Interview with Kensington Runestone Researcher Michael Zalar
Gonzo Science: So, how did you get involved in the Kensington Runestone controversy?
Michael Zalar: Well, I picked up a book at a rummage sale. It was Hall’s
Gonzo Science: Where did you dig around?
Michael Zalar: The Minnesota Historical Society was the main point; it took me many months going through their stuff. There was the Runestone Museum up in Alexandria, MN. I’ve been down to the Vesterhigh Museum down in Decorah, Iowa. There’s a Scandinavian Heritage Center down in Northfield at one of the Universities down there, so I poked around there. I’ve also been to a couple other historical societies; I found some records up in Fergus Falls and got some information there, and Elbow Lake. So I’ve done quite a bit of poking around.
Gonzo Science: What do you do, what’s your career, what are your credentials?
Michael Zalar: I don’t have any particular credentials; I was a history major in college but I did not complete a degree there. What I do is I work for AAA; I’m a caller receiver, I work nights. And working nights, especially in the off season, you don’t get a lot of calls at night, so you’ve got plenty of free time to bring books in, read through them, and go through them that way.
Gonzo Science: So we could call you an “independent researcher”.
Michael Zalar: “Independent researcher” works. I will give myself the title of historian, seeing as how I’ve had a couple pieces published. I have had peer-reviewed articles in the NEARA journal [New England Antiquities Research Association] and the
Gonzo Science: The NEARA journal was where you published an article that detailed 40 errors about the Kensington Runestone in a book by the Smithsonian Institution?
Michael Zalar: 37 errors. I went for factual errors, not matters of interpretation. Things where the information that I had just conflicted with what they were trying to say, with what they were saying in the book. And when you stop and think that these 37 errors occurred over about three pages of text, that’s quite a bit of misinformation that was being put out.
Gonzo Science: She seems to be a lightning rod for this kind of charge. Her sloppy scholarship is kind of renowned, from what we can tell.
Michael Zalar: As far as the Kensington Runestone goes, yeah. I’ve seen other articles by her, and again, it’s amazing what she tries to get away with. I think she’s one that’s tried to say, for instance, that the Kensington Runestone was written in the dialect of the people living in the area. And she makes this assertion; she doesn’t give any evidence for it. As far as I can tell, there have been no dialectic studies of what was spoken in the late 19th century in Minnesota; there’s no means of comparison. She just makes statements like this without any kind of backup for it, without any kind of citation for it.
Gonzo Science: So it’s unreferencable, and unreferenced.
Michael Zalar: Yeah. And then other places she just makes complete errors in what has been published. There are a lot of scholars out there who have reason to doubt the Runestone on solid information, but she’s not one of them. It’s like she’s got something against the Runestone; she’ll do anything she can to make sure it’s thought of as a fake.
Gonzo Science: Have you had any correspondence or dealings with any of the other Runestone skeptics, like Knirk or Michlovic?
Michael Zalar: Yeah, I’ve with exchanged e-mails with Dr. Knirk, who was very cordial. His assumption is that, based on the runes and the linguistics, the Kensington Runestone is false. I put forward other arguments – the history; the geochemical analysis that has been going on – and he did say that the geochemical analysis by American Petrographics and the University of Minnesota was some pretty solid science.
Gonzo Science: Do you think he was surprised that it existed at all?
Michael Zalar: It’s hard to say, from e-mails, whether there was much surprise. I think that maybe it was something he had not recognized, that there was double-dotting occurring in manuscript forms. But again, he seemed perfectly willing to accept that evidence, so …
Gonzo Science: So he’s a good scientist.
Michael Zalar: Yeah, he’s one of the guys that I think you can say has some reason to disbelieve in the Kensington Runestone, and, you know, I don’t think he’s going to change his mind unless some very, very dramatic evidence comes forward. He’s always going to challenge Dr. Nielsen, and so on, but if that evidence comes forward - like if there is evidence that this could not have taken place any later than the year 1800, I’m sure he would accept that, and realize that, yeah, there’s a problem there. You can’t dismiss it quite so easily. That’s what I’ve been putting forward to Dr. Knirk, is regarding that kind of evidence, which is out there. Maybe it’s had some influence on him.
