EP 438. The Real Minnesota Vikings

 

Reading from the Runestone

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. Have I got a story for you today. The things they don’t teach you in American history sitting in a high school classroom. You all ever heard of the Minnesota Vikings? Yeah, I have, too. They’re a football team, right? Well, maybe their name came from somewhere you never heard about in the history books. Joining me to explain this today is Elroy Balgaard from somewhere outside the Twin Cities, Minnesota. Elroy, how the heck are you, man?

Elroy Belgaard: Doing great, Ramsey. Thanks for having me on.

Ramsey Russell: I’m glad to have you here. And the other night, while I was sitting in Minnesota, just outside of where the heck was Fergus Falls, I heard the most incredible story that I’m like, no way, I’ve never heard this. And he said, well, let me get my cousin on the phone. And it was you, and my head exploded, I’m like, you got to be kidding me, this can’t be true. But apparently it is, and you’re going to explain why you think it is. And I know you’ve done some documentaries and a whole lot of research in this topic, but tell me who the real Minnesota Vikings were.

Elroy Belgaard: Right. Well, one of the reasons that the football team, Minnesota Vikings, is called the Vikings is we think that Vikings were in Minnesota in the year 1362, 130 years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. And there’s something called the Kensington Runestone, and that’s why we think they’re here. Just to give you a little history, in 1898, a farmer was clearing a hill for trees. He was going to make it into a pasture. So he’s pulling over a tree and tangled in the roots of a tree. Is this what we call a Runestone? It’s a big rock. It’s about 200lbs, it’s very square looking, like a tablet, and chiseled into it, is this story like a long story. Chiseled into this rock, tangled in the roots of a tree. And the story talks about 30 Vikings, I still call them Vikings that came, that traveled to Minnesota in the year 1362. And the runestone talks about they had a camp one day’s journey north from this stone, and they went out fishing one day, and they came back and 10 of them were dead. Ten of their party was dead.

Ramsey Russell: From what?

Elroy Belgaard: And so they don’t say. They just said, should I read you the text of the runestone?

Ramsey Russell: Absolutely.

Elroy Belgaard: Okay. Here’s what it says. I’ve got it right here in my computer.

Ramsey Russell: If they chiseled it in stone, this must not be a multi chapter story.

Elroy Belgaard: It’s not too long. So here’s what it says. 8 goths and 22 Norwegians on an exploration journey from Vinland to the west. We had camp by two scaries, one day’s journey north from the stone. We were out to fish one day after we came home, we found 10 men, red of blood and dead. Ave Maria, save us from evil. And then on the side of the stone, it says, we have 10 men by the sea to look after our ships, 14 days travel from this island in the year 1362. So they left their big ship 14 days away in the sea, and we don’t know where that is. And I can get to where we think, that’s a long discussion of how did they get from Norway to Minnesota?

Ramsey Russell: We’re going to get into that. And I know there is some scientific dispute, some scientists are, historians dispute that there were truly real Vikings 100 and some odd years before Christopher Columbus in the middle of North America.

Elroy Belgaard: Right.

Ramsey Russell: But my one question I’ve got is, in what language was that story written in stone?

Elroy Belgaard: It was written in old Swedish.

Ramsey Russell: And a farmer in the 1800s, knew Swedish?

Elroy Belgaard: No. Well, he was Swedish. His name was Olaf Omen, and he was from Sweden. And they think that he carved it himself, but it was carved in runic, using runic letters. And it’s not your normal letters, like the Alphabet we have. It’s different characters that they used to use back then. And it’s in an older language, old Swedish.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I mean, for a farmer in 1800s, even a swedish farmer to know a lost Alphabet would be questionable right there. I mean, how would he know that?

Elroy Belgaard: Right. Yeah. And that’s one of the things that we think the big thing is, he was a farmer struggling, had a bunch of kids, this is in the 1800s, he’s plowing with horses, trying to survive. Why would he do this and then bury it and plant a tree on top of it and wait 20 years? Well, that’s the other thing. The tree was at least 30 years old because of how big it was. And he wasn’t even in America 30 years before that. So there’s a lot of things that say that it’s a real artifact.

A Viking Quest?

So it’s like a claiming stone in Minnesota.

Ramsey Russell: Okay, what were Vikings? What were they doing in the middle of – Because here’s the deal, is somewhere, gosh – in North Dakota, just a couple of hours or so west of here, there’s a monument that marks the absolute geographic center of North America. There’s no oceans in Minnesota, there are some rivers, but, like, you take a Mississippi river, it originates in Minnesota, run south. So, I mean, it just doesn’t make sense that Vikings. And your cousin was showing me, just as a reminder what a Viking ship looked like. It was just a great big wooden hole with dragon heads on both sides and a sail or two. How in the world did that -? So they left it somewhere a couple of weeks away with 10 men in guarding, and the rest of them went up into modern day Minnesota. For what? Were they looking for riches? Were they looking for castles to raid? What were they doing?

Elroy Belgaard: Well, we don’t really know, but one of the theories is the word that they use for exploration journey, is – I forget the word, but it’s like they were claiming the land. It’s a land claim. The reason that France, we had to buy the Louisiana purchase from France is because the French were here, and they carved a big stone in North Dakota that they found and they claimed it for France. Well, this is 200 years before that. So it’s like a claiming stone in Minnesota. The Mississippi starts there, the Red river starts there, which flows north into Hudson Bay. And the St. Lawrence river start, all start in Minnesota. So that’s 3 of the major watersheds, and Kensington is very close to the continental divide of all three of those watersheds. So by putting it there, they’re claiming wherever that water flows, basically, which is most of the continent.

Ramsey Russell: Very interesting. Did you tell me the other night that the Vikings were in the fur trade, or were they just in all kinds of trade? Loot and rape, plunder?

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah, that too. But there’s a Viking village now in Nova Scotia called on L’Anse aux Meadows that they say is an official Viking settlement that was settled probably by Leif Erickson in the year 1000. Right around 1000. And that’s right at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. Well, that’s 362 years, this is 362 years later that the Vikings were in Nova Scotia at the mouth of the St. Lawrence river. Do you ever think they would take a ship down the St. Lawrence river and see what’s down there?

Ramsey Russell: That’s a mighty big river.

Elroy Belgaard: 300 years. Yeah, I mean, and that’s what they did. They explored all over the world. They went to Russia, all the way down to Russia, and that’s what they did. So of course, I think they went all the way down and explored and were exploring. And one of the things that they did in Minnesota was the fur trade. You know, there was a big French fur trade here in the 1500s and 1600s, and because of the beaver and there’s just a lot of critters in Minnesota that are good for fur, but there’s a lot of theories that the Vikings were doing that before that, that they were also doing the fur trade before the French.

