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Rune Stone State Park
Heavener, OK 74937
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County: LeFlore
WebSite: None
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Location Description:
On Poteau Mountain near the small town of Heavener, Oklahoma, near the Arkansas line, stands a slab of stone which is 12 feet tall, 10 feet wide, and 16 inches thick, like a billboard. There is writing on this billboard, consisting of 8 deeply pecked letters, whose edges have eroded to smoothness, even though the stone`s hardness on the Moh`s Hardness Scale is 7, where a diamond is 10.
In the 1830`s, the Choctaws of Indian Territory saw the writing but could not read it. Various citizens in the 1800`s saw the stone and named it "Indian Rock", although the Indians had no alphabets.In 1923 the lettering was submitted by Carl Kemmerer of Heavener to the Smithsonian Institution, who identified the letters as Norse runes.
In 1948, research to find out what the letters said, when they were made, and by whom, was begun by Gloria Stewart Farley, who had seen the inscription as a child.. She spent a total of 38 years finding the answers to these questions. She renamed it The Heavener Runestone in 1951. Based on her research, the Runestone State Park came into existence to preserve this stone in 1970.
By 1967 the runes were believed to represent the date of November 11, 1012 with the runes used as numbers in a Norse cryptopuzzle, according to Alf Monge, a cryptanalyst who was born in Norway. The authenticity of the stone being made by ancient Vikings was supported by the finding of two more runestones in the vicinity of Poteau Mountain, another smaller inscription of eight runes at a foothill of Cavanal Mountain, 14 miles away, and another stone bearing five runes at Shawnee, Oklahoma.
In 1986, it was found that these 5 runestones had apparently been made even two or three centuries earlier, before 800 A.D. Translations were made in words, not numbers, by Dr. Richard Nielson, whose doctorate was obtained at the University of Denmark. By making an in—depth study of the ancient literature and hundreds of Scandinavian runestones, he determined that the second and eighth runes are actually variants of the letter L, which permitted him to say that the Heavener runes are G—L—O—M—E—D—A—L, meaning Glome`s Valley, a land claim. The similar Poteau runes are a memorial to the same man, meaning, "Magic or protection to Gloie (his nickname)". The Shawnee runestone is the name MEDOK, and was probably a gravestone, but had been moved because of construction work. The other two runestones on or near Poteau Mountain do not have enough runes for a translation, but the four stones were placed in a straight line, miles apart. These five inscriptions are all from the oldest 24—rune FUTHARK, used from 300 until 800 A.D. in Scandinavia.
It is believed that these Norse explorers crossed the Atlantic, rounded the tip of Florida into the Gulf of Mexico, found the Mississippi River, and sailed into its tributaries, the Arkansas and Poteau Rivers, around 750 A.D. This date is indicated by the grammar used on the Poteau Runestone.
There is much evidence that many Old—World cultures visited America centuries before Columbus, discovered by Gloria Farley and her colleagues, and presented in her book, "In Plain Sight: Old World Records in Ancient America". One chapter of her book is devoted to the Oklahoma Runestones.
The eight glyphs are from an Old Norse alphabet knows as "runes". Cryptographers have come up with a variety of translations, such as: "Earth Spirit`s Dalle", "Valley of the Gnomes", and " Magic to Gloi". Other runestones dating from around A.D. 1015 have been found in Poteau and Shawnee, Oklahoma.
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