Overview

In the year 1354 King Magnus of Norway commissioned Paul Knutson to organize an expedition to search for the inhabitants of the Western Greenland Colony who were reported missing in 1342. Viking's Last Voyage is a story about how that search might have unfolded. The search lasted about eight years, but the story relates only to the latter part of that time. The search ultimately took the expedition into Hudson Bay, up the Nelson River, down lake Winnipeg, then up the Red River of the North, eastward on the Buffalo River, and to Big Cormorant Lake in west-central Minnesota. As the search proceeded into the interior of America there was considerable interaction with Native Americans. Initially the Ojibwes were hostile and accounted for the loss of 16 of the 20 who had traveled inland. A record of that loss was recorded in Norse runes on a stone that was unearthed near Kennsington, Minnesota in 1898. Following that loss, the survivors aided by a fortuitous romance between one of the survivors and an Indian maiden they reach the Dakotas and Mandans who were friendly. Among the Mandans they found the members of the Lost Greenland Colony. Unfortunately the news never reached the remaining 10 Scandinavian who had remained at Hudson Bay before they set sail for Norway. Three of the surviving Norsemen married into the tribes, but Paul Knutson traveled westward with two Norse/Mandan guides in search of a fabled river that laid far to the west and emptied into a salt sea. He was never heard from again. Over the centuries the whole Colony disappeared as a result of intermarriage with the Mandans and Dakotas.

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Iral Conrad Nelson (1900-1994), principal author was born and raised on a farm near Gordonsville, Minnesota. He attended the local public schools which were limited to Grammar School and two years of High School. Later he learned the accounting business through a correspondence course. He followed banking for some years, and in 1943 he established his own public accounting practice in Eugene, Oregon which he continued until his retirement in 1981. His paternal grandparents had emigrated from Norway to Minnesota in 1852, and he was always interested in the Norwegian language and culture. He became reasonably fluent in Norwegian through study of the language on Linguaphone audio records. His associates at the Sons of Norway Lodge told him that he would do well speaking with the natives in Norway. His maternal grandfather emigrated from South Wales to Pennsylvania in about 1820. His maternal grand-mother was born in western Pennsylvania and was likely a mix of Scotch-Irish and German, but with a touch of Native American from the 1700's. (His grandmother once told his older brother, ""You got more Indian in you than you think you have."" The latter likely had some influence on the treatment of Native Americans in the story. His idea for the Viking""s Last Voyage apparently came from reading of The Riddle of the Kensington Stone published in the Reader's Digest, November 1948. The runic writing on the Kensington Runestone purports to provide evidence of Scandinavians in Minnesota in the 14th century. Iral Clair Nelson (1927-), secondary author is the son of the principal author. He was born and raised in Oregon and Idaho. He received a Masters Degree in Physics at the University of Oregon in 1955, married, and went to work in radiation and environmental protection at the Hanford Project in Richland, Washington which he continued for nearly 50 years. He became Board Certified in Health Physics in 1962 and now holds emeritus status. He served in the US Navy during the Korean War and briefly in WWII. The decision to reconstruct Viking's Last Voyage as written on a typewriter to digital form for publication was based on fulfilling his father's desire to have the story made available to the public, encouragement from his neighbor, Alan Aamot, and his having retired and thus having time to devote to the project. In the process of editing the story considerable research was done. The research was made possible because of the 17th and 18th century journals and other information available on the Internet-none of which were available to his father. The more the related aspects were investigated the more plausible the story became.

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