May 4, 1966
Dear Mrs. Lindroth-Wallace:
Mr Wheeler let me read your letter of April 25. Many thanks for your greetings.
Dr Liestol gave a remarkably interesting lecture, with slides, and he had an audience of 600. It was only at the end of his account of the finds at Bergen that he gave a little attention to the Kensington inscription. He had earlier held a "press conference."
He had worked out (here at my office and across the hall) a most effective arraingement, first, of the Kensington alphabet, then of the genuine runic alphabet as used generally from about 1150 to 1500. The Bergen find yielded more than 12,000 symbos in the various inscriptions, and not one of the seven main suspected letters of the Kensington inscription occured in all those finds. I thought it was the most effective illustration I have seen of the impossibility of the Kensington inscription. Obvious if the inscription had been genuine it would have been written with runes that people of that time knew, used, read. But the linguists simply cannot convince the lay enthusiats. I think wah you are doing will carry the case somewhat further, and perhaps my work will add something. Again and again I seem to be on the edge of a really significant discovery, and then I find that I have unverified rumor. But when all the rumors are put together, they may amount to something. And I do have many revisions to offer which ar fact not rumor. Still I have not found a "confession." Dr. Liestol thinks we may never really know who did the Kensington inscription -- to which I am tempted to answer with the words from the Gilbert and Sullivan music: "What, never?"
I note that your work goes slowly -- so does mine. But I do make a little progress. I am doing a little revision of the traditional accounts of Sven Fogelblad, and Dr. Ander, now at Upsala, has been hunting in old records there. By the way, i Oraa on the way to that village site to which you are going "God willing and the snow permitting"?!
With cordial greetings,
Sincerely,
Theodore C. Blegen
(MHS Blegen papers)
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