Ramsey Russell: It’s going to sound like a strange question, Elroy, but who were the Vikings? Who were they? Where were they from? And were they really depicted like you see in character rations on history channel dramatizations?

Minnesota Fur Trades & The Battle of 2 Vikings

Oh, so there were two kinds of Vikings?

Elroy Belgaard: No, not so much. I mean, yes, they were raiders, but they’re from Norway, Sweden and Denmark mostly, and some from Finland, but that’s mostly where they’re from. And like Norway, is very rugged. Only 30% of Norway is inhabitable because it’s all just mountainous. So, you get a pretty big population, especially with young men and they have no prospects, there’s no place to farm, they have no future. So they get on a ship and go out and try to find their fame and glory, and so they went out and plundered. But they also were explorers. They discovered Iceland, they discovered Greenland and Vinland, which is North America, and they settled in those places and they traded. Iceland, and Greenland were mostly, well, Iceland was uninhabited and Greenland was mostly uninhabited, so they just set up settlements there and so that’s what they did in North America, too, was they traded, they were friendly. They traded, when you’re that far away, you’re not going to pillage. They traded. They had some skirmishes with the natives at the beginning. Lee Ferrikson had to run in, and I’m sure that was – and the Iceland, Icelandic tales talk about skirmishes with the North Americans, too, with the natives.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I was thinking 1300s, if 10 Vikings who knew how to swing a sword, let’s say, at a minimum, whether they were peaceful or not, they were tough men that fell the oceans and up the rivers. I would just think that if they were found bloodied and dead in the middle of Minnesota, it must have been an Indian battle. I mean, who else would it be? Not other Vikings.

Elroy Belgaard: It could have been pagan Vikings.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, so there were two kinds of Vikings?

Elroy Belgaard: Well, yeah. One of the other reasons they came is the official reason is the king of Norway in 1355, hadn’t heard from the Greenland Vikings for a while, because in the beginning of the 1300s, the little ice age happened and it got super cold, and they knew about Vinland, the new world. And so one settlement said, we’re out of here, and they took off and went for North America. Well, you’re not paying your tithe. They weren’t getting their tithes. The church wasn’t getting its tithes anymore. So he sent out this expedition in 1355, headed up by a guy named Paul Knudsen to go check on the Greenland Vikings, find out where they were. And he had found out that they had become pagan again, that they weren’t Christian anymore, and bring them back under the fold so they could get their tithes going again. And the fur trade, probably. And the trade, because I think the fur stop as well. All of a sudden, the fur trade stopped, and the king is like, that was a big source of income for the king. And so he sent out this expedition of 30 men to check up on him.

Ramsey Russell: I read or heard a story one time, Elroy, that some Viking traders that had been somewhere up in the North America were wailing for narwhal’s and had brought back a lot of the ivory horns and presented them to a king. I don’t know which king.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: As unicorn horns. And the market went through the roof. Because a narwhal is like a whale with an ivory horn, and they had presented them as unicorns, and just the price went through the roof. They got a lot of that trade.

Elroy Belgaard: They’re endangered, too, kind of. I don’t know if they are.

Ramsey Russell: but they’re unicorns.

Elroy Belgaard: They use that to chisel a hole through the ice, right? So they can breathe. That’s so they can go up into the arctic underneath the ice, and they chisel a hole and then they can pop up and grab a breath every now and then.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Those Viking traders were pretty clever. Who was Leif Erikson? I’ve heard that name before. Why is he so prominent Viking?

Elroy Belgaard: Leif Erikson was the son of Eric the Red. Eric the Red was born in Norway, but he discovered Greenland. He discovered Greenland, for sure. He might have discovered Iceland and Greenland, I forget. But his son Eric, I think, was born on Greenland, and he went on to discover, “North America” in the year 1000.

Ramsey Russell: Christopher Columbus did not discover North America.

Elroy Belgaard: Well, nobody discovered.

Ramsey Russell: Spanish had been here for the last here forever, when Christopher Columbus landed somewhere over there.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah. I always say Christopher Columbus was the last person to discover North America.

It All Starts with a Skull

So now I want to do carbon dating and the DNA on it. So if this is from 1362 and is European, that would pretty much prove that the runestone was real. 

Ramsey Russell: He just got the credit. That’s a good one. How did you get interested in this? How did you develop such a profound interest in Vikings in Minnesota?

Elroy Belgaard: Well, yeah, that’s a good question, because like I was mentioning, my family is from a little town called Ashby, which is one day’s journey north of Kensington. And when I was a kid, my dad took us all to the museum and I saw the runestone and it talks about how 10 people were killed one day’s journey north of Kensington. And I always thought, oh, that’s up by Ashby, and I always thought that. I’ll try to shorten this story up. Years later, my mom talked about, she got this book about the history of Ashby, and she said, there’s a story in there about a bunch, they found a bunch of skeletons on it, on a gravel pit in 1931 in Ashby. And most of them were native, they were obviously Native American. But 8 of them were buried straight like Christians buried their dead. They were in a row, and their feet were facing east, and one supposedly had a gold tooth. And back in 1931 there was a lot of speculation that these could have been the Vikings that were killed in the Kensington massacre or the battle or whatever. And of course, but that was in 1931, and you know this, before they had the state archaeologist and they didn’t have DNA and they didn’t have carbon dating and these gravel pit guys didn’t know what to do with them, so they just, sadly just put them all off to the side, and souvenir collectors picked them all up, so they’re just basically gone. Well, I was telling this story to my cousin Harlan, and I told him that whole story, and he goes, oh, yeah, Bruce Melby’s got a couple of those skeletons in his basement.

Ramsey Russell: What?

Elroy Belgaard: A couple of skulls. He had a couple of skulls he had found in a gravel pit when he’s a kid. And the Melby’s owned that land where the gravel pit was in 1931. And while Bruce Melby had long gone, he had passed away a dozen years ago, and his house was abandoned. And so we went in there and looked around, and he was a hoarder, and we looked around and dug, and we didn’t find anything. So we were a little discouraged. But just a couple years later, somebody bought that property, and they’re going to burn down his house. And my cousin Harlan knew that house was originally a log cabin. The inside of that house was one of the old original log cabins in that area. And so he decided to take that log cabin and move it back to his place, and he fixed it up, it’s beautiful. You should see it. So we had a crew come in and just get rid of all the junk, all the garbage, it was just filled. So he had a big pile, and he’s going to have a big burn pile going outside. Well, his son is in a closet, and he takes a bread bag off a shelf, and a skull falls out of the bread bag onto the floor. So now we have a partial skull. Just the face. It wasn’t the whole skull. And I said, well, this is interesting. So I did a GoFundMe –

Ramsey Russell: The things that people keep in basements and closets that never ceases to amaze me, but go ahead. I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but I’m thinking, who keeps a partial skull, human skull, in a closet? In a bread bag, in a closet.

