Beardmore Relics

The cache consists of a Viking Age sword, an axe head, and a bar of undetermined use (possibly a part of a shield).

[1] Curran lectured widely on the theme "A Norseman died in Ontario nine hundred years ago" and published a book on the subject.

[5][1][6] The Canadian author Farley Mowat, in his Westviking (first published in 1965), speculated that the Beardmore relics, and the Kensington Runestone, were proof of Norse occupation in the region of Ontario and parts of Minnesota.

[7] The runestone is considered by runologists and Scandinavian language scholars to be a hoax, but its authenticity is believed by some amateur researchers and locals alike.

Mowat proposed that such an expedition could have been led by Paul Knutson and that the runes upon the Kensington Runestone related to the death of ten of his followers.

Mowat proposed that the Beardmore relics were the remains of a burial and that the Kensington Runestone was originally engraved and left somewhere near the area as the expedition made a hasty northeasterly retreat.

[1] John Robert Colombo wrote that “Archaeologists accused Dodd of fraud, suggesting he had purchased the artifacts from an immigrant from Norway and then ‘salted’ them for later ‘discovery’.

[1][5] According to American anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, during the twenty-five years between the supposed discovery and the son's admission, successive museum directors and staff members knew much of the 'true' history of the relics.