A carving of 255 runic symbols, a boat holding 16 people and 14 X-shaped marks lies on bedrock near the town of Wawa in northern Ontario, and archaeologists are still working out who made it and why. The slab was exposed after a fallen tree tore away several inches of soil, and the find has been described by archaeologist Ryan Primrose as among the least expected of his career.
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Primrose directs the Ontario Centre for Archaeological Education and has followed the site since he became aware of it in 2018. The runes sit inside an area of roughly 1.2 by 1.5 meters, and the grooves are cut deep, a sign that whoever made them put in a great deal of labor. Beside the lettering, the carver added a small boat full of figures and a scatter of crossed marks whose meaning nobody has explained.
What the runes actually say
The word Nordic suggests something ancient and Viking, but the reading by Henrik Williams, an emeritus professor at Uppsala University in Sweden and a runology specialist, points somewhere else entirely. Williams examined the inscription on site and found that the symbols spell out the Lord’s Prayer in Swedish. He traced the wording to a runic version of the prayer from 1611 that was republished in the 19th century, according to HeritageDaily’s report.
That origin settles the question of language and, with it, the likely nationality of the carver, who was almost certainly Swedish. Williams estimated that the work took about two weeks to finish. In the telling given to CBC News, he said he was a little disappointed that the carving was only about 200 years old, a remark that captures how far the reality sits from the Viking story the word runestone invites. The finding also shows why careful reading matters: runes were still being used, studied and republished in Sweden long after the Viking Age, so a runic inscription alone says little about its date.
Dating the carving to the 1800s
Primrose estimates from the wear on the stone that it was made in the early to mid-1800s. The weathering and the historical evidence, as HeritageDaily summarizes Williams’s view, make it far from a relic of the Viking Age. The CBC News report from Sudbury adds that the Hudson’s Bay Company employed Swedes at roughly that time, and that its Michipicoten trading post is not far from the site.
A plausible setting emerges from the record without a proof of it. Researchers have floated two explanations: an informal place of Christian worship for Swedish workers connected with the nearby post, or a private religious project by a single person. Nothing recovered at the site settles the matter. No accompanying artifacts have been found, though researchers suspect the carving may have been deliberately buried at some point, which would explain why it survived under soil. The boat and the crossed marks, by contrast, have no agreed meaning, and the reports do not offer a reading of either.
The find is not new to specialists. The Wawa Runestone entry on Wikipedia records that the stone came to light after trees growing on it fell, that a local historian contacted the Ontario centre in 2018, and that Williams and Loraine Jensen, then president of the American Association for Runic Studies, visited in October 2019 to confirm the inscription was runic. Public announcements followed in June 2025, so the latest coverage revisits an inscription that had been circulating for months.
Protecting the site and what remains unanswered
Primrose has been working with the property owner and has applied for a leasehold on the land, according to HeritageDaily. He hopes to find funding to turn the site into a historical attraction, and the plans could include a protective structure over the bedrock. Exposure to weather is a real concern for a carving that spent perhaps two centuries under cover and is now open to rain, frost and foot traffic. Any protective cover would also have to be designed with the owner, since Primrose has only applied for the leasehold and the work depends on the property owner and on funding that the report describes as still being sought. Until something is built, the exposed rock stays vulnerable.
Other outlets have followed the story as it developed. Archaeology magazine reported in June 2025 that the rock carvings had been explained, and Discover magazine framed the inscription as possibly the longest runic text in North America.
Several questions have no answer yet: who the carver was, why this particular spot was chosen, and what the boat and the 14 X-shaped marks were meant to say. For now the best-supported reading is a Swedish worker or traveler of the early 19th century, praying in stone, in a landscape far from home.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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