Elroy Belgaard: In a bread bag. Yeah. So he was an interesting guy. This Bruce Melby, his dad fought in the civil war, and the other reason my cousin want to look in there, supposedly there was a civil war rifle somewhere in that cabin, too, that he was trying to find, but we never found that.

Ramsey Russell: So you find this partial skull, now what?

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah. So now I want to do carbon dating and the DNA on it. So if this is from 1362 and is European, that would pretty much prove that the runestone was real. And this is one of the Vikings that were killed. But it costs a lot of money. So I made a YouTube about it and did a GoFundMe page, and that’s where Peter Stormare found me. Peter Stormare is an actor, famous Hollywood actor, but he’s from Sweden and he’s in the movie Fargo. He’s the wood chipper guy in Fargo.

Ramsey Russell: He’s the quiet Swede that chips up the other guy.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And really steers the whole show right off the rails, it kind of just started off like a little scam until his character came along.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah. But he’s been in so many movies and TV shows. But when he was making Fargo, he was driving past Alexandria on his way to Fargo and saw the sign for the museum. And he stopped in and looked at the museum and saw the runestone. And Olaf Oman, who found the runestone, is from the same area in Sweden that Peter Stormare is from. So he felt a connection. They both traveled to America 100 years apart. But Olaf Oman was kind of vilified because they said, oh, he’s the one that faked the runestone. He made it up. And so Peter Stormare’s goal was to clear Olaf Oman’s name. Olaf Omen actually had a hard life because of that. Two of his kids committed suicide and it really kind of “ruined his life” when he found the runestone.

Ramsey Russell: That’s incredible. Were there any other runestones found? How many runestones are there?

Elroy Belgaard: This is the only one founded in North America. Back in the 30s or I think in the 30s when it went to the Smithsonian for a while, and the Smithsonian now, they don’t believe in it necessarily, but back then they thought it was real and they said it was the most important archaeological find in North America, if it’s real. But there’s runestones found in Greenland, a lot in Iceland, and they’re all over Scandinavia. That’s very common thing in Scandinavia. They’re big, but they’re real big. Like, real big, like 8ft, 10ft tall and they carve dragons in them, but they also carve stories in them and they’re a thousand years old.

Ramsey Russell: What were some of the other signs that Vikings existed or visited Minnesota? Because here’s what – I’m asking a couple of questions here, Elroy. Okay, so we found this one runestone, which sounds to me like a headstone, a marker.

Elroy Belgaard: Right.

Evidence of Vikings: Mooring Stones

They’re in Norway, too. And they’re not just in Minnesota, they’re in North Dakota, there’s some in North Dakota and I think in Wisconsin, too.

Ramsey Russell: But apparently it’s not because the bodies were found elsewhere, the skeletons were found elsewhere, presumably. So I’m kind of asking, what other signs or markings were there of Vikings in Minnesota, real Vikings, and how many might there have been beyond just that exploratory company?

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah, that’s a good question. If you go to the Runestone museum in Alexandria, that’s where the runestone is. They have a lot of other artifacts, axes and spearheads and fire starters, all made of metal that have been found in that area, all over kind of that area in northern Minnesota. And they look Viking, they don’t look pioneer. They have the kind of a Viking axe shape to them, and they have quite a bit. Where the runestone was found, Olaf Omen, dug down underneath it, hoping you might find something. And they found a whetstone, like, for sharpening an axe, and there’s been a couple whetstones found. But all over Minnesota, there’s something we call mooring stones. And they’re big rocks, big boulders, usually by the shore of a lake, with a little triangular hole chiseled on the top of it. And they’re all over where the runestone was found –

Ramsey Russell: A triangular hole.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah. It’s not completely round. So it wasn’t carved with a drill, it was chiseled. And they’re kind of a triangular shape. And they’re all over Runestone Hill, where the runestone was found. And at the base of the hill, there’s 4 of them just in a row, great big ones. And I think that’s where they moored their boats. The theory is they would take a big stick and pound into these holes and then tie their boat to it. But they’re all over Minnesota, and some are on top of hills. And in my opinion, I think they’re used to mark the water ways, like the portages. And, like, okay, if you’re trying to get from here to Duluth, you got to take a right on the long prairie river and then take a left at the crow wing river. You know what I mean? I think it’s a way to mark the water routes. I’ve done a lot of trips in the boundary waters in Minnesota, and they used to, they don’t have them anymore, but they’d used to. You’d have your map and a compass, that’s all you got. And all these lakes, and they’ve got these little portages to get from one lake to the next, you get to the end of the lake, and it was always a welcome site. They’d have a little post that says the name of the next lake and how long the portage is, and that was marking the portage. And I think that’s what these were. Maybe they put a stick, maybe they put a stick in that hole, so if you’re at the end of the lake, you could see a little stick hanging up.

Ramsey Russell: Well, and if you hammered a round stick which sticks around, if you hammered a round stick into a triangle, it would hold.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it would hold. I can see where a round stick about that size, diameter would go – I could hammer it down into a triangular opening.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah. Putting a round peg.

Ramsey Russell: Have similar mooring stones been found near water and on hills and around Norway, Sweden?

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: So it’s a very common thing.

Elroy Belgaard: Yes. They’re in Norway, too. And they’re not just in Minnesota, they’re in North Dakota, there’s some in North Dakota and I think in Wisconsin, too.

Ramsey Russell: Well, because I’m sitting here thinking it could easily have been a way for me to tie up my boat, hammer something down in this triangular thing and tie my boat up, mark my waterways, hang a flag. But up on the hills, we start talking boats and water, it doesn’t make sense, but unless it’s a way that I could anchor my tents or my tarpaulins or whatever my hides I was using for shelter or for buildings, I’m sure rope was in high demand back then for a lot of different things.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah, if you’re portaging a big boat up a hill, you could put a block and tackle or some sort of thing to pull it up the hill. Yeah, but they’re all over Minnesota.

Ramsey Russell: Well, if you start seeing. Okay, so we found one runestone talking about 10 people that got killed. But now we’ve got these other artifacts, implements and tools scattered all about Minnesota. So that wouldn’t have been left by 10 men, there would have been communities maybe, or loose bands of walking around and exploring. Maybe a hundred people broke up into 5 or 20 different organizations just going and camping and living. They didn’t just go on the fly like a backpacker today, they would set up shop for a little bit and then continue on.

