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IN THE ANNALS OF LIFE'S MYSTERIES IS THAT OF AN ANCIENT STONE INVOKING THE HELP OF THE VIRGIN MARY

You hear about how Christopher Columbus had such a devotion to the Blessed Mother.

You hear about her huge role in the founding of the first permanent settlement -- St. Augustine, Florida (which has the nation's oldest Marian shrine; it was founded on her birthday).

You hear about how -- indeed -- the Mississippi River was originally known by European settlers as the "River of the Immaculate Conception" (wouldn't it be great to return to those times?). Look at all the missions. Look at all the names of various cities. Lake George was once the "Lake of the Blessed Sacrament" and the Chesapeake Bay was once the "Bay of Saint Mary." Ditto for places in Canada, particularly Quebec.

But what if she had been invoked more than a century before Columbus (and his Santa Maria), before Ponce de Leon in Florida?

Like in the 1300s?

Seems impossible: Columbus didn't come upon the New World until 1492. And St. Augustine was settled in the 1550s.

But there remains the mystery near Kensington, Minnesota, of a man named Olof Ohman who in 1898 with his son dug up a slab of soft calcite on his farm and discovered strange, ancient-looking script on it. When Ohman showed it around, someone in the large Scandinavian community there recognized it as similar to the old rune writing of their ancestors -- as in Vikings. Some think the Vikings may also have had Mass during explorations in Canada many centuries even before that!

The stone was sent to a Professor George Ohrme at Northwestern University, who declared it to be false. Someone had planted it as a hoax, he conjectured. Most authorities agreed with him. But not all; prime among the believers was Professor Sigurdus Nordhal of the University of Iceland.

The problem was that the mysterious carvings on what became known as the Kensington stone involved runic characters or expressions not thought by scholars to be similar to those employed during the 14th century. That was the date indicated in the etchings. Nonetheless, a man named Hjalmar Holand purchased the stone and set about lecturing and writing on it, relating it to the record of a Viking expedition that departed from Norway in 1348 and did not return until 1364. There was also an old account of a vessel around that time creeping into a harbor at Straumfiord, Iceland -- very possibly, he felt, the 1348 expedition. Meantime, some scholars decided that the etched letters were too weathered to be a recent hoax. One program (on the History Channel) suggested that the Knights Templar, in the company of Cistercian monks, brought the Holy Grail to the New World in the late 14th century, and that the runestone might hold the key to its final resting place. That theory is "out there," but one of many.

Anyway, it is one of those "unsolved mysteries." To repeat: most doubt its authenticity.

Scholars did agree that the inscription reads: "Eight Goths and 22 Norwegians on an exploring journey from Vinland very far west. We had camp by two skerries, one day's journey north from this stone. We were fishing one day when we returned home and found ten men red with blood and dead. AVM [Ave Virgin Mary] save us from this evil. We have ten men by the sea to look after our vessel forty-one days' journey from this island. Year 1362."

Ave Maria!

Bless you mother, for all your blessings, through the centuries upon us.

Mary Undoer of Knots plus The Holy Cloak novena, $7.25

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