Stone Called Proof Vikings Visited Oklahoma -- But Others Say Runes Date From Period Long After Columbus Landed

HEAVENER, Okla. - Gloria Farley first saw the 12-foot-high Savanna sandstone with strange etchings 64 years ago when a childhood playmate's father took them on an expedition to nearby Poteau Mountain.

She wasn't sure what the inscription said then, and there remains considerable debate about its meaning now. But Farley, 75, says she is certain of one thing: The huge rock known as the Heavener Runestone is proof that Europeans - specifically, Vikings - visited America long before Christopher Columbus was ever thought of.

"They (some archaeologists) think I'm a little housewife who don't know nothing," she said. "I'm self-educated, but I've been at it 44 years - 44 years of blood, sweat, tears and money.

`I BELIEVE IT IS PROOF'

"I believe it is proof of the presence of Old World people in this area centuries before Columbus."

Public interest in the unusual artifact, called a runestone because its message is etched in Scandinavia's ancient runic alphabet, has slowly been building since October 1970 when it was incorporated into a state park. But local officials say attention has increased recently as the 500th anniversary of Columbus' 1492 voyage to the New World approaches.

According to state officials, nearly 80,000 people visited the park last year, most descending a spectacular, winding path to the runestone, now housed in a small wooden building and displayed behind clear plastic.

And for Heavener - an eastern Oklahoma railroad town of 2,800, nestled amid the mountains just north of the Ouachita National Forest - the runestone has emerged as an important hook to lure new tourists to an area some believe is just waiting to explode with visitors because of its scenic beauty.

"There's a tremendous number of people coming down here to look at that runestone," said Homer C. Reese, manager of the Heavener Chamber of Commerce.

Not everyone is impressed, however. Many scholars contend that the Heavener Runestone is not nearly as old as Farley and some epigraphists believe.

They suggest that it is more likely that the runestone - traced by local oral histories to about 1830, when it was found by Choctaw Indians - was the work of German military officers of Scandinavian descent who visited Fort Smith, Ark., in the early 1800s.

OTHER THEORIES

Others theorize that it may be the handiwork of 19th-century European visitors to western Arkansas, where Queen Wilhelmina of Holland built a lodge that remains an important tourist destination in the Ouachita National Forest.

"My conviction is, after having seen it, it definitely is a modern artifact," said Birgitta Wallace, a Canadian Park Service archaeologist who researched and wrote about the U.S. runestones on a grant from the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh.

"The type of runes were not the type of runes the Vikings used. . . . It's quite a bit more recent. It's a mixture of two alphabets."

According to the pre-Columbian theories, Vikings cruised up the Mississippi River, veered onto the Arkansas River and may have spent a winter or two near the Poteau River or Morris Creek in eastern Oklahoma.

For years, those who believe that Vikings were responsible for the Heavener inscription and other smaller runestones collected in the area were guided by the work of Alf Monge, a Norwegian-born former U.S. Army cryptographer.

He argued that the letters actually represented numbers, derived from two alphabets, and that the inscription reflected a date, Nov. 11, 1012.

More recently, a Houston-based epigraphist, Richard Nielsen, visited the site, studied ancient Scandinavian manuscripts, compared the messages and concluded the Heavener Runestone was a boundary marker or a land claim.

In an article published five years ago by the Epigraphic Society, Nielsen translated the message as "glome dal" or "valley owned by glome."

The translation is similar to Wallace's. Although she doubts that it was a boundary marker or a land claim, she does believe it reflects the name of a Scandinavian visitor to the area.

She said she deciphered the message as saying "gnomedal" - the "g" representing a first initial, and "nomedal" a Norwegian surname.

Wallace's research was completed in the late 1960s, but Nielsen said his more recent analysis found that the message was not a mixture of the two runic alphabets. Instead, he said, it was consistent with the old runic alphabet that ceased to be used about the year 800. As a result, he said, he believes the Heavener Runestone was probably etched between the years 650 and 750 - but certainly no later than 800.

Don G. Wyckoff, director of the Oklahoma Archaeological Survey at the University of Oklahoma, said he remains "open-minded" to any new evidence supporting the theory that Vikings visited the state hundreds of years before Columbus.

But he said state archaeologists, who have excavated 4,000 sites within about 70 miles of the Heavener Runestone, unearthed no evidence of anyone other than indigenous peoples in the area.

"I just can't believe somebody would come in from that country and not leave some major impact on the native culture," he said.

Farley, however, points out that she has recorded 17 other ancient, transcribable scripts on stones from Vermont to California, mostly in Oklahoma and California.

"This is evidence of Old World people being here," she said.

EX-STATE ARCHAEOLOGIST

Wyckoff, who served as the state archaeologist from 1969 to 1981, also said "those interested in promoting" the runestone prevented archaeologists from undertaking the best possible analysis of the site by making casts of the inscription.

The latex molds, he said, effectively cleaned out the natural vegetative growth and the metal fragments that might help provide a clearer understanding of the time frame in which it was etched.

Norman Totten, president of the Epigraphic Society and a professor of history at Bentley College in Waldham, Mass., said no one can be certain whether the Heavener Runestone is pre- or post-Columbian.

But he said Wyckoff's contention that early European visitors would have left a greater impact on the indigenous peoples is not necessarily true.

He said the Vikings, for example, may have been forced to use indigenous tools, weapons and equipment because they had been gone from the home for so long.

For Farley, the runestone has in effect become the focus of her life's work. Even while she raised two sons, cared for an ailing husband who has since died, and spent 17 years as state welfare caseworker, much of her spare time was devoted to the sandstone with the mysterious inscription.

Now, although she has recently had health problems, Farley said, she still spends "all day, every day" searching for more pieces that would validate her contentions about the Heavener Runestone.