Elroy Belgaard: And I think they did. And I think they intermingled with the natives, I think, because there’s a lot of similarities between, the Ojibwe people and how Vikings lived. They built lodges, like, for the winter, they had teepees for the summer when they’re hunting, like tents. But Norwegians had that, too up in northern, the reindeer people lived in tents.

Ramsey Russell: So who do you think taught who? Do you think the Ojibwe natives taught the Vikings or vice versa?

Elroy Belgaard: I don’t know. That’s a good question. But they build their lodges in a circle, and Vikings also do that. They build the lodges in a circle.

Ramsey Russell: Why?

Elroy Belgaard: And on top of runes –

Ramsey Russell: Why did Viking build their lodges in a circle? To have a social area and meeting area, common area?

Elroy Belgaard: And it might be for a protection just for, if there’s invaders or something. And then you could put a protective wall around the outside. But in the show we found some other things, some other artifacts in episode 4. Oh, I haven’t told you about the show yet.

Ramsey Russell: No, I was just fixing to ask you. Tell me about the show.

Elroy Belgaard: So, yeah, so I made this GoFundme and made a YouTube. Well, Peter Stormare, he’s got a production company and they do TV shows and they were thinking about what another TV show to make and he wanted to make one about the Kensington Runestone, a docuseries. And so he was doing research on it and he found my YouTube. So he contacted me and asked if I wanted to be in his series. And I’m like, sure that’d be good. So it’s called Secrets of the Viking Stone and it’s on Amazon and it’s on Discovery plus and it’s free on Tubi.

Ramsey Russell: Tell me about the different episodes, what all topics you all covered and how that process.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah, so there’s 12, 1 hour episodes and I get involved with the skull. So I tell them the whole thing about the skull we found and then we kind of walk through doing the DNA and the carbon dating. And I won’t give away the ending on that, I won’t give you a spoiler on that, you’re going to have to watch how that turns out.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Lightning Lake

You are by 10 mile lake. Just south of there, there’s a lake called Lightning Lake and it’s on the Mastinka river. And the Mistinka river flows into the Red river, which flows to Hudson Bay. But the Mistinka river is as close as you can get to the continental divide. So I think they parked their boats in Lightning Lake, hiked over the continental divide to Palm de Tier Lake, and then they’re in the Mississippi watershed.

Elroy Belgaard: But one, but one of the things that I was, I’m very fascinated by this lake called Lightning Lake. And it’s kind of by where, right where you were yesterday. You are by 10 mile lake. Just south of there, there’s a lake called Lightning Lake and it’s on the Mastinka river. And the Mistinka river flows into the Red river, which flows to Hudson Bay. But the Mistinka river is as close as you can get to the continental divide. So I think they parked their boats in Lightning Lake, hiked over the continental divide to Palm de Tier Lake, and then they’re in the Mississippi watershed. Because the reason I think that is there’s something called an anchor stone. This farmer found a stone, it’s a big rock with a groove carved all the way around it where you would tie a rope like an anchor. So we went out in the show where the farmer told us where he found this anchor stone in Lightning Lake. And we found something that I called the step stone. It’s this big boulder that looks like they carved 3 steps in. So you tie your boat up and it must have been a pretty big boat. And then you would go up the steps into this boat. There’s 3 steps carved. And we found that. Yeah. So if they’re loading furs or whatever, then you would take that boat up to Hudson Bay and get into the big ship. So it wasn’t a big ship, but it would be a pretty sizable boat.

Ramsey Russell: Back in the 1300s and Viking days, where would the market have been for those furs and goods that they were trading? I guess back in Europe. Sweden. England.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah. I think it was a big thing. Beaver was huge. And I don’t know what else. I think it’s mostly beaver was the high demand stuff. And that was part of it, that the trade. So these Vikings, these explorers were trying to figure out what happened to the Greenland Vikings. And maybe they said, oh, they’re way inland. They’re in Minnesota and they’re pagan now. So that might have been what happened. Who knows? Probably it was Native Americans, probably Lakota were in the area at the time. But I think, or was it? Yeah, I could be wrong in that.

Ramsey Russell: So you got the secrets of the Viking Stone. You found these stairs that were going into the boats. And then what? How did the episodes evolve?

Elroy Belgaard: Well, we did the skull. We did Lightning Lake. There’s all these things all over Minnesota. So we’d go and look at them. Altar rock, there’s an episode about the code stone this guy found.

Ramsey Russell: What is a code stone?

Elroy Belgaard: It’s really cool. There’s a big boulder and there’s 3 holes chiseling in it and it’s a same kind of hole, 3 holes in this. But it’s in a regular pattern. But except it would be 4 holes, but one hole is missing. So it’s one, two, then a space and then a hole, and that’s all it is. But just down the hill from that, there’s 3 rocks in that pattern. One, two, then a space and then a rock. And each one of those rocks are in a row, and each one of those has two holes drilled in them. And if you do a metal detector where the third rock, the missing rock should be, we got a huge hit. A metal hit. Like, there’s something down there big and we don’t know what it is.

Ramsey Russell: This is Raiders of the Lost Ark stuff, man.

Elroy Belgaard: Well, wait till I get the Templars involved.

Ramsey Russell: Well, let’s hear it.

Elroy Belgaard: Well, whoever carved the runestone was a knights Templar.

Ramsey Russell: Really? I thought there were in Malta

Elroy Belgaard: They’re in Malta big time, but they’re also in Gotland. After the 1300s and 1309, I think when the king of France killed them all on Friday the 13th, a lot of them fled to Gotland, which is this little island in the Bering Sea off the coast of Sweden. And that’s where the Goths come from. And they became the Teutonic knights and the Cistercian monks, and I think that’s where they took the Templar treasure. But on the runestone, the letter in runic language, the X is the letter A, that’s what an X stands for A in runic letters and there’s 19 X’s on the runestone, and every one has an extra little hook. So there’s an X, this is DaVinci code stuff. There’s like an x and there’s a little X, another X on the top. So that’s called the hooked X. And Christopher Columbus used to mark the Cistercian, he was a Templar, and he used to use a hooked X and stuff like that. So there’s 19 hooked X’s. That’s one of the reasons they thought it was fake, is they go, well, this guy doesn’t even know how to make a proper X, look, he’s got a little extra thing on there. And there’s a secret code chiseled into the Kensington runestone. And Scott Wolter talks a lot about this. He’s a forensic geologist. He’s the one who authenticated it in the year 2000. And he has a TV show and made a bunch of documentaries and this is really his thing. So they double dated it. Like, in rock, we’re here in the 1362, you chisel that in rock? Well, somebody could take a chisel and make that 1462 pretty easy with a chisel. So what they used to do is double date it. They would hide the date in the text by putting a little extra mark next to certain things that – So the year 1362 is coded in the text of the runestone. Well, another hidden text in the runestone is the word grail. There’s an extra mark by a G, and R, and A and a L.

