Kingittorsuaq Runestone

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kingittorsuaq Runestone was found in 1824 by someone who climbed to the summit of a mountain on Kingittorsuaq Island, in northwestern Greenland. Three stone cairns stood there in a formation that could not have been accidental. They formed a perfect equilateral triangle. The runestone was inside one of them. On the stone, three hunters had carved their names and a short record of their time in this remote place. After the names, however, the inscription closes with six runes that no scholar has ever fully deciphered. Debate over those final characters has continued ever since. The arguments span questions of magic, coded ciphers, and the outer limits of runological knowledge. The stone, now held at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, is catalogued as GR 1 in the Rundata record of Scandinavian runic inscriptions.

• 2. The Date on the Stone

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  The readable portion of the Kingittorsuaq inscription identifies the hunters, but determining exactly when they made their journey north has proven surprisingly difficult. The Catholic Encyclopedia assigns a very specific date: the 25th of April, 1135. Other scholars have placed the stone's composition anywhere between 1250 and 1333. The historian Finn Gad has argued that the date carved into the stone is genuinely ambiguous. Its characters can legitimately be read in more than one way. This matters considerably. For a long time, researchers used the stone's supposed date as evidence that the hunters had over-wintered in this remote region. Without a firm date, that claim loses its footing. Rasmus Rask examined those final symbols in the same year the stone was found, and he was only the first of many to try.

• 3. The Undeciphered Ending

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  Rask believed the closing characters encoded a year. The philologist Finnur Jónsson, working in 1914, dismissed that possibility entirely. He declared the symbols to be ornamental or mystical marks, beyond any interpretation. That verdict did not hold.

  Runologist Magnus Olsen in 1932 argued that the last fully deciphered word on the stone had been written in haste. The word 'ok rydu' was, he believed, missing its punctuation. Properly read, Olsen said, it should be 'ok rýndu,' meaning 'and wrote runes.' He then proposed that the remaining characters translated to either 'vel,' meaning 'well,' or 'vit,' meaning 'widely.'

  An unnamed linguist writing in 1906 had approached the problem differently. He looked for bind runes, a form in which multiple letters are merged into a single carved glyph. He identified similarities between the stone's final characters and bind runes on the Norum font. He read the last deciphered word as 'ruddu' and interpreted the closing symbol as 'ís,' Old Norse for ice. His conclusion was that the inscription ended with the phrase 'they cleared away the ice.'

  William Thalbitzer, a philologist, built on this reading in 1951. He proposed the ending should be read as 'ok rýndu ís,' meaning the inscription described an act of ice magic. He further argued that writing 'ís' in standard runes would have been taboo. The goal, in his view, was to magic the ice away, and naming it openly in conventional script might have undermined the spell.

  In 2002, Mindy MacLeod reviewed the evidence for bind runes as tools of runic numerology. She found little to no support for that use. Her findings raised serious questions about readings that depend on specialized combinations of rune characters. In 1967, the cryptographer Alf Mongé had proposed a more systematic solution: two separate cipher systems operate within the symbols. He argued they encode both a specific date and the name of whoever carved the stone.

  The six characters are not meaningless marks. Each has a very close single-character match within the known runic alphabet, which means the problem is not one of recognition but of reading. The question of whether the stone encodes its maker's identity within those final symbols has never been resolved.