Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
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A rock carving discovered in the Ontario backcountry started a search for the meaning and history of the site in 2019.
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The carving features what experts now believe to be an 1800s runic interpretation of the Christian Lord’s Prayer.
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The find may be traceable to an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
In 2018, the toppling of a tree near the township of Wawa, Ontario, revealed a rectangular piece of bedrock (about four feet by nearly five feet) etched with 225 symbols alongside a depiction of a Viking longboat. Eventually, a local historian came across the odd finding—now known as the Wawa Runestone—and reported the find to the Ontario Centre for Archaeological Education (OCARE). You can see the stone here.
The team at OCARE, led by archaeologist Ryan Primrose, decided to keep the stone concealed from the public until they could gather more details about its origin. And now, they’re finally talking about the object for the first time.
“Well, it’s certainly among the least expected finds that I think I’ve encountered during my career,” Primrose told the CBC. “It’s absolutely fascinating.”
Initial research, according to an OCARE statement, showed that the carving was likely written in Futhark characters—a runic script once used in northern Europe and Scandinavia. This led some experts to think that the carving must have been completed as far back as the Viking era, especially considering the second carving of a boat (which resembles a Viking longboat, contains about 16 occupants, and is flanked by several crosses or stars) found adjacent to the script.
Primrose, it turns out, was wise to hold off on publicly announcing it as a Viking-era find. In 2019, he brought in Sweden-based expert Henrik Williams, professor emeritus at Uppsala University, to consult on the site. Williams confirmed that the inscription was runic, but disagreed that it was Viking in nature.
Williams said that the runic writing was a version of the Christian Lord’s Prayer, which had been carved in Futhark. “The text conforms to the Swedish version of the Lord’s Prayer used from the 16th century and is written using a variation of the runic translation developed by Johannes Bureus in the early 17th century.” OCARE stated.
“It must have taken days and days of work,” Williams told the CBC. “They are really deeply carved into the rock. Someone must have spent a couple of weeks carving this thing.”
While tough to pinpoint, OCARE researchers believe the inscription itself dates to the 1800s. Williams believes the creator of the carving had to come from Sweden, and as Primrose researched the history of the area, he found that the Hudson’s Bay Company hired Swedes in the 1800s to work at remote Canadian wilderness trading posts—including the Michipicoten post, located not far from the Wawa carving, the CBC reported.
Whether this was a popular religious site—the inscription was found under soil after the tree fell, and no other artifacts have been found nearby—or the work of a single person toiling alone is still a question.
But with this announcement, many other questions have been answered. “Canada now has a total of 11 objects claimed to bear runes but only five in fact do so, and three of those constitute modern commemorative inscriptions,” Williams wrote in an OCARE report. “The Wawa stone is Ontario’s first with actual runes, the longest runic inscription of any on the North American continent […] and the only one in the world reproducing the Lord’s Prayer.”
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