Vikings! In Oklahoma?

By Tracy Morris
Published 02/18/2008

Heavener Runestone proof of a directionally challenged Norsemen?

These days you could say that Heavener Oklahoma is off the beaten path. The town, which sits nestled under the Poteau Mountain, is a little out of my cell phone range. So risking breakdown without the help of Triple A feels like an adventure. But if I feel a little lost in the wilds of Oklahoma, how much more lost would the Vikings have been if they had indeed settled here?

It sounds a little bit like the plot of a Hollywood movie starring Antonio Bandaras. But residents of Heavener maintain that around 900 A.D, Vikings paddled their longships down the Eastern Seaboard, around the tip of Florida, through the Gulf of Mexico, up the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers and then traveled overland into Eastern Oklahoma – where they put up a billboard.

Okay, they may have built settlements and planted crops, but none of those things have been found. What has been found is a large flat stone – twelve feet high, ten feet wide, sixteen inches thick, rectangular in shape and sitting in a mountaintop ravine – with six-inch high Norse runes carved deeply into it.

Translations of the runes vary. Some people maintain that they're a date – November 11, 1012, while others say that they read “Glome's Valley,” as either a land claim or a kind of early Viking graffiti.

Whether Vikings actually were in Oklahoma, they came and left long ago. And the evidence that they were here might have lived on in obscurity if not for a few key events.

Flash forward in time to 1838, when thousands of Native Americans were forcibly moved from Tennessee into Eastern Oklahoma. The new arrivals noticed the stone, which became known as Indian Rock by European settlers – even though the carvings were not recognized by anyone as either Native or Latin writing.

In the 1920's a Heavener resident sent copies of the runes to the Smithsonian for identification. The Museum wrote back to say that the writing was Norse, but that it didn't make sense for Norsemen to have made them. In all likelihood, museum officials reasoned, a Scandinavian settler must have made the carvings by working from a primary school grammar book from his homeland.

As settlers moved into the area, they found more and more of these engraved stones. However most of them were destroyed by treasure hunters. The same fate might have befallen the runestone, if not for the efforts of Gloria Farley, a local school teacher.

Farley researched and wrote extensively about the stone. Through her efforts, the name of the stone was changed from Indian Rock to The Heavener Runestone, and the Heavener Runestone State park was established. Eventually, she found four more examples of Viking Runes carved into the Oklahoma landscape. Some of these are now on display in the Heavner Runestone State park.

So did Vikings settle in rural Eastern Oklahoma? Authorities in history say no. What is known however is that Norsemen did establish settlements in Newfoundland and similar stones with Runic writing have been found in Minnesota.

More importantly, stranger things have happened. In 1939, two fishermen pulled a small Bull Shark out of the Mississippi river near in Alton, Illinois, about 1,750 freshwater miles outside of its natural habitat.

If a shark can be thousands of miles away from where it's supposed to be, why not a Viking?