Naragansett Runestone

My parents and I took the 2 ½ hour trip from our house in Massachusetts to Newport, Rhode Island to see the Newport Tower. I remembered that the Narragansett Runestone was in the area so we stopped to see it before heading to Newport.

The Narragansett Runestone is located in Wickford (which is in North Kingstown), Rhode Island. The stone was moved from its original location “in the intertidal zone of Narragansett Bay just south of Pojac Point in North Kingstown, at 41O38.90N and 71O24.48W” (according to a kiosk at the rune stone) to an area behind Old Library Park next to the Town Hall Annex, in Wickford off of Brown Street. This will save it from the tidal erosion.

It was neat to see the runestone in person after reading about it online and in books. For the most part, the rune writing is carved maybe 1/2” deep into the rock and fades out at the right side of the sentence due to water erosion. As far as I know, nobody knows what the stone says even though there are recognizable runes that can be interpreted like the first three runes, the s, h, r, and a runes.

Naragansett Runestone

This runestone is important because it could be associated with the Spirit Pond runestones in Popham Beach, Maine. The Spirit Pond runestones, which were found by Walter Elliot in 1971, allegedly say, “Vineland takes 2 days” with an arrow pointing to the south. A two-day sail from Popham Beach to the Narragansett Bay area is about two days. Not only that but both the Narragansett Runestone and the Popham Beach runestones have the “hooked X” rune (a-rune), the s-rune (looks like a lightning bolt - The Nazi’s used this rune symbol for the stuf-stoffle [ss] and on some of their aircraft and other objects), and the h-rune (looks like a star). These three runes are also found on the Kensington Runestone discovered by Olof Ohman and his sons in 1898. The Kensington Runestone is dated 1362 using the pendadic number system.

Kensington Runestone

The full significance of these runestones is yet to be determined. However they are intriguing because of the possible implications of even more ancient ocean travel than previously thought. Christopher Columbus continues to rapidly fall off the leaderboard for "discovering" America.

by Steven Bohin

Ancient Man Research Team