Originally published in Ancient American Magazine March/April 1994.
In the 1830′s, soon after the forced removal of aboriginal tribes into Indian Territory, Chocktaw hunters roaming vast, vacant, forested hills came upon the mammoth runestone in an idyllic vale of Poteau, Mt. It had stood immemorially hidden in its remote ravine. Gloria Farley first hiked to it in 1928 when no path yet led the two miles uphill from her home town, Heavener, Oklahoma. A precocious little girl, she realized c.1930 that the large characters carved on “Indian Rock” were runes; but not until 1951, on moving back to Heavener from Ohio, did she clear away the gray lichen and begin serious study of this “billboard” (her word). She measured the protective semicircle of overhanging cliffs at 40′ high. The huge stone below was an upright gray slab of very hard, fine-grained Pennsylvania Savanna sandstone 12′ high, 10′ wide, and 16′ thick. Geologists told her it once projected the cliff above and fell to its present position in a primeval time. The large runes, 6 1/2 to 9 1/2″ high, stretch horizontally nearly two yards (69″) across the west face 3/4 to 1″ wide. Tool marks, 1/4 to 3/16″ deep, were detectable but the sharp-chiseled edges had weather-rounded despite the natural shelter (Westville Symposium Papers #17).[amazon asin=0557231655&template=*lrc ad (right)]
Gloria’s name and accelerating discoveries were long famous in Oklahoma when I examined the big runestone May 21st, 1965, (before its fencing for the state park) and a few days afterward beheld aghast a replica of the Ruthwell Cross and other large British runestones in the National Museum of Scotland that bore the same and similar characters. It took no special acumen to recognize that the Heavener staverow consisted of letters from the older, 24 rune futhark, not the later 16-rune futhork or any combination of the two. So Alf Monge’s 1967 insistence on six of the Heavener letters from the older, but second and eighth from the later, to solve the inscription as a medieval cryptopuzzle for the date 11 Nov. 1012 (St. Martin’s Day) failed to beguile. Norway-born Monge, a former Army cryptanalyst genius, misassumed all the Arkansas-system runestone puzzles recording dates, which he figured to fall in the 11th Century, because Thorfinn Karlsefni’s saga-attested expedition to Vinland took place after 1000 A.D., when, however, the old style of certain Heavener runes was half a millennium obsolete. The Kensington Stone specifies its own date, 1362 (in Arabic-Norse runes, i.e. after Arabic numerals were known in Scandinavia but before adoption of outright Arabic form), its grisly message consistent with 14th-Century-style runes, three letters in Latin (AVM for “Ave Maria”). The Heavener Stone presents a straightforward identification in 3rd-5th Century styles.
Monge read instead: GAOMEDAT, which he knew was not a word, to make his date come out right. He realized that by the time 
meant T, O was written 
, whereas in the previous futhark of Heavener runes, T would have been 
. He construed the Heavener N as A of the later alphabet (the earlier wrote A 
) and misread the clear aesc, 
, as asc, i.e. plain broad a as in “ah”.
[amazon asin=0934666555&template=*lrc ad (right)]By 1961 the Viking expert Frederick Pohl, of Norwegian descent, had read the aesc the same, thus GNOMEDAL, which would be Norse “Gnome Valley.” But the word is GNOMEDAEL, thus Anglo-Saxon in form. Many students besides Pohl and Monge decided the inscription was not a word. But whether Norse or Anglo-Saxon, it makes a quaint, appropriate name for a miniature vale or dell as if of gnomes. Runes in the same evolving styles were written in differing dialects: Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Anglo-Saxon, the last written in runes as late as Alfred the Great; the pre-migration Old English epic Beowulf (unwritten till the 8th Century) tells a tale set in Denmark or Sweden. The discovery that Anglo-Saxon was still spoken in isolated pockets of Sweden astounded 19th Century philologists. How to get Anglo-Saxon writers to the Arkansas during the Heavener rune-style of 200-500 A.D. beats me, but an aesc is anaesc.
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