Gonzo Science: What is the technical definition of a patina?
Michael Zalar: I don’t know if I have a technical definition, but it’s basically a discoloration of the stone due to weathering factors. A patina on copper is very easy to see. The patina is the green coloration. If you leave a piece of copper laying exposed on a roof, it will turn green. It’s a very pleasant-looking patina. That’s a patina, essentially some form of discoloration.
Gonzo Science: Have you ever dealt with [Runestone skeptic Kirsten] Seaver?
Michael Zalar: I wrote a letter to the editor of [the journal]
Gonzo Science: It seems like there’s a mental block in some of the skeptics’ minds that anyone could have gotten that far that early. The very notion of Scandinavians exploring Minnesota in 1360 seems absolutely ludicrous to them.
Michael Zalar: Yeah, you go back to the very first scholar that examined the stone – Breda, back in 1899 – and he puts down as one of the reasons that he just does not believe that the stone is real is the “utter absurdity of the story”, something along those lines. And yeah, there is that block, even with myself. I hear about this and I go, I wonder what the reasons are for thinking it could actually be authentic.
Gonzo Science: Kind of a blind spot. It might take more of a generalist to put all the pieces together.
Michael Zalar: That’s one thing I’ve been trying to do in my discussions with Knirk or Fitzhugh, is to show them that there are a lot more pieces than what they’ve been looking at. Okay, maybe the pieces of the puzzle up in this area don’t seem to go together, but all around that area, they do seem to go together. You have to explain these other pieces. You have to explain how someone could have gone into the area prior to the settlement of the region, because that’s what the science is saying – physically, the stone had to be in the ground for 50 years in order for the kind of weathering that has occurred on it to have occurred. And you know, they say, “Well, that doesn’t matter, we can ignore it because we’ve got this knowledge here that says it’s impossible.”
Gonzo Science: They’re saying linguistics trumps geochemistry.
Michael Zalar: What I keep pointing out is, even if they’re right, and this is impossible or seemingly impossible, you’ve got another set of evidence over here that says it’s seemingly impossible for it to have been forged. And what we have are these two masses of evidence, and what I would really like to see would be for people to come together under the Minnesota Historical Society or the Smithsonian, some agency to try to get a number of objective people to sit and simply review the evidence, and to hear the pros and the cons as put forth by the experts, and to make judgments regarding the evidence, the legitimacy of the evidence, and possibly come to some conclusion.
Gonzo Science: What’s your take on this recent “AVM stone” hoax admission?
Michael Zalar: My opinion on the AVM stone has been, get it into the lab and see what’s there. The only thing that I had seen interesting in the AVM stone was the three runes under the AVM, which were not the same as the runes on the Kensington stone. They were cut differently, the letters were different, one of the letters was not even used in the Kensington stone at all, another one’s backwards, another one has got a shorter staff and was kind of different. All I knew about it was that whoever cut this AVM stone was not the same person that cut the Kensington Runestone. That’s all I could say going in.
Gonzo Science: Yeah, but then to attach the hoax idea to it again…
Michael Zalar: And there was another hoax done, back in the 40’s I think. Someone else carved a runestone and buried it in his field, and dug it up again a little bit later. And again, people went, “Oh this is interesting, it looks like it might be proof of the Kensington Runestone,” but after a while, people started going, “Well, it really doesn’t look much like anything,” and he finally admitted that he had done it as a hoax, as a means of trying to disprove the Kensington Runestone. As if doing this really proves anything.
Gonzo Science: Wow, you’re right - that could have been really bad.
Michael Zalar: Yeah, it could have been really, really, really weird.
Gonzo Science: It seems likely that the AVM stone hoax will be forgotten eventually. The Kensington stone seems to have survived this previous hoaxing attempt. It seems a little childish. Like they’re so sure that the Kensington stone is a hoax, that they somehow wanted to provide another hoax to show how easily it could have been done.
