According to Farley, Vikings could have easily travelled south from Newfoundland along North America's eastern seaboard, then swung around the tip of Florida to the Gulf of Mexico where they could enter the Mississippi River, which flowed into to the Arkansas River, which in turn led into the Poteau River in Oklahoma.
"The Poteau River is just a few miles from here," said Garcia. "Don't think about how the waterways look now. Before all [the] man-made lakes and dams, these little creeks were big rivers and waterways back then."

My most uninformed take on vikings not colonizing is that they were much more into pillaging and taking stuff from others.

Not enough people and too spread out in the America's for them to put much effort in. Plus they weren't as advanced as the "old world"

Yea. That’s a pretty uninformed take.

[removed]

Yeah, I agree. That was a pretty uninformed take

Long time ago there was a fake about a viking outpost and a rune stone in Minnesota. Debunked even before the arrival of internet.

They did colonise Island and Greenland.

>The language of the runes remains in question too. "The inscriptions are not a Viking script, but a combination of [runic languages] Elder Futhark and Younger Futhark, which predates when the Vikings would have been traveling," said Dennis Peterson, archaeologist and manager of the Spiro Mounds Archaeological Center, the source of America's largest collection of prehistoric Native American relics, not far from Heavener.

So some vikingaboo carved it and now the locals want to keep the belief that it was done by Norse traders going because it makes them money from tourism.

[removed]

The one and only question to ask is why would Vikings try to establish a settlement 1000 miles from open waters (Gulf of Mexico) and several thousand more from the nearest Viking settlement.

Yes. The Native Americans were more evenly matched in their fighting capabilities with the Vikings than they were against the later Europeans. The later Europeans brought muskets, cannons, horses, and smallpox. For the Vikings, getting to the Americas was only half the challenge. Making it back was the other. It is also possible that having reached the Americas, the Vikings chose to stay. The locals may have welcomed them.

The amount of civilizations created BECAUSE of Scandinavian exploration is pretty astounding, actually.

Why am I getting down voted when I said it was a most uninformed? Lol

Most definitely. From my understanding people have been throwing runes on stones or trees and claiming the vikings did it for many decades now, and every time they are proven to be fake and made with modern equipment.

Not just decades, the Kensington Runestone was "found" in 1898. It was just pure coincidence that it was a Swedish immigrant who happened to find it in his field, during an era when people were romanticising the vikings and tying ancestral pride to their travels.

No real scholar has believed in its authenticity for over a hundred years, yet you still get the tourism spiel about "it totally could have happened tho and someone once heard a story about their grandpa seeing blue-eyed natives, come check out our stone". Peter Stormare even made a recent documentary about it where he really seemed to want to believe in it. It's weird how the obvious fakes seem to get more excitement than L'anse aux meadows gets.

You could say "Vikings wouldn't want to go to Oklahoma", lol.

[removed]

"Two decades later, she returned to study it, as an amateur runologist and self-taught epigraphist."

Every professional academic opinion in the article disputes the opinion of Farley, the self-taught amateur.

Because it was a Swedish immigrant in the 19th century. They hid the real answer at the end.

Sounds like almost every episode of Ancient Aliens

They also colonized 3 Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, parts of Scotland, Slavs to the east by Swedes etc.

Ive been, I never want to go back

Ah yes, these inconvenient coincidences, like how crop circles only pop up in communities previously aware of crop circles, or how despite its size and population, nearly all alien abductions on earth happen to Americans.

[removed]

Yeah, they don't even have an NFL team there.

[deleted]

Interesting. In Keene, NH there are legends of a Spanish gold mine. . There are even locations on maps.

America's Stonehenge.

In defense of America's Stonehenge, I don't know of anyone calling it that before the 2020's, they were called the Georgia guide stones for most of their existence and no one claimed them to be ancient, we know when they were built, and we kind of know who built it.

My dad took me to see the stone just for the hell of it back when I was in the third grade. Even back then he pointed out that it was probably carved in the 1800s by a Scandinavian immigrant.

I know of no serious Oklahoma historian who believes that these runes were carved by vikings. They are just an interesting road side tourist attraction.

You see that rune that looks kind of like a bow? That was not used by vikings. Same for the one that looks a bit like a capital M. They ARE runes, they just were not used in Scandinavia at the time vikings were active. Also that picture from 1928 (I think the year was) where some people are sitting on the stone? The runes look weird and I’d be surprised if the picture hasn’t been retouched.

Different place. AS is in NH. All informed historians consider it a hoax, but they've sold tickets for maybe a century now.

Ooh thank you, was not aware of that.

Because they knew that one thousand years later there would be scandinavians immigrants in that area.

That is the best possibility yet.

I live within 50 miles, I still haven't been there.

its really sad... journos are so desperate to publish a "scoop" that they will hide behind "objectivity" and print outsider/minority opinions even when they hold zero weight. often gives a false impression of genuine conrtoversy when none actually exists

Only a few decades ago people did not believe Vikings made it to the americas then they excavated L'ans aux Meadows in NFLD. Inuit legends speak of encountering tall white men when they settled northern Canada. Petroglyphs Provincial Park in Ontario has glyphs of a Viking ship and Norse gods. The park is in the middle of Canada; thus, Vikings had to have travelled inland. I found a rune on a beach on Lake Erie near Point Pelee.

Apparently even a non-expert, just with the knowledge of the elder and younger futhark and their approximate time of use could debunk this.

Not just tourism. Unfortunately these hoaxes often have ties to white supremacists wanting to validate their Nordic obsession. The history of academics purposely spreading myths about Norse visitors to the continental states (before the L’Anse aux Meadows discovery) is fairly dark.

I’ve studied runes, but even those who didn’t would be able to tell this is fake. Lol.

It’s possible, but highly unlikely and with no actual evidence.

[removed]

[deleted]