What are the origins of mysterious characters?

George Young of Queensland, Halifax County, Nova Scotia, first set mankind on a quest to follow the trail of the mysterious Canadian Yarmouth Stone. The 180-kilogram boulder was discovered in a lagoon salt marsh in 1812 by a Yarmouth doctor, Richard Fletcher. He was an army doctor who retired in 1809 and came to live in Yarmouth, where he died in 1819. He actually placed the stone on a raised piece of ground close to the shore. That piece of land, of course, lies between the outlet of the Cheggazin Marshes and the western edge of Yarmouth Harbour. The stone is briefly inscribed with fourteen characters, and those words have haunted experts for nearly 200 years.

The stone is now carefully preserved and prominently displayed to the public at the fascinating Yarmouth County Museum at 22 Collins Street. The museum's director and curator, historian Eric Dinh Ruff, has a wealth of valuable information about this mysterious and ancient stone and its possible origins. In a recent interview, he told a reporter the following. He allowed the reporter to take notes during the interview, and, the interview was very helpful in deciphering the character; it provided a lot of information.

The Yarmouth Mystery Stone is a very interesting piece of Yarmouth history. Most people believe that it was left behind by Norse pirates, and that's the general story, but there are many other stories as well. Roughly speaking, it was discovered by a doctor named Fletcher in 1812, at the end of Yarmouth Harbor. Some people, particularly Dr. Fletcher's descendants, always felt that Fletcher had carved it, as he was obviously a jokester, and, moreover, his family always felt that he had done it. Many others feel that Norse pirates left the stone, and it has been translated several times by different people from ancient Norse texts. One translation was made by Henry Phillips, Jr. around 1875, and he felt that those ancient Norse scripts either said 'Hagou speaks to his congregation' or 'Son of Hagou speaks to his congregation.' "

Later in 1884, Phillips published a paper on that passage, based on an annotation by Harry Pearce, a former provincial museum director, and argued that the man called Haguchi was a member of the Volkar Sefen expedition of 1007.

Eric Ruff also told reporters that in 1934, Oliver Strandwood had translated the ancient Norse writing on the stone. This translation by Strandwood is particularly interesting linguistically. Olever Strandwood, who was a school inspector for Benton County in Washington, D.C., and also a distinguished Norwegian scholar, believed that the writings were indeed ancient Norse script. He translated them as, "Leif Arikor set up {this monument}." The meaning of "this monument" in the sentence is something understood by man. This ancient Norse script stele character does not contain it in itself. The meaning of this understood grammatical structure can also be found in requests for help, such as "Please help me to come up {from this ditch}," where the meaning of "from this ditch" is understood because the person called upon can see the ditch and understands the situation of the the situation of the man who said it-both of which make this well-understood sentence superfluous! The actual existence of the Yarmouth Stone makes the addition of "this monument" unnecessary in much the same way. Just as Confucius might have apparently written in his aphorism, "He who carves y into solid stone will choose fewer words than he who writes on paper with ink and quill."

In 1934, when Oleaver Strandwood was engaged in his work, Georges St. Perrin was in charge of the stone and the Yarmouth Library, which then preserved it.In 1934, Georges' description of the stone, given to Oleaver, clearly states, " . . there is little sign of erosion. With the exception of a few isolated places, the carving shows a kind of distinct V-shaped section ...... The stone is of very hard texture ...... The carving is so finely worked that the carver must have used highly hardened tools... ..."

Strandwood did a very effective job of carefully searching through the various alphabets of established Norse antiquity to find known counterparts from identified sources to the Norse antiquities carved into the Yarmouth stone. He then singled out the ancient Nordic scripts that had been corresponded to, and in turn gave the counterparts of the Latin letters of the ancient Nordic scripts above. Strangwood made several pages of densely-painted cross-references to establish and corroborate all fourteen ancient Norse characters on the stone, and, finally, came up with the Latin translation:

LAEIFRERIKUBISR

Considering that there is a relatively minor discrepancy between the ancient Norse scripts and the Euganean scripts that were engraved at a slightly different angle, the Grosse Pointe alphabet of central France and the There is also a striking similarity between the inscribed script on Yarmouth stones.

In order to fairly balance the opinions of the various experts on ancient Norse writing, it needs to be said that in 1966, some 30 years after the publication of Strandwood's work, Dr. Listo of the Northwick Institute in Oslo, expressed his doubts as to whether or not those engraved texts were ancient Norse writing at all.

Julius Frasch Harmon offered an entirely different scholarly opinion on the subject in his paper entitled "On the Engravings on the Stones of Brixton and Yarmouth," which appeared in the January 1976 issue of West Virginia History, Volume 36. Harmon argued that the inscriptions were purely mathematical, and that they were statistics about an expedition that had set out on the orders of King Erico XIV of Sweden.

