Holand took the stone to Europe and, while
newspapers in Minnesota carried articles hotly debating its authenticity, the stone was quickly dismissed by Swedish linguists. For the next 40 years, Holand struggled to sway public and scholarly opinion about the Runestone, writing articles and several books. He achieved brief success in 1949, when the stone was put on display at the
Smithsonian Institution, and scholars such as
William Thalbitzer and S. N. Hagen published papers supporting its authenticity. At nearly the same time, Scandinavian linguists Sven Jansson,
Erik Moltke, Harry Andersen and K. M. Nielsen, along with a popular book by Erik Wahlgren, again questioned the Runestone's authenticity. Along with Wahlgren, historian
Theodore C. Blegen flatly asserted that Ohman had carved the artifact as a prank, possibly with help from others in the Kensington area. Further resolution seemed to come with the 1976 published transcript of an interview of Frank Walter Gran, conducted by Paul Carson, Jr. on August 13, 1967, that had been recorded on
audio tape. In it, Gran said that his father John confessed in 1927 that Ohman made the inscription. John Gran's story, however, was based on second-hand anecdotes that he had heard about Ohman, and, although it was presented as a
dying declaration, Gran lived for several more years, saying nothing more about the stone. The possibility that the Runestone was an authentic 14th-century artifact was raised again, in 1982, by
Robert Hall, an emeritus professor of the
Italian language and
Italian literature at
Cornell University, who published a book (and a follow-up in 1994) questioning the methods of its critics. Hall asserted that the odd
philological problems in the Runestone could be the result of normal
dialectal variances in
Old Swedish of the period. He contended that critics had not considered the physical evidence, which he found leaned heavily toward authenticity. Hall was not a runologist; his errors in reading the runes have been described by two runologists, and
R. I. Page. In
The Vikings and America (1986), Wahlgren again stated that the text bore linguistic abnormalities and spellings that he thought suggested that the Runestone was a forgery.
Lexical evidence One of the main linguistic arguments for the rejection of the text as genuine Old Swedish is the term () 'journey of discovery'. This
lexeme is unattested in either
Scandinavian,
Low Franconian or
Low German before the 16th century. Similar terms exist in modern Scandinavian (
Norwegian or , Swedish ). is a loan from Low German ,
Dutch , which is in turn from
High German , ultimately loan-translated from
French 'to discover' in the 16th century. The Norwegian historian
Gustav Storm often used the modern Norwegian lexeme in late 19th-century articles on Viking exploration, creating a plausible incentive for the manufacturer of the inscription to use this word.
Grammatical evidence Another characteristic pointed out by
skeptics is the text's lack of
cases.
Early Old Swedish (14th century) still retained the four cases of
Old Norse, but
Late Old Swedish (15th century) reduced its case structure to two cases, so that the absence of
inflection in a Swedish text of the 14th century would be an irregularity. Similarly, the inscription text does not use the
plural verb forms that were common in the 14th century and have only recently disappeared: for example, (plural forms in parentheses) (), (), (), (), () and (). Proponents of the stone's authenticity pointed to sporadic examples of these simpler forms in some 14th-century texts and to the great changes of the
morphological system of the Scandinavian languages that began during the latter part of that century.
Paleographic evidence The inscription contains
pentadic numerals. Such numerals are known in Scandinavia, but nearly always from relatively recent times, not from verified medieval runic monuments, on which numbers were usually spelled out as words. S. N. Hagen stated "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 [by the 14th century] ... I suggest that [a posited 14th century] 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". A possible origin for the irregular shape of the runes was discovered in 2004, in the 1883 notes of a then-16-year-old
journeyman tailor with an interest in folk music, Edward Larsson. Larsson's aunt had migrated with her husband and son from Sweden to
Crooked Lake, just outside Alexandria, Minnesota in 1870. 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 three are specially adapted to represent the letters å, ä, and ö of the modern Swedish alphabet. The runes in this second set correspond closely to the non-standard runes in the Kensington inscription. In 2020, Swedish archaeologist Mats G. Larsson discovered that Anna Ersson, cousin and childhood friend of Olof Öhman, lived in Kölsjön during 1878. Their relationship seems to have been close, as Öhman asked Ersson to marry him in 1879. More runic inscriptions were later discovered in the area around Kölsjön, and Larsson furthermore established that Öhman had relatives who owned land in Kölsjön, further increasing the proximity between Öhman and the runic inscriptions of 1870s Sweden. The abbreviation for
Ave Maria consists of the Latin letters
AVM. Wahlgren (1958) noted that the carver had incised a notch on the upper right-hand corner of the letter V. ==Purported historical context==