Two trees fell in northern Ontario and exposed a stone that most people would have walked past without a second thought. Etched into bedrock near Wawa, the stone slab carries a long inscription and a small scene that set archaeologists buzzing.

Early whispers leaned toward Vikings, but the evidence points elsewhere. The inscription records a Swedish version of the Lord’s Prayer, and it was carved with a runic system not used by medieval Norse travelers.

Swedish prayer on an old stone

Henrik Williams from Uppsala University, led the analysis of the runes. He identified a Swedish and Protestant version of the Lord’s Prayer, matching a 1611 model, a finding consistent with expert reports on the discovery.

The carving runs to 255 runic characters, in a panel that measures about 4 by 5 feet (1.2 by 1.5 meters). The runes sit beside a carved image of a boat with about 16 figures and several X marks.

The text uses characters from Futhark, a historic runic alphabet adapted for Swedish by early modern scholars.

The inscription is not a hoax and not a Viking era message. The content, language, and letter forms point to a later hand working with a specific, early modern guide to writing Swedish with runes.

Cracking the Wawa stone text

The Ontario Centre for Archaeological Research and Education (OCARE) coordinated a site visit after initial checks showed the writing was not Indigenous petroglyph art.

The team brought in a runologist, a specialist in runic inscriptions, to read the text under field conditions.

“The longest runic inscription of any on the North American continent,” noted Williams, citing his field report.

That assessment came after several hours of careful character tracing and comparison; the findings highlight the inscription’s scale and rarity.

OCARE’s notes also record that the boat motif sits beside the prayer and that both are deeply carved. No other artifacts were found at the panel, which limits how precisely researchers can date and interpret the scene.

Swedish prayers on the Wawa stone

To understand the text, you need a booklet written by Johannes Bureus in 1611. He was a 17th century Swedish scholar who taught Swedish people how to write with runes. His booklet includes Christian prayers that are written in runes and in Latin letters.

That 1611 template matches what appears on the Wawa stone. Swedish readers in later centuries kept Bureus’s guide alive, which explains how a prayer in early modern Swedish could appear far from Sweden.

The likely scenario is ordinary, not sensational. A Swedish hand in the 1800s, perhaps tied to commerce or travel, spent weeks incising a prayer from a printed model as an act of devotion or identity.

The boat looks like a long, shallow craft with a line of seated figures. The X marks stand near the boat in two clusters, but their meaning is unclear.

Scholars do not yet agree on whether the scene marks a gathering place or simply adorns the prayer. Without artifacts, the safest reading is that the image underlines the text’s devotional purpose.

How old is the prayer slab

The team has not pinned down a date. Field notes point to a 19th century window, but the lack of associated material keeps the estimate cautious.

Weathering patterns and the historical availability of Bureus’s runic prayer suggest a carver working at least a century ago. The present consensus keeps the door open to earlier or later dates until a peer-reviewed study appears.

It is not evidence of a Viking settlement on Lake Superior. The only confirmed Viking settlement in North America is L’Anse aux Meadows, a UNESCO World Heritage site at the tip of Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula.

The Wawa inscription belongs to a later tradition. Medieval Norse used an earlier suite of runes and a different language, while this stone follows a Swedish Lutheran text that is filtered through an early modern revival of runic writing.

Why the Wawa stone matters

Runic literacy did not end in the Middle Ages. This panel shows that Swedish readers, centuries later, still knew how to write their sacred texts in characters that many Europeans had forgotten.

It also expands the very short list of authentic runic inscriptions in North America. Because the prayer is long, it provides a rare, stable sample for studying how Bureus-inspired runic spelling was actually used by later readers.

Researchers still want to explain the boat and the X marks with more than educated guesses. Better dates may come from microerosion studies, close documentation of tool marks, or finds in regional archives.

Public access will require careful conservation. Deep carvings last a long time, but exposure to freeze thaw cycles and foot traffic can erase details that make the text readable.

Viking presence in Canada rests on other evidence. A 2021 dendrochronology and radiocarbon study fixed wood cutting at L’Anse aux Meadows to AD 1021 by detecting a solar storm signature in tree rings.

That benchmark helps draw a clean line between medieval Norse activity in Newfoundland and later European lives inland. The Wawa stone sits on the newer side of that line, a Swedish prayer engraved in Canadian rock.

The study is published in Nature.

Image credit: Ryan Primrose.

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