Books like this one owe a debt to other books: Alice Beck Kehoe’s The Kensington Runestone: Approaching a Research Question Holistically explores the runestone evidence from all sides; the Olof Ohman letter and affidavit can be found in Theodore C. Blegen’s The Kensington Rune Stone: New Light on an Old Riddle and other sources; Annette Kolodny’s In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery is a good in-depth read about the Norse sagas; the Good Earth Woman’s story related by Ruth-Ann Tuttle is given in Ruth Landes’s 1968 book The Mystic Lake Sioux: Sociology of the Mdewakantonwan Santee; and Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed includes a section on the Greenlanders and the mystery of their disappearance. Newton Horace Winchell was the state geologist at the time; I relied on his 1910 report to the Minnesota Historical Society as the starting point for Dagmar Holm’s translation of the stone’s text. Newton Horace Winchell was the state geologist at the time; I relied on his 1910 report to the Minnesota Historical Society as the starting point for Dagmar Holm’s translation of the stone’s text. The poster she shows Julia is based on the reading of the stone’s text from John D. Bengtson’s article, The Kensington Rune Stone: