
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/set/OVERrune.html

[Octahedron]

Oklahoma ? Yesterday, I did read in a book of Charles Berlitz (Unexplained Mysteries) that Vikings likely visited Tennessee via the Mississippi delta according some paintings or sightings of North American Indians where pictures of a Viking ship and Vikings were made in.