Ramsey Russell: Meaning what?

Elroy Belgaard: So, well, the theory is that this expedition. Here’s my theory, and I think I’m the only one that has this theory, but the king of Norway sent out this expedition. You better go check on those Greenlanders and figure out what’s going on. I think what the expedition did – and he gave this expedition his royal boat, his big, huge boat. I think this expedition moved the Templar treasure from Gotland to the new world. And they were gone for 9 years. I think they stopped in Oak island, dug a big hole, we’re going to bury it in Oak island. And then it flooded, or they discovered there’s too many people here. So we got to go. Let’s go into the smack dab in the middle of the continent where there’s nobody there.

Ramsey Russell: Okay, so I’m a simple man, I’m having a hard time keeping up. So I’m going to recap here. The Vikings were sent to find other Vikings from Greenland that owed the King Norway tax. And they had this massive ship, not just a regular ship, they had a big ship.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Where were the knights of Temple come in. Why would they have gone to Gotland to get – this was after they were killed on that particular fight?

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah. So they fled to the isle of Gotland. And they called themselves a Cistercian monks and they’re Cistercian monks, and then the Teutonic knights.

Ramsey Russell: Okay, so the king and detachment of Vikings, on their way to find the Greenland Vikings swung through and got the Teutonic’s knights treasure and said, well, let’s not give it to the king. Let’s go bury it in the new world.

Elroy Belgaard: Maybe. I don’t know, but I don’t know all the inner workings, or maybe they didn’t tell the king what they’re doing, but I think the fact that he sent – he was the king of Norway and Sweden, but he didn’t send any Swedes, he only sent Norwegians and Goths. And so the Goths were, they’re from Gotland. And there was a war that happened in 1361, the year before in Gotland. And I don’t know how that ties in, but just to say, there used to be Templars on Gotland, and maybe they still are, but that’s where they fled to after. And I think they went to Malta, too, right?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Elroy Belgaard: I know that Templars on Malta.

A Noble Cause

What he wanted to do is have archaeologists dig it up. So he wanted archaeologists to dig there so nobody could say he planted it, that this was a plant, this was fake, which is a very noble cause and a very noble way to do that.

Ramsey Russell: A lot of them. Now, you all went to the code stone and the holes and the space and another hole and then rocks matched it and where a rock should have been, you got a big metal hit. Why didn’t you dig?

Elroy Belgaard: Well, we should have. The guy, his name is Bob. He’s a great guy. Bob Voyles, he knows more about the runestone than I do, you should interview him sometime. Great guy. But he didn’t want to make the mistake that Olaf Omen made. The reason they think it’s fake is, he just had the story. What he wanted to do is have archaeologists dig it up. So he wanted archaeologists to dig there so nobody could say he planted it, that this was a plant, this was fake, which is a very noble cause and a very noble way to do that.

Ramsey Russell: Be kind of hard to fake a bunch of treasure.

Elroy Belgaard: Well, yeah. So he wanted to get permission. And my motto is it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I’ve heard that one.

Elroy Belgaard: So because it’s on state land. So in order to get permission, he needed to get permission from the state archaeologists, who agreed, the board of Native American, whatever they agreed, all these things agreed to do it, except for the DNR because it’s natural prairie. Right where we want to dig, there’s buckthorn, which is invasive, and you’re supposed to dig up the buckthorn. And we can dig up the buckthorn for, there’s a buckthorn bush right there, want us to dig it up? So we haven’t given up, but getting permission is kind of hard once you try to ask it.

Ramsey Russell: Here’s a question, is, why do scientists – you said the other night that some scientists dispute that there were Vikings or those Europeans at that time. Why did they dispute it? What is the basis of their dispute? I mean, because you’ve laid out a pretty incredible story based on the artifacts and the arrowheads, and the farm implements and the code stones and the runestones, and the moore stones. What is there to dispute?

Elroy Belgaard: Mostly it’s the language of the runestone. So we had this guy who’s from Norway, he teaches Viking history at Yale. His name is, shoot, I can’t think of his name right now.

Ramsey Russell: You got to watch those professors. Because sometimes they let their ego get in the way.

Elroy Belgaard: And he’s on the show. The show is good, because we want to show both sides of the argument. So we have a lot of academes saying why they think it’s fake. To his credit, he walked up to the runestone, had never seen it before, and just read it like he was reading the morning newspaper. He just walked up to it, and if you see it, it’s just a bunch of gibberish, but he just walked up to it and just read it. And he said, it’s modern Swedish. And that didn’t around till the 1800s or whatever. Or that those words didn’t appear in a dictionary till the 1500s. Well, my argument is, in 1362, the printing press hadn’t been invented yet. There weren’t any colleges or universities yet, there wasn’t the Internet. And whoever carved wasn’t Swedish. There were no Swedes on this expedition. There was Norwegians and Goths. Gotland has a different dialect than Swedish still today. So to think that in the 1300s, everybody across all of Scandinavia had proper grammar. And it’s really about the grammar. He says they’re using singular verbs.

Ramsey Russell: People do that.

Elroy Belgaard: Not plural verbs.

Ramsey Russell: People do that today. High school graduates do that today. I hear it all the time, I see it all the time. Besides there’s a lot of words, a lot of us say today that aren’t in the dictionary. I think I was 50 years old before a dictionary put the word ain’t in the dictionary. I mean, people have been saying it for hundreds of years.

Elroy Belgaard: Well, and that’s exactly my argument. It’s not proper grammar. And the other thing is, a plural verb usually has an extra letter, like an S at the end. Like, we travelled, we traveles. Well, they don’t say that anymore, but they used to have plural verbs, because many people were traveling, they travels with an S at the end. Well, if you’re chiseling a word in a rock like, oh, geez, I got to make it proper grammar and put the S there, maybe that’s when singular verbs were invented. I don’t know.

Ramsey Russell: Or if you forget it, because I sometimes write so fast, I forget I misspell words, it’s not like I’m going to go back and re chisel it, make another stone. You got a great point right there. Now, here’s a question.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah.

Why Did Vikings Move to Minnesota?

But if you come to Minnesota, if you go to inland Norway and especially Sweden, it looks a lot like Minnesota. It’s very similar. There are a lot of lakes, pine trees, and it’s very fertile land. And that’s what they really wanted was the fertile land.

