In Heavener Runestone Park, in Le Flore County in eastern Oklahoma, stands a large sandstone slab with eight characters carved into its face. They are runes — the alphabet of the Vikings. If they were carved when runes were in use, the stone would be evidence that Norse travellers reached Oklahoma centuries before Columbus, a thousand miles from the nearest proven Viking settlement. That is the claim the stone has carried for a century. The runes themselves, read carefully, tell a different story.
Eight Characters
The inscription is short: eight characters, read as ᚷᛆᛟᛗᛖᛞᚨᛐ. Most of them belong to the Elder Futhark, the oldest runic alphabet, used roughly from the second to the eighth centuries. But the carving is inconsistent. The second character is a short-twig “A” from the Younger Futhark, a later alphabet. The final character is reversed compared with the last “A”. Read literally, the transcription is “gaomedal”. Most scholars who have examined the stone think the second character was meant to be an Elder Futhark “N”, also reversed, which would make the reading “gnomedal” — either “gnome valley” or a personal name, “G. Nomedal”.
The visitor centre at the park offers a different reading again. Its displays translate the disputed character as an “L” and state that the inscription was probably a claim marker meaning “valley belonging to Glome”, or “Glome’s Valley”. Three readings, one stone, none of them certain — and the inconsistency of the alphabets is itself the most informative thing about the carving. A genuine Viking-age inscription would use one alphabet consistently. This one mixes two.
The Stone’s History
The Heavener Runestone was first documented in 1923. It is the oldest of a number of runestones found in Oklahoma, and the verdict on all of them is the same: they are of modern origin, dating to the nineteenth-century “Viking revival” or produced by nineteenth-century Scandinavian settlers. The Heavener stone is most likely a nineteenth-century artifact made by a Scandinavian immigrant — one suggestion is a Swede working at the local train depot.
The context supports that verdict. Two other stones found near Heavener, sometimes called the second and third Heavener runestones, are most likely not runic at all; their incisions appear to be of Native American origin. Three further runestones, found at Poteau, Shawnee and Pawnee, are also of modern date. Oklahoma has no shortage of carved stones. What it has no evidence of is a Viking presence.
The archaeologist Ken Feder has made the comparison that matters. In eastern Canada, genuine Norse evidence has been found — the settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, excavated in the 1960s, proved that Vikings reached North America around the year 1000. In Oklahoma, there is no settlement, no grave, no artefact of Norse origin beyond the stones themselves. A single carved slab, in the wrong alphabet, in the wrong century, is not a settlement.
Why the Stone Endures
The Heavener Runestone endures because it is a good story, and because it is a real object that visitors can stand in front of. The park that houses it presents the stone with pride, and visitors still arrive hoping for Vikings. The “Glome’s Valley” reading, offered at the visitor centre, gives the stone a human story: a settler, a claim, a valley named after a man. It is a better story than the scholarly verdict, which is that a nineteenth-century immigrant, caught up in the Viking revival of his time, carved some runes into a rock.
Both stories may be true at once, in a sense. The stone is a genuine artefact of the nineteenth century, and it says something real about the people who made it: about immigration, about the romance of the Viking age in nineteenth-century America, and about the desire to belong to a landscape by writing a name on it. It does not say that Vikings reached Oklahoma. It says that a Swede, or someone like him, wanted them to have.
The Heavener stone has a famous cousin. The Kensington Runestone, found in Minnesota in 1898, bears a long runic inscription claiming a Norse expedition in 1362 — and it too is regarded by most scholars as a nineteenth-century creation, carved by a Swedish immigrant. The pattern is the same in both cases: a stone, a story, and a longing for a Viking past that the archaeology does not support. Oklahoma’s runestones belong to the history of immigration, not to the history of exploration.
What Is Documented, and What Is Not
Documented: The Heavener Runestone stands in Heavener Runestone Park, Le Flore County, Oklahoma, and was first documented in 1923. Its eight characters mix Elder Futhark and Younger Futhark forms; the usual scholarly reading is “gnomedal” (“gnome valley” or the personal name “G. Nomedal”). The stone is assessed as a nineteenth-century artifact, most likely made by a Scandinavian immigrant. Other Oklahoma runestones, at Poteau, Shawnee and Pawnee, are also of modern date. Genuine Norse settlement in North America is proven at L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, around the year 1000.
Unverified or disputed: That the inscription reads “Glome’s Valley” (the visitor centre’s interpretation); that the stone was carved by Vikings or by any pre-Columbian traveller; that the second and third Heavener stones are runic at all (their incisions appear to be of Native American origin).