396 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1953 



in Sweden right up to the nineteenth century. In that period the 

 literature of course makes mention of the discovery of new land, but 

 the concept is covered by other words: wpptdcha (or uppflnna) with 

 the substantives wpytdcht^ ufptdchning^ upptdcJcelse (the subs. 

 opdagelse is Danish, not Swedish). Uppdaga {-as) is also employed 

 in the same period, but with other meanings: dawn, become light, 

 come in sight. The position is the same in Denmark, except that the 

 present meaning occurs somewhat earlier, in the eighteenth century. 

 Seeing that the word is unknown in the Middle Ages in both Scandi- 

 navian and Germanic, and that it has other meanings in Early Modern 

 Swedish and Early Modern Danish, whereas the concept of "discover" 

 has other words, it is quite improbable that the Danish word opdagelse 

 should appear in a medieval Swedish inscription. 



Another deviation from Old Swedish is pags rise (Old Swedish 

 dagsledh or dagsfosrdh) and of in of west^ which must be assumed 

 to be the English preposition. 



Linguistically, then, the inscription reveals a number of uncon- 

 formities with Old Swedish and they cannot be explained, as Holand 

 avers, as a contrast between the inscription's character of the spoken 

 language and the written language of the documents. Moreover, it 

 includes words and forms which seemingly are due to English influ- 

 ence: of west, pep, from, mans. Of old fonns there are but few: 

 ceptir, pagh, peno, ok (and perhaps illu, unless this is a Swedish 

 dialectal form or should be read illy) . 



Rwne forms. — The following are normal: l, p, e, /, A, i, I, m, n, 

 0, p, r, s t; while the following are unusual : a, g, j, k, w, y, or, ^. 

 Some of the latter forms are explained by Holand as being due to 

 influence from, or borrowed from, book minuscules — an influence that 

 was more likely to be from majuscules than minuscules. The deciding 

 point in the rune forms is the /^-rune with two dots as there is no 

 precondition for such a form in medieval book writing ; the Swedish 

 p does not come into use until after 1500. 



As regards both linguistic and runic forms the inscription on the 

 Kensington stone is thus a direct contradiction to a dating to the 

 year 1362; and, besides the debatable points, there are three which 

 must be taken as decisive : the use of a special ;'-rune, the ^-rune with 

 two dots, and the word oppagelsefarp. 



The correctness of this conclusion now seems to be confirmed by a 

 drawing of the inscription v/hich Professor Holvik has recently 

 brought to light and which he considers is a draft, not a transcript. 

 [K. M. N.] 



To my inquiry as to whether the Kensington inscription might not 

 just as well be Old Norwegian as Old Swedish, Mr. Nielsen replied 

 (letter of January 8, 1950) that although one or two phenomena in 



