Translated by Birgitta Wallace with permission from the author, Mats G. Larsson

Mats G. Larsson: archaeologist. historian, and author, has discovered new connections between the finder of the Kensington stone and the Kölsjön region where several inscriptions in Kensington-style runes have been found. The research by Mats G. Larsson and a local teacher, Anna Björk, have led to even more of these inscriptions. Larsson has recently published a book with the Swedish title “Kensington 1898, runfyndet som gäckade världen,” Kensington 1898, the Runic Find that Mocked the World.

Larsson says “Occasionally a researcher discovers completely different and even more exciting information than the one he or she sets out to find. This has happened to me several times in the past, and now in the heat of summer in Hälsingland it happened again.

Öhman’s Fiancée in Kölsjön

I will start from the beginning. Last summer I wrote a guest blog that the finder of the famous Kensington stone, the Hälsingland-born Olof Öhman, had a cousin by the name Anna Ersdotter, who was also his intended fiancée.¹ From the address on a letter sent by Öhman to Anna I found that during the year before Olof emigrated to America she had been working at one of the Kölsjön shielings² in Hassela in northern Hälsingland, the place where relatively recent – but older than the Kensington stone – inscriptions in runes known as Kensington runes have been discovered over the last few years. Through Anna Ersdotter we thus found a clear connection between these runes and Olof Öhman.

During the past year more inscriptions with such runes have been found. Anna Björk, a teacher in Hassela, and her pupils were instrumental in the reading of the first Kensington-type runes in Hassela, runes written in the ceiling of a room used by the farm hands on the Ersk-Mats farm. She has now discovered another inscription in Hångberg and one in Lindsjön, both situated in the Kölsjön community. And when she and I visited the Landbo croft at the end of July this year we found yet another one, and it was that one that led to a new discovery.

More links to the Kölsjön community

What I really tried to find out after this expedition was if the Franshammar foundry had owned the Landbo croft. As I had suggested earlier, this was one of the possible explanations to why Anna had worked in Kölsjön. I studied the existing documents pertaining to Kölsjön on the Survey Department’s Historic Maps, but I could not find any Landbo croft. But when I went through the records of a lot division done 1883-1884 because of a water lowering of the West and East Kölsjön, my eyes widened. I recognized a place name among the lot owners: Kalvhaga in Forsa, the village where Öhman’s uncle and close friend Erik Olsson and his daughter Anna Ersdotter, had lived. Although it was Erik’s brother-in-law Erik Andersson who owned Kalvhaga 2, Erik Olsson lived on the same farm. There he built an attractive farm house of his own, typical of Hälsingland. The two Eriks had married two of the daughters of the former owner of Kalvhaga 2, and that was the way they obtained the farm.

I wrote in an earlier blog that it would probably not be possible to find a closer connection between Öhman and the Kensington runes than through the letter to Anna. Now we really have a closer link. We can see that he may have learnt the Kensington runes from several of his close relatives who must have visited the Hassela area and come in contact with people writing many runic inscriptions at this time. This can have happened both before and after his emigration to America in 1879 because he returned home in 1883 for a couple of years, the time when the Kölsjön shieling was still owned by the Kalvhaga family. With risk of once more being wrong, I think that we can not find a closer – and more uncontestable – link than this between Öhman and the Hassela runes.

Continued research showed that the Kolsjön property was owned by Erik Andersson from 1878 to 1886 at which time it was called Kölsäga. But why would one acquire a property by Kölsjön in Hassela when one lived in Forsa by the Dellen lakes a good distance away? As I described in an earlier blog, during the summers, it was common that the farmers in the coastal areas brought their cattle to pastures in the inland forest areas where they owned or rented shielings. This is probably the reason for the presence of Anna Ersdotter in Kölsjön in 1878.

1^ In the end he married another girl, Karin Danielsson.

2^ A shieling is a pasture area away from the main farm where one or more staff spend the summer tending to the livestock and producing dairy products.