Eric Ruff then goes on to explain several other very interesting observations. "There is an early Basque saying that speaks of stone inscriptions meaning, 'The Basque people have conquered this land,' which may be from 350 BC. The Mycenaean account, which may be even earlier than that, interprets the stone as 'honoring the throne of God: at the time when the waters were at their peak, the royal purebred lions were sent out at sunset to act as protection and control and to dig out a cave, for which they had all been killed.' I think it's incredible - how you can come up with that kind of meaning from just a few ancient Scandinavian texts: as you all know, I don't put much stock in this. Other accounts include Japanese accounts, 14th century Scandinavian accounts, and tree-root accounts. So the reader is free to choose. I love it when my visitors come in and ask, 'Is this true?' And I say, 'Yes, it's a real stone.' We did have a bit of a problem with the stone; one of the presidents of the Historical Society in the '30s thought that the inscription was showing fading, so he re-chiseled the stone, and so we lost whatever we could get out of the original, even though we do have a photograph of the original item. Anyway, here's what happened. The stone originally belonged to the Yarmouth Public **** Library and it has been on loan from them since in the 1950s when the museum opened."

"My own preferred way of putting it is Basque conjecture because, having been given a Basque-French dictionary and having looked up ancient Nordic writing in a Basque book on ancient Nordic writing, I can see how they could have made those same as the Basque words equivalent. It made sense to me: of course you can see 'Basque'; you can see 'people'; you can see 'land'. Around 1895, another stone was found in Yarmouth. It had Old Norse writing on it like the Old Norse stones we have found, and, at that time, there were three extra letters underneath them - the text translated into Basque was 'The Basque people have conquered this land and are living here.' There is some speculation about that stone, because it happened to be found in a hotel that had just opened in 1895, and the stone has been lost ever since."

"Our stone was found in 1812, before people even thought of Nordic pirates. It could have belonged to the Norse pirates. I certainly don't doubt that the Nordic pirates were here. I am sure that they may have been here. They were certainly in Newfoundland."

This view is strongly supported by Birgitta Wallis, who was working with a German film crew in 1995 and had shown them the Nordic Pirate site at Lance Oaks Meadows in Newfoundland, which she believed to be undeniably real, and who had then taken them to Nova Scotia to take pictures of the Yarmouth Stone.

Eric went on to explain how the stone crossed the Atlantic in the First World War.

"The stone was taken to England one time to be verified or translated. It was taken before the First World War and when it was ready to be returned, war broke out, so it was decided not to risk a submarine encounter to take it across the Atlantic. Apparently it was in a packing case in the London docks during the First World War."

"Some pieces were taken from the back of the stone to identify where it had come from. It might be nice to think it came from somewhere in Scandinavia, but, well, it's the local stone."

Laura Bradley, a very willing and knowledgeable archivist at the Yarmouth County Museum, gave a taped interview, "I've seen several researchers come here specifically to look at this stone. The early researchers and annotators couldn't actually see the stone, so they were dealing with photographs and specimens, so they couldn't tell which of the natural markings on the stone were natural and which were man-made. One theory that came back was that the markings on the stone were naturally occurring. It is difficult to identify because the original intact inscriptions are messed up by repetitive carvings, making it difficult to view the stone's markings in the same way. However, two geologists who have viewed the stone over the past six years have told me that they do not believe the markings are naturally occurring. And our local expert, the real North American expert in this field, Birgitta Voorhees, who works in Parks Canada, says that it's true that the markings are not ancient Nordic writing, but they are naturally occurring. So we have very qualified experts who hold the opposite opinion.

"I can't come to a conclusion yet. I do know that the stone was discovered in 1812 and that the man who found it was a military doctor. The likelihood that he actually made these markings seems remote to me. However, when I spoke to geologists who felt that it was not a natural formation or a natural phenomenon, and when I spoke to this Norwegian expert, who said that it was in no way an ancient Nordic writing, I really felt that I wanted to make a well-founded opinion, and unfortunately I could not do so at this point. This is one of the great mysteries of Yarmouth. I've looked at all these expert papers all my life and really don't know how those markings got onto that stone, it's very much a mystery to me."

In short, what was the actual history of the Norse pirates that finally proved the controversial ancient Yarmouth stone might be relevant? Erik the Red, or Erik Thorvaldsson as he was known, succeeded in the late 10th century A.D. and was the founder of the earliest Scandinavian settlements on Greenland. His son - Rafe Eriksson - was the first fully credible European to discover North America, and in the spring of 981, Erik the Red, along with about 30 of his family members, friends, neighbors and a herd of livestock, traveled west. Their tile-stacked-hulled Nordic pirate ship was less than 30 meters long, and the conditions for making such a sea voyage must have been unfavorable. Obstructed by a drifting iceberg, they were unable to land on the east coast, but instead skirted the southern tip and then sailed north along the west coast (now Juriennehaber). Having found a land they liked, they named it Greenland, and later, due to their great praise of the land, so much so that their enthusiastic contemporaries formed an expedition,*** with 25 ships carrying potential colonists as well as livestock. In reality, only 14 ships, ***including 300 to 400 colonists, settled there in what became known as the "Eastern Colonies".

In 999, Erik's second son, Rafe, called Rafe Eriksson or Lucky Rafe, sailed from Greenland to Norway via the Hebrides, instead of taking the more usual Icelandic route. The following year, on his way back, he did not stop at any land in between. Hoping to reach the southern tip of Greenland. Due to bad weather, he didn't get there, but saw the North American continent: probably Labrador, maybe Newfoundland, and maybe even Nova Scotia, far to the south. When he realized that wherever this was, it was not his father's home in Greenland, he turned north along the coast and made it safely home before fall. The tantalizing question remains unanswered: did Rafe Eriksson land near Yarmouth and, while he was there, carve the disputed stone?