Ramsey Russell: So the other night, we talked to you, and I was like, man, this is interesting, I’ve never heard about Vikings Minnesota. And then I thought to myself, well, of course I have the Minnesota Vikings, there’s a football franchise called the Vikings, and I guess somebody heard of these Vikings, and I googled it. Founded in 1960, they are named the Vikings of medieval Scandinavia, reflecting the prominent Scandinavian American culture of Minnesota. And if you go to Minnesota, there’s a lot of Scandinavian heritage. So now I get to thinking about this. Isn’t it odd that back in the 1300s preceding Christopher Columbus, Vikings obviously were in Minnesota, according to a lot of the facts you laid out. And hundreds of years later, their ancestors landed presumably on the east coast after coming over on a ship and loaded up in a covered wagon and went west to Minnesota to farm. Why?

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And that can’t be coincidental. What was this an ancestry? Was this something that handed down this story about this magic land, about this place? Is there’s just so much similarity to Minnesota and Scandinavia that, I mean, isn’t that odd? Isn’t that coincident?

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah, it is. It might be a little coincidence, the Norwegians knew about the new world, and maybe, and it’s in the Icelandic tales, so people knew about the new world, but in the 1800s, they didn’t know that Vikings had traveled all the way to Minnesota. So I think it might be a little coincidence. But if you come to Minnesota, if you go to inland Norway and especially Sweden, it looks a lot like Minnesota. It’s very similar. There are a lot of lakes, pine trees, and it’s very fertile land. And that’s what they really wanted was the fertile land. But I heard somebody say, well, but it might be instinctive, too. Well, you probably know about this more than I do, but geese will always travel back to where they were born, or they would go to their instinctively know where to go.

Ramsey Russell: Biologically, it’s called philopatry. And female ducks and geese go back to where they were raised and they bring their mates with them. Their mates tag along. I mean, a dirty guy is going to follow the girl. So they do. They migrate back to these ancestral lands.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah, I guess they know about it because that’s where they’re born, too. But yeah, I think, it’s probably just a little bit of coincidence.

Ramsey Russell: But were you telling me earlier today there was a fable of sorts? There was some kind of story about this?

Elroy Belgaard: Well, there’s the Icelandic fables there. There’s all these Icelandic writings that they thought were fables for years. And it’s about Leif Erikson and all the people going to Vinland, and it’s about Vinland and all this stuff, a lot of people thought it was fake, but now they’re going, oh, these were real. What happened? Maybe not all real, but a lot of these Icelandic tales were probably, the tales of the settlements that happened here in Vinland.

A Mississippi Delta Connection

I’m from Mississippi, where there’s Mississippi delta, there’s just an elaborate system of ancient prehistoric Indian mounds and built for ceremonial purposes, built to get out of flood waters back before the levees and all that kind of stuff. And every night, again in an Ag field, you’ll see a small mound.

Ramsey Russell: It’s all very interesting. John told me to relate his story to you because I was telling him the other night after we talked, we’ve got a goose hunt in Sweden, we go to Sweden to hunt. It’s a beautiful country, and the part of Sweden we hunt is up against the Atlantic, not too far out of Denmark, and it’s a lot of agriculture, and it’s a lot of hardwoods, and really just as a frame of reference for anybody listening, it reminds me of Tennessee. Just rolling topography and wetlands and the time of year I was there in the fall, bright oaks, just very gorgeous, and a lot of agriculture. And one day we were riding down the road, heading back, and out in the middle of this field was this mound. I’m from Mississippi, where there’s Mississippi delta, there’s just an elaborate system of ancient prehistoric Indian mounds and built for ceremonial purposes, built to get out of flood waters back before the levees and all that kind of stuff. And every night, again in an Ag field, you’ll see a small mound, and it’s where a farmer pushed up some dirt and he’ll put a fuel tank to gravity feed his tractors or whatnot, like that. And as we were driving by, I was looking at this out in the field, and it just didn’t strike me as a fuel tank, as a fuel station. So I said to my host, I said, I’m born and raised in the Mississippi delta, and we got all this, my own culture, and I explained it to him, and I said, if we were in Mississippi or Louisiana or Arkansas, I would think, I would point to that and say, that’s an Indian mound. And now, sometimes you drive by some of these Indian mounds in the delta today, and there’s houses built on them, there’s cemeteries on them. You know, they’ve been repurposed for a lot of different reasons. And he said, well, it’s funny you should say that. And he said, let’s drive around, I want to show you. And we drive around, and it’s a very perfect mound. And on the east side was an entrance, and it was about belt tall, and it was stones. It was a stone entrance, and he said, go in there and look. I said, really? And we got on our hands and knees, because you had to get on your hands and knees, you couldn’t bend over and walk. You had to get on your hands and knees and crawl in. And once you’re inside, we lit our phones, and we’re inside just like a little igloo, think of an igloo, but it was stone. Inside this soil was stone. And we crawled out, and I go, okay, so what is it? He goes, it’s a Viking burial mound. And a few days later, we were jump shooting mallards, and they were pushing a little wetland, and they’re flying out, bam, bam, you’re shooting. And one I shot sailed about 300 or 400 yards across this Ag field and crashed. And he tried it off with his lab. And when he came back, he opened up his hand, and he showed me this beautiful metal spear tip. Like, we find arrowheads over here, but over there it’s a lot of metal. And there at his home that night, he showed me a lot of metal type artifacts that he had found. One time I read recently, somewhere on the Internet, somebody somewhere Norway or Sweden or Denmark, and it just blows my mind that for the hundreds or thousands of years that it just stood there. But somebody, a duck hunter, it sounded like, beached his craft. And it wasn’t a sand beach, it was a stone beach. And anchored his boat, went to go do something, and noticed standing up in the rocky shore was a sword, like a Viking sword, like, somebody just planted with the handle up, just stuck in the soil and walked off. And I don’t know, got eaten by a bear or didn’t come back. Never came back to get his sword. And it had been standing there for hundreds of years. And that kind of stuff just fascinates me. What do you think about that Viking burial mound?

Elroy Belgaard: No, that’s awesome, that’s very cool. Well, we kind of deal with that in the show a little bit because one of the things we do is we went to Maine to look for – we had this guy from Norway, his name is Sturla, who has this theory that there’s probably a settlement in Maine, like the Gulf of Maine, has all these islands, like 5000 islands. And they found a Viking penny in Maine, it was a native American trading site and with thousands of artifacts, but amongst them was a penny from Norway from like 1100. Yeah, it’s called the Maine Penny. And so he had this whole idea that there’s probably a settlement somewhere in one of these islands because he thinks probably what happened is the Vikings would come down and park on an island and then light a fire and let the natives know they’re ready to trade. And when they see a fire on land, they’d go in and they’d trade or something.