Michael Zalar: You have to have absolutely no respect, and anyone who’s done any work on the Kensington Runestone can at least show reasons why people think that it’s real, even if they disagree with it. Anyone that’s seen the 1910 report, with Winchell and two other geologists pointing out that it must be fifty years old, have got to either be ignoring this, putting up a mental block against it – that’s possible.
Gonzo Science: Or disparaging Winchell’s credibility.
Michael Zalar: You can’t disparage his credibility. The awards that he won, the fact that they’ve named a building down at the University after him – and not because he donated a lot of money. The geology building – the Winchell building – down at the University of Minnesota is there because Winchell is the greatest geologist that has ever come out of Minnesota. His work stands for itself.
He was the editor of a major scientific magazine, he was the state geologist, he won awards at international conferences, he was president I think at one international conference. You don’t get that by being someone stupid and prone to looking at pranks and thinking they’re real.
Gonzo Science: So they were saying, “50 years at the very, very least.”
Michael Zalar: At least. For Upham and other geologists, it’s in the books of famous Minnesotans. He was examining it at the same time as Winchell. They worked together on the 1910 report. He thought it was probably hundreds of years old from the weathering. Hotchkiss said it was hundreds of years old, at least fifty.
Gonzo Science: Maybe they mean all the linguistic experts? But then, that’s not even true.
Michael Zalar: The Smithsonian did do a slight change in the book after I presented my list of errors. They did a second printing, and there were a couple places where they did some – not in some of the major stuff; that would have required a whole rewrite I guess, and that wasn’t something that I guess they felt they needed to do – but it seems to me that – and I’m really not sure of this – but it seems to me that Wallace had had to back off of saying “all the linguistic experts” to something like “all the Scandinavian runologists” or something like that; having to box it down, because Thalbitzer was a trained linguist, and he thought the stone was real.
Gonzo Science: From a historical perspective, it’s really not that great of a leap. Here you have this tough, sailing culture, hard as nails, exploring all the time…
Michael Zalar: It’s coming out now that they were interacting a lot more with the natives; they were certainly going to the North American continent to cut wood, because they didn’t have any wood up in Greenland.
Gonzo Science: These are the folks from the 14th century western settlement of Greenland?
Michael Zalar: Yes, the Greenland colony; they were going out and doing that. Bits and pieces have been put together; they were up north of Baffin Island. So they were working this area - rather than being a bunch of Norse who were all stay-at-home, wouldn’t venture out from their colonies, or rarely went between colonies or anything like that -which is kind of how they’re looked at, I think.
Gonzo Science: Maybe you should write the first one.
Michael Zalar: It’s a time period where Sweden was large. Magnus was both king of Sweden and Norway, and had a lot of Finland, and they bought some territory on the Swedish peninsula from the Danes, where the Danes had used it. So he had a large chunk of territory. He was crusading against the Russians, maybe open to expand his influence there – so it’s certainly not impossible that if he was this expansionistic, that he would have looked to Greenland, especially as a - I mean somewhere up there, there’s Asia, Cathay – and Greenland may have been real close to it.
Gonzo Science: What do you make of this book,
Michael Zalar: It makes for an interesting possibility but I don’t think there’s a lot of fact that goes along with that. For instance he says that the plague wiped out these ten people. And the idea of them getting this far in, having carried the plague for two or three years before manifesting itself, and only manifesting itself in these people at this time, and all dying at once … that seems pretty shaky. He thinks they came in by Lake Superior then a number of backwater routes – you know, you can’t get up the St. Louis; around Jay Cook Park there are massive falls and stuff like that.
I got into discussions on the internet which got me to researching down at the [Minnesota] Historical Society, and looking through all their stuff and building up my files, and I kind of got hit by a research bug. I love digging into stuff and finding things out, and there’s plenty of stuff there.
Now, I have heard back. Brigitta Wallace, who wrote that section for the Smithsonian, did write a counter-claim, but for the most part, she does not rebut my charges. She puts out extraneous information which does not deal with what I was talking about, the very specific things that I had said. There are a couple places where she adds some information, like personal letters from a relative in Scandinavia, which I don’t have access to, which do apparently counter my information - which does not mean that I was wrong; it merely means that she had another source for those.
