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tury blade depicted in contemporaneous Norwegian
paintings (Jay Rath, The M-Files: True Reports
of Minnesota's Unexplained Phenomena, WI:
Trails Books, 1998, pp. 92, 93). It was by no
means the only verifiable artifact of its kind
found in Minnesota, however.
Another example, though in broken condition,
was recovered three miles south of Erdahl,
by Julius Davidson, while pulling stumps on his
farm, less than 25 miles northwest of the Kensington
Rune Stone, which was found four years
later. “Beneath one of these stumps,” according
to his wife, Martha, “he found this heavy axe of
strange shape, the like of which he had never
seen before.” His find was sent to Stockholm,
Sweden’s Historical Museum, where Assistant
Curator, Bengt Thordeman, stated that the object
“is in type practically identical with the St.
Olaf axe (preserved at the Museum)
dated to 1468.”
A specimen closely resembling the
Erdahl find was recovered in 1933 by
farmer William H. Williams, while harvesting
corn eight miles south of
Mora, forty-seven miles north of Minneapolis.
Dr. O.B. Overn, President of
Concordia College and the School of
Mines at the University of Minnesota,
which acquired it, declared, “It is
wrought iron of a composition that
has not been used in axes during the
last two centuries.”
A halberd—a long-handled axe
with a spike on top—was discovered in
1915 by E.O. Estenson, who told how
he “saw the handle of the axe stick
out about two feet above the grassy
surface of the bank” on the Dakota
side of the Red River. Estenson
brought it to Charles E. Brown, at the State
Historical Society of Wisconsin (Madison). “It
looks to me like an ancient Norse weapon,” the
renowned archaeologist stated, then passed the
halberd on to Sigurd Grieg at Oslo’s University
Museum, who declared, “Without doubt …
from the period around 1500.” Also, on the
Minnesota side of the same Red Lake River, Ole
Jevning was boring holes for fence posts in June
1871 on the bank of a former channel, when he
unearthed a layer of charcoal and ashes.
“When I got about two feet down,” he said, “I
heard something scrape against the auger, and I
pulled it up, thinking I had struck a stone.” Instead,
it was a U-shaped piece of metal known
as a fire-steel, used for striking fires during the
fourteenth century.
According to historian Eivind Engelstad at
Oslo’s University Museum, “The [Red Lake
River] fire-steel … is of exactly the same type as
the fire-steels which have been found in Norwegian
graves from the Viking Age in great numbers.”
Another medieval fire-steel later appeared
at Cormorant Lake, 75 miles south of the Red
Lake River find.
Just 15 miles due north from Norway Lake
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more confirmation of its lost rune stone was
plowed up just west of Brooten in 1943 by Andrew
Stene. From a previously unfarmed area of
his field emerged a 20-inch-long, badly damaged
sword with a zigzag pattern on its grip.
Twelve years later, Stene’s son, Robert, gave it
(minus any details of its discovery) to Professor
David J. Mack, chair of the Department of
Metallurgical Engineering at the University of
Wisconsin. “This structure consists of a high
carbon, wrought-iron sword,” he concluded, “a
most unusual material, which has not been
made, to my knowledge, since the introduction
of crucible steel, two hundred years ago. This is
a material which was used extensively by medieval
armorers.”
The Brooten Sword closely resembles its
counterpart unearthed 120 miles to the north-
Viking Sword Museum’s namesake at Ulen, Minnesota
closely resembles another weapon found 120 miles away
west, in Clay County, but just 25 miles from
Comorant Lake’s medieval fire-steel. Three
miles west of the small town of Ulen, the plow
of Hans O. Hansen brought up a similar edged
weapon during spring 1911. Professor Holand—
of Kensington Rune Stone fame—secured notarized
statements from Hanson and his neighbors
concerning the sword’s discovery. “These affidavits
brought out the fact,” Holand affirmed,
“that none of them had ever seen the sword before,
nor had any knowledge how it had come
there… The bronze handle, including the crossbar
which serves as hilt, is 6.5 inches long, and
has spiral ornamentation … It has a long,
shallow, central groove near the point, and two,
nearly parallel grooves near the hilt. The quillions
[cross-bar] are straight with rounded ends.
The surface of the grip is corrugated and in imitation
of eagle feathers… On one side [of the
cross-bar] appears a cuirass [an armored breastplate],
behind which can be seen two battleaxes
and a dagger in crossed formation. On the
other side is the bearded head of a man surrounded
by a helmet” (Westward from Vinland,
NY: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1940).
Rath admits that the Ulen Sword “does
vaguely resemble those created in a Romanesque
style and carried by U.S. Army personnel
in the early nineteenth century. Upon examination,
however, the Smithsonian Institution [J.E.
Graf, Associate Director, 4 March 1939] stated
that the sword was unfamiliar to them. French
or English trappers in settlement times would
have carried rapiers, not Roman-style swords.”
While the anonymous writer for Wikipedia asserts,
without proof, that the artifact “is almost
certainly a nineteenth century French military
sword,” Holand points out how virtually identical
examples of the Ulen Sword were portrayed
in the Historia de gentibus seup septemtrionalibus,
by Archbishop Olaus Magnus, in 1555
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulen_sword).
“The sarcophagus in the Uppsala Cathedral
shows an identical specimen,” Holand continues.
“The carved doors of the
[early thirteenth Century] Hyllestad
Church in Norway show four
swords like the sword from Ulen.
“Originally, the blade must have
been about two feet or more in
length, which was the usual length
of swords of the Middle Ages. But
when it was found, it was only
about sixteen inches long.” He speculated
that its tip had been deliberately
broken off by a local Plains Indian,
who transformed it into a
hunting knife. “The concave marks
from the round head of the supposed
tomahawk are still visible for
a distance of about 1.5 inches on
the remaining stub of the blade, and
this has been flattened and widened
by the impact of the blows” (Westward
from Vinland, NY: Duell, Sloan
& Pearce, 1940).
Although the “Viking Sword Museum,”
open since 2007, is dedicated to Hans Hansen’s
find, the object darkly sealed inside its marred,
clear-plastic display case is just a replica. Two
years later, after he passed away at ninety-eight
years of age, the original went to his greatgrandson,
Scott Hilde, who brings it out of
hiding only once each year, at Ulen’s mid-
August “Turkey Barbecue Day,” like some religious
icon made public during its annual festival.
The proliferation of verifiably medieval Scandinavian
artifacts throughout Minnesota—more
than in any other state—indicates Norse settlement
of some size across the “Land of 10,000
Lakes.” The common twelfth to fourteenth century
provenance of these objects likewise coincides
with pandemics then ravaging Northern
Europe, where Norwegian and Swedish monarchs
dispatched far-flung expeditions in search
of fresh territories, places of refuge from the disease-plagued
Old World. As such, they came to
North America’s Upper Midwest in search of
sanctuary, the same impetus that still inspires
millions of immigrants to our continent from
around the world.
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