Ramsey Russell: The store is open. Come get beads. I wonder what all they did trade back then.

Elroy Belgaard: Well, it was fur and I don’t remember fur mostly. Maybe not beads, but pennies, evidently. Probably metal. They probably brought metal.

Ramsey Russell: What would an Indian in Maine in 1100 need with a coin other than it was a shiny object.

Elroy Belgaard: They drilled a hole in it and was probably like a necklace or something.

Ramsey Russell: Isn’t that something?

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Go ahead.

Elroy Belgaard: We found this island that we didn’t find much, but it’s called Pond island, and we did metal detecting, all the stuff we found was from the 1800s because there was a farm on that island at one point. We were going to leave and we had to go around to the opposite end of the island. And they’re going to take the boat around. And I told Peter, well, I’m going to walk across this island just to see if there’s anything in the middle of this island, that we hadn’t looked for. And right smack dab in the middle of the island, I think I found an old well, but I took some pictures of it and we had to go, and that was it. But it was a depression, there’s no rocks anywhere, but there is a depression in the middle of this island with a big flat rock next to it. Like they had a well or a cache or something, and then they would cover it with this big rock. So I just took some pictures of it and moved on. Yeah, there’s a lot of interesting stuff on the east coast, too, because that’s probably where Vinland was. There’s a tower in Newfoundland, not Newfoundland, in Newport, Rhode Island, what’s it called? The Newport Tower. And it was there when the settlers got there. When the Mayflower landed, they sailed around the cape and down around the southern, that part in Rhode Island, there’s another bay down there, Narragansett Bay. There’s a big tower there, and they went, who built that? And the Plymouth settlement said that there was already a European type settlement there in Newport. And they didn’t go to shore – anyway, so that’s where people think. And there’s a big boulder found in Narragansett Bay with runic lettering carved in it, including a hooked X in Narragansett Bay that was found. So that might have been what they called Vinland.

Ramsey Russell: We started off thinking or talking about the Vikings coming in down the rivers from Hudson Bay, which makes sense they would have kind of come in from that way because they were so predominant on Greenland.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah.

An Exciting Quest

And so, anyway, so it’d be fun to actually see if I could get from Runestone Hill to Duluth in 14 days. 

Ramsey Russell: But now you say there’s different stones and artifacts beyond Minnesota, clear out domain and Rhode Island. Has here been any evidence that maybe that would link, are there any ruins or artifacts or anything found between, let’s say, Maine and Minnesota to where maybe they landed on a boat and then walked or progressed without a boat.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And inhabited it for a period of time.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah. There are other artifacts, but it’s mostly along the St. Lawrence Seaway. St. Lawrence River. There’s a stone in Michigan that’s like a Viking ship carved in it. And so my theory is, I used to think they – So the big question is, how do you get to Kensington, Minnesota, from Norway? Well, they left their ship by the sea, they don’t say what sea, I wish they would have. But the options are Hudson Bay or maybe Lake Winnipeg, which is an inland sea kind of, or Lake Superior.

Ramsey Russell: A great lake in the sea, wouldn’t be much different to them.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah, an inland sea, the word they use could mean inland sea. And the great lakes, Lake Superior, as big as a lot of seas, it’s just not saltwater. It would be a thousand miles to get to Lake Winnipeg, and it’s only 350 miles to get to Duluth. And I started thinking about it, but there’s an obvious way to get to Hudson Bay, just go up the red river. But it’s so twisty turny, it would take you way more than 14 days. So I started thinking about it. How could I get to Duluth in 14 days? So, like I say, I used to go on a lot of canoe trips, so I just got on Google Earth and pretended I was mapping out a canoe trip. Well, Alexandria is very close to Kensington, where the runestone was found. And there’s a big chain of lakes that are connected that go right through Alexandria. There’s 20 miles of lakes, and if you can get to that bottom lake, it’s called Lake Mary, it’s about 5 miles away from Runestone hill, and there’s actually a couple of ponds in between that you could hop from pond to pond and get to Lake Mary. If you get to Lake Mary, it’s 20 miles of lakes, and then there’s a river called the Long Prairie River that flows out of Casco Lake. Oh, shoot, I can’t remember the name of that upper lake out of the top lake. It’s called the Long Prairie river. And it goes for 94 miles downstream to the crow wing river, which flows into the Mississippi. Then you have to go 115 miles up the Mississippi to big Sandy Lake. And then there’s a portage, you’d have to take a portage to get to the St. Louis river, which flows into Duluth. And so there’s one portage. So if you get to that Lake Mary, there’s one portage from Runestone Hill to Duluth. And where that portage is, there’s still a portage, it’s called the Savannah Portage, and it’s famous. Native Americans used to use it. The French fur traders use it. It’s a famous portage, and that’s probably how they got there. So I wanted to prove that. So last summer, we found this old wooden boat that we fixed up that 3 people could row, it’s kind of big. You could have 3 people rowing and one guy in the back steering. And we started at the museum in Alexandria and portaged it down to that lake, and then started rowing and went into the long prairie river, just to see if that was even doable. And we went about 12 miles up the Long Prairie River, and that was it, we couldn’t go anymore. But I just wanted to prove that it was navigable, because as you go, more rivers flow into it, and it gets bigger and bigger and faster and faster. The part that I was unsure of is the beginning part.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Elroy Belgaard: And so, anyway, so it’d be fun to actually see if I could get from Runestone Hill to Duluth in 14 days. That would be my quest.

Ramsey Russell: How far west, and how far south have Viking artifacts been found in North America?

Elroy Belgaard: That’s a good question. Some in North Dakota. There’s been some stuff found in North Dakota. I can’t think of them off the top of my head. There’s supposedly a runestone at the bottom of the Missouri River in Mandan, North Dakota. And the Mandan Indians are interesting because when the French fur traders first met them, they were reported to have blonde hair and blue eyes, and their language sounded European, they said. And Mandan sounds like Scandan, like Scandinavia.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Elroy Belgaard: And so the theory is that the expedition, some of the expedition never made it back to Norway, and they just stayed here and intermingled with the natives and became the Mandan Indians. That’s a theory.

Ramsey Russell: Very interesting.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah.

On the Hunt for 3 Runestones

Well, to let you know there’s three other runestones I’m looking for. 

Ramsey Russell: What next for you, Elroy? What do you hope to find? When does your quest stop? What is your goal?

Elroy Belgaard: My goal is to find – Well, to let you know there’s three other runestones I’m looking for. Since I started this, 3 other people have come forward to me and had the exact same story, basically, is their grandpa or great grandpa, right around the time when the runestone was big, found a runestone on their farm, didn’t want anything to do with it. One threw it down an old well and filled it in, one threw it in the creek and one threw it in the lake.

