600-Year-Old American Indian Historical Account Has Old Norse Words By Larry Stroud, Guard Associate Editor Published on Thursday March 15, 2007 Vikings and Algonquins. The first American multi-culturalists? BIG BAY, Mich. — Two experts on ancient America may have solved not only the mysterious disappearance of Norse from the Western Settlement of Greenland in the 1300s, but also are deciphering Delaware (Lenape) Indian history, which they’re finding is written in the Old Norse language. The history tells how some of the Delaware’s ancestors migrated west to America across a frozen sea and intermarried with the Delaware and other Algonquin Indians. Myron Paine, 72, and Frode Th. Omdahl, 51, met on the Internet six years ago when they were each looking for a rare book, “The Viking and the Red Man,” written by the late Reider T. Sherwin. Together they found copies of all eight volumes with the same name, published mostly in the 1940s. Using Sherwin as a reference, they found that much of the Algonquin language consists of Old Norse, including Old Norse root words often strung together to make new words that were adopted by Algonquin speakers. Paine and Omdahl were featured speakers on “Norse Tracks in America” at the first Ancient American Artifact Preservation Foundation annual conference in Big Bay, Mich. in 2005. Paine spoke again at the ’06 conference. Paine is a lifelong student of history who has a doctorate in agriculture engineering. He taught in two universities, and served as a state and regional Extension engineer covering 10 Great Plains states. He later worked as an electrical engineer for three aviation companies, a career that included being a primary writer of test reports for the certification of the Cessna 208 aircraft, the Caravan. He grew up as a farm boy in South Dakota, where the “white faces among the Mandan Indians” intrigued him. Omdahl is a native of Stavanger, Norway who now lives in Asker in the same country. He is educated in journalism, graphic design and marketing communications. A lifelong student of history and an eager genealogist, Omdahl got interested in Norwegian emigration to America. Researching his family history, he also caught interest in “the first wave” of Norwegian emigrants to America, 800 years before the next “wave.” That the Algonquin Indian languages have many words identical to Old Norse is not a new discovery, as evidenced in books other than Sherwin’s, but the application Paine and Omdahl are using is new. The two are using Sherwin’s eight volumes to decipher the Lenape’s ancient picture stick writing, the Walam Olum. For each picture stick, Lenape historians recited or sang a verse. “The memory verses of the Walam Olum were created by people speaking Old Norse,” Paine said. “The Walam Olum is a 600-year-old American history composed of pictographs and memory verses. The history tells of fighting the mound builders, Iroquois, and of the arrival of white men. “Our efforts to decipher the Walam Olum have found a striking correlation of the Walam Olum words to Old Norse phrases,” Paine said. “This relationship strongly supports the hypothesis that Old Norse speakers visited eastern ancient North America and left very tangible evidence of their presence.” “The Algonquin language is Old Norse,” Sherwin wrote in the preface of his Vol. 4. Sherwin, a native of Norway before he moved to the U.S., began comparing the languages because he heard a New England place name before he saw it in print, and was told it was of American Indian origin.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Apr 2014 21:27:33 +0000
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