Kensington Runestone - Debate - Edward Larsson's Notes - The Stone and The Larsson Runes

The Stone and The Larsson Runes

Before Edward Larsson's sheet of runic alphabets surfaced in Sweden in 2004, when the stone was exhibited there, it seemed as if the Kensington runes were gathered from many different futharks, or in a few cases invented by the carver. Larsson's sheet lists two different Futharks. The first Futhark consists of 22 runes, the last two of which are bind-runes, representing the letter-combinations EL and MW. His second Futhark consists of 27 runes, where the last 3 are specially adapted to represent the letters å, ä, and ö of the modern Swedish alphabet.

Comparing the Kensington Futhark with Larsson's two it appears to some that the Kensington runes can be interpreted as a selective combination of Larsson's two Futharks, with some very minor variations such as mirror-imaging. On the stone the runes representing e, g, n, and i can be argued to have been taken from Larsson's first Futhark, and likewise the runes representing the letters a, b, k, u, v, ä, and ö from Larsson's second Futhark.

However, the use of runes in the medieval period is far from systematic or coherent: in defence of the possibility of the genuineness of the stone, S.N.Hagen wrote: "The Kensington alphabet is a synthesis of older unsimplified runes, later dotted runes, and a number of Latin letters ... The runes for a, n, s and t are the old Danish unsimplified forms which should have been out of use for a long time ...I suggest that creator must at some time or other in his life have been familiar with an inscription (or inscriptions) composed at a time when these unsimplified forms were still in use" and that he "was not a professional runic scribe before he left his homeland".