Ramsey Russell: Wait a minute. I mean, I can understand, I find a runestone, and now we’re talking back, way back when, 1800s. How scandalous could it have been?

Elroy Belgaard: Well, like I say, it kind of ruined Olaf’s life. It was huge.

Ramsey Russell: Why would the kids have committed suicide over something like this?

Elroy Belgaard: Because they were accused of fraud. They’re accused of faking it. And there would be people like, Olaf would be out just doing his farming. And there were gawkers, people would come and just watch him. It was huge news back then, and it was big news. And going back to why is the team named the Vikings? Well, if you go to Alexandria or anywhere up there, everything is Viking. It’s Viking Auto, Viking bank, Viking car wash, and in the 60s, the runestone was a much bigger deal, and it was part of our culture, they used to teach it in school, they taught it to me when I was a kid. But people have lost interest in it.

Ramsey Russell: Not all of us.

Elroy Belgaard: So, yeah, there’s 3 other runestones I’m looking for. If we find one, that would prove it, that’s like, okay, here’s another runestone. But the big thing is I want to find where the massacre took place. I say massacre, battle where the 10 men were killed and find the dead, find their grace.

Ramsey Russell: I would have assumed it was near the runestone.

Elroy Belgaard: It says it’s one day’s journey north. One day’s journey north from – Well, the runestone says one day’s journey north from this island. Right. Well, now, Runestone Hill is a hill, but it’s got water on three sides. The first thing that the settlers did when they got there was knock down all the beaver dams and trade all the swamps so they could farm them. And that’s what Olaf omen did. He knocked. There was a beaver dam right there, and he knocked it down because he wanted to farm the lowland. But had that beaver dam been there, the water level probably was higher, and then you could take a boat from Runestone Hill. You wouldn’t have to Portage, there’ll be no portages until you got to the savannah portage.

Ramsey Russell: That would have been one heck of a beaver dam.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah, right. Well, there were beaver dams. It was all different when people got here, there were canals, everybody traveled by, that was the way to travel was by boat. The farmers would travel by boat because it’s a very easy way to get around. Yeah, how far is one day’s journey north? A lot of people think, there’s a lot of theories of where that is, and I’m not going to tell you the details, but a friend of mine who is, knows there, again, knows more about this than me. He’s been researching this his whole life, I think he cracked the code – because the problem with the runestone, it says we had our camp by two skerry. What’s a scary?

Ramsey Russell: I don’t know.

Elroy Belgaard: I know. Nobody knows. And skerry is actually an English word, an old English word that means rocky island. But the word on the runestone is sklr and nobody know. And it might have been one of those things that the people on Gotland in 1362 knows what it meant, but we don’t know what it means now. Well, this guy, and I’m not going to say it now because it’s going to – this is the whole reason for season 2, is this guy, I think, figured out what that word means and use that. And he showed me where he thinks it happened, and I think he and the farmer there, the farmer’s dad or grandpa, always thought that there was a depression in the land that he thought was a mass grave.

Ramsey Russell: My goodness.

Elroy Belgaard: So, I call that the big kahuna. That’s the big kahuna. That’s all I’m going to say about it.

Ramsey Russell: When does the second season Secrets of the Viking Stone, when did it start? And where will it be aired?

Elroy Belgaard: We’re all set to do another season, and then COVID hit and all the funding dried up, and so everything came to a screeching halt. And so I’m personally trying to get it going again, and Peter Stormare wants to get it going again, too, but we’re having a hard time, it’s all about the Benjamin because to get a film crew and –

Ramsey Russell: All about the money. I think you need to go scratch around with those – You go scratch around those stones and hit pay dirt, you can do filming, you can do whatever you want to.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah, that’s true. Well, and that’s what I have been doing. I’ve just been going up by myself with, or with my cousins or whatever, and just with my iPhone and just filming it myself. But it’s not worthy of a TV show, but if I find something, Bob’s your uncle, it’s back on.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. I never heard the relation between the Knights of Templar and Vikings. I did not know that there was a missing knights of Templar treasure.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Is that common knowledge?

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah. Like, if you watch, what’s the movie with Nicolas Cage?

Ramsey Russell: Well, yeah, I remember that movie where they’re chasing the round –

Elroy Belgaard: The Raiders of the Lost Ark, the 3rd Indiana Jones movie that was about the Holy Grail, and the guy and the knight who has the Holy Grail is the Knights Templar. And then the Nicolas Cage movie, what’s that called?

Ramsey Russell: But I guess I just –

Elroy Belgaard: Something treasured.

Ramsey Russell: I just assumed that those storylines were made up. I mean, I didn’t realize there was really a missing treasure. Knights of the Templar. I didn’t realize that Knights of the Templar really held the Holy Grail well.

Season 2: The Knights Templar’s Wealth 

Because they were in the crusades during the 1100. They were in Jerusalem during the Crusades. And after the crusades, they became extremely wealthy. Like, they were richer than the kings. They had more money than – in fact, that’s why they were killed, because the French king needed money and he asked for a loan from the Templars.

Elroy Belgaard: Because they were in the crusades during the 1100. They were in Jerusalem during the Crusades. And after the crusades, they became extremely wealthy. Like, they were richer than the kings. They had more money than – in fact, that’s why they were killed, because the French king needed money and he asked for a loan from the Templars. And they said they wouldn’t give him, something happened, they wouldn’t give him the money or whatever. And so he says, that’s it, and killed them all or not all of them. So they became quite rich because there was a temple, there was the temple or a temple in Jerusalem that reportedly went deep underground, many levels. And Scott Walter talks about this. He’s written a lot of books about this. The hooked x. He wrote a book called The Hooked X. And so I think they fled Europe, went to Gotland, hid it there for a while, and things got heated up. Do you ever watch Oak island? Ever watch the TV show Oak Island? They landed. Oak Island is right by the mouth of the St. Lawrence Seaway. They dug a big hole and it flooded, and they’re like, well, this isn’t going to work. And I think that’s what I – Yeah. And I have a lot more to say on that, but I don’t want to do. That’s another reason for season two.

Ramsey Russell: I got you. Elroy, I appreciate you. I’ve enjoyed hearing this story, and I appreciate your time, and I appreciate you sharing it with us.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah, well, thanks. No, this is great. I appreciate meeting you.

Ramsey Russell: Yes, sir.

Elroy Belgaard: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Yes, sir.

Elroy Belgaard: I’m going to have to check out your blog.

Ramsey Russell: Well, come on. And, folks, I appreciate you all listening this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. In the words of old Paul Harvey, now you know the rest of the story behind a football franchise, The Minnesota Vikings. See you next time.