And that’s fine, that’s legitimate. If she’s got a reputable source, than that’s fine. But when she misquotes published reports, changes the conclusions of a scientific inquiry 180 degrees from what was published - she said it was totally different – that’s just bad scholarship, that’s not something that should go in print.
I doubt that he’ll be changing his mind on this, but he is at least open, far more open to receive new information, it would appear to me. As a matter of fact, he’s been trying to say that there’s never been double-dotting over any of the runes, in manuscript form of the alphabet in Medieval Scandinavia. And I was able to point out on a website a private manuscript collection – the Schoyen Manuscripts – I was able to point out a very specific twelfth-century instance where there was double-dotting over some of the manuscript. And he has acknowledged that. I pointed that out to Dr. [Richard] Nielsen as well, and he said that the double-dotting was used for abbreviation. I pointed that out to Dr. Knirk and he admitted that it did exist, but he didn’t think it was for the purposes of abbreviation.
You also mentioned Michlovic, the archeologist from Moorehead State. I haven’t had a great deal of contact with him, but last year, I was up in Moorehead, and there was an open discussion of the Runestone. Nielsen presented some of his evidence and Barry Hanson presented some of his up there. There was a get-together afterwards, and Michlovic and I seemed to be debating each other towards a student who was there, who was going, “Oh, I don’t know which way to go in.” And Michlovic would say something; I’d say something else and refute that, and so on and so forth.
One point that seemed really curious to me is that Michlovic seemed to suggest that a patina could only form on stone if it was left exposed to wind and rain. And geologically, that’s not correct. I’ve talked to Barry about that. Very early on in the investigation, I wrote to the state geologist of North Dakota and some geologist at the University of Minnesota, asking how long it would take for the stone to get a patina, because that was certainly very relevant. And the geologist from North Dakota, I’m afraid I forget his name, said that he wasn’t an expert in that, but that it could take as little as a couple of decades.
So we are looking at an extended period of time there. And he referred me to the University of Minnesota, and they essentially confirmed that – said things like, “You have to know the soil itself and the stone itself,” so it would be difficult to get any kind of real dating based on that. But again, this was specifically a reaction to the patina being formed by the stone being in the soil, not, as Michlovic seemed to indicate, subject to rain and wind. So unless he had some other idea of what a patina was, in regards to geology, I find that very difficult. It does bring into question whether or not he understands at least what we’re trying to talk about.
It was about a trip that was undertaken by this anonymous monk/scholar, apparently out in the areas around Greenland. And unfortunately, the book is lost, so we can’t refer to the
Now, she mentions that she found some archeological evidence on Baffin island which seems to agree with something of the bits and pieces that have come down to us of the
Some of the cartographers that I was talking about have drawn Hudson Bay in their maps – in 16th century maps – and it would appear to be Hudson Bay. And a couple of cartographers refer to the
The story seems absurd, to think anyone could have actually got here at that time – until you start doing the research. And I think a number of these skeptics are specialists in a particular area, so they have a limited field of vision. Most of them are linguists, and they don’t expand their investigation to include the historical aspects, or the geochemical aspects, or any of the other sciences.
But we need a standard set of: what do we know about the stone. Because people on the one side are putting forward all their evidence with whatever bias they have, and we have people on the other side putting forth their evidence with whatever bias they have, and you hear claims and counter-claims being put forth, and you need someone to sit down and adjudicate that. That was suggested as early as 1910 or 1911. The
That’s the first thing that pops into just about anyone’s mind. I think it’s possible to find unbiased people. I don’t know how you go about determining that, or how you could give anyone some sort of test to see if they’d be influenced one way or the other. At least I think you could get them to sit down, and examine the evidence, and put forth some cohesive report on the evidence. Whether their conclusions differ, that’s hard to say, but the evidence does need to be gone through carefully, which like I say, hasn’t been done. Hopefully someone will get around to doing it.
Now, it is disturbing that they did not come forward immediately after the announcement of the finding of the AVM stone. I think that was highly unprofessional, especially for someone who was a professor of Germanics, to allow this to go on for nearly three months after it was first reported found. And apparently she knew about it fairly quickly. It cost me time, and not so much money, but I am going to have to redo my book a little bit and put an insert into the books that I already have completed, discussing this. So from that standpoint, it’s quite aggravating.
As far as whether it has any great influence on the Kensington Runestone – I don’t see it. On the one hand it did bring the Kensington Runestone back to the public eye for a while, which I guess was a good thing.
It was the same thing with the AVM stone, except that it was a longer period of time before anyone found it, so it had been able to weather a bit more. It was actually discovered in I think 1995, by a group that was out there, looking for any additional evidence for the Kensington Runestone they could hopefully dig up. It was found, it was documented, it was passed of as a hoax at that time; apparently the intervening six years had weathered it a bit more, or lichens grown in areas they had not, and that looked like evidence that it was older. And who knows, if people had found it a hundred years from now, certainly it would have been heavily weathered at that point, and by then all the hoaxers would have been dead.
And I’ve heard that argued briefly in one of my internet discussions – “Oh, this Winchell must have been a flake that was doing that sort of thing for a living” - until I pointed out that, no, this is what was out there, it was confirmed at that time by the Wisconsin State Geologist, Hotchkiss. As a matter of fact, it was his limit of 50 years is what I’m using. Winchell thought it was likely to be 500 years old, from his understanding, and his examination.
So when I say fifty years old, I’m using the absolute minimum that any of the geologists have come up with. One thing that bothers me along those lines is when someone says, “All the experts agree that the stone a hoax”. I’m going, “Well, all the experts agree that the stone must have lain in the ground for at least fifty years.” That’s the only place where we find the experts agreeing.
We find people like William Thalbitzer, S.N. Hagen, to a certain extent Holand, Dr. Nielsen, Dr, Hall, all saying that, “Look, this stuff could well be from the 14th century.” So there is no “all the experts agreeing” on that point. And these are the people that have written papers, so we know they’ve at least examined it, not just read someone’s article that quoted someone else who’d examined part of what someone was talking about and came up with this opinion and have that reflected up – that’s not an expert opinion.
You can’t give an expert opinion until you’ve done the research. And if your “expert opinion” is that all the experts are agreed that it’s a hoax, then you haven’t done your research, and so I guess you can’t be considered an expert. That’s one of the little bees in my bonnet - when I hear that come out.
So you’ve got to eliminate “Scandinavian linguists” from that group; you have to box it down to “Scandinavian runologists”. So okay, all the Scandinavian runologists who’ve written on the Runestone think it’s false – not all the linguists mind you, and not all the Scandinavian linguists – just this little box that kind of sounds good, but really doesn’t mean all that much.
It was a runologist that was reviewing Nielsen’s paper – maybe he wasn’t Scandinavian – and I don’t know how to talk to him or correspond with him, so I don’t know what his take on all this is, whether Nielsen’s at least right in this little section, or whether he believes wholeheartedly in the Runestone, or he was just backing up to make sure things were done correctly on this paper. But, if this runologist now believes that the Kensington Runestone is real, or at least that the evidence does not prove it to be a hoax, that’s it still questionable – then there’s another chink off of that as well.
There was a letter written by a fellow – he wasn’t a linguist or anything like that, I think he was a historian – Frederick Brown, back in 1910, to a member of the Runestone Committee. And he pointed out that if there is any doubt whether or not it’s linguistically correct, then you’ve got to start going to the physical evidence and examining that. He said unless it’s decidedly clear that the language is impossible, then you start looking at other factors. And I think he said something to the effect that you’ve got to watch out because laws are not only validated by new findings, but new findings change the laws.
He didn’t give any opinion at any point one way or the other about whether the Runestone is real or a hoax. He just wrote this to someone who was examining the Runestone, the point being if there’s any question in the linguistics, you have to check the other factors. I think that there has been, with all the people, from Dr. Fossum back in 1911 who wrote a newspaper article going word for word through the Runestone, right up to this current debate in
There have always been people that are questioning whether the linguistics are wrong, and they have published papers on that, and they have said that the linguistics are reasonable for the 14th century for a party like this. The liguistics, and the runes, and so on. So you can’t trust that as the be-all, end-all. And when you look at the people that have come out against it, they are virtually all linguists. Ms. Seaver might be a historian that has come out against it, but I don’t know of many historians that have come out against it. I have known a few that have said I think the stone is real, or it seems reasonable: Thor Heyerdal, Farley Mowat, several others, those are the memorable names. And others have come out in support of the Runestone from their analysis of the information.
And now we do know that they were venturing forth, interacting with the native population in the area. I don’t know if there was a lot of trade going on, but there are indications of trade. They were going up and down the coast of Greenland, to many islands, and even over to North America. They were going to all these places, and that’s a bit more than we had thought before. Why couldn’t an expedition, especially if it was fitted out like King Magnus was saying: “Take the royal ship and the men that you think are best, even from my own bodyguard” – if it was this trip, it was a well-provisioned trip.
Now, we don’t have any further knowledge of that outside of these orders that Magnus gave, and Magnus was overthrown the next year, so we don’t even know if that trip started. Though there might have been some church involvement regarding that – there’s indications that Sweden was behind on her tithes to the Pope, and this may have been some way of getting the Pope off their backs, where you’re out making sure that there’s Christianity out here, and maybe trying to spread the word, or finding out whatever and sending that information back to the Pope. So it may have been that even if Magnus was deposed, it still would’ve had to have gone on. I don’t know the history of that period as in-depth as I would like to. There aren’t a lot of books out there about Sweden in the 1360’s.
Greenland had white falcons, and according to one report, the Mongol king, the Khan, had white falcons. Maybe Magnus heard this and kind of put two and two together, maybe he had descriptions of the Eskimos, which look like Asiatics. It might have been like, “We might be pretty close here. Let’s see if we can find Cathay, find China.” That’s my thought of why the expedition would have gone as far inland as they did, is that there were reasons at that time for someone in his position to think that he might be able to get into some very lucrative trade via Greenland.
Of course it’s hard to look into his mind. It could be like I said, “I want to preserve Christianity out there, and that’s it. If you can poke around a little bit more, or look for these lost colonists, or whatever, fine, go ahead – but don’t make too big a trip of it.” And they just took off on their own and went, “Hey, this is kind of neat – let’s see what’s around the next corner.”
People keep bringing up things like, “Why did they do this?” and I keep going, “That all depends” – it all depends on the leader of the expedition. What kind of bug does he have in him? No idea. Was he told to find Cathay or not to come back? Was he just a wanderer by nature? There are people that just want to do that; they want to set out and walk to wherever they can get to. And he just happened to be in a position of power with the ear of the king, and got the financing for this trip, and went as far as he could.
You can go up the Red River as far as Fergus Falls without any real difficulty, before you hit any kind of really major rapids or anything like that. And Fergus Falls is, what, 40 miles from Kensington, roughly? I got no problem with the idea that the massacre may have occurred there, at the “day’s travel”. Walking south along the tree line, out of sight from Indians at that point, because the tree line does go right – roughly –from the Fergus Falls area down to the Kensington area as far as I’ve been able to determine. So that’s a possibility; I don’t know.
I admit he did present a route where they might have been able to follow, if they had Indian guides to navigate them from here to here, to know where the portages were from there to there, and then go upriver here, and go off the river here. But it’s too complex. I’ve always gone for the simplest explanation. The simplest is coming in via the Red River; the Hudson Bay to the Red River, that’s pretty direct. The conclusions of Reiersgord’s book are not that wild, but they’re just a little bit too far for me to really accept, unless there’s more tangible proof. Like the Indians wrapping the stone in cloth of some sort and carrying it around, and only showing it on special occasions, like it was some religious icon of the orthodox faith or something like that. You know, if there was evidence out there that they did this a lot with religious artifacts, that they’d cover them and carry them around – but as far as I can tell, there’s just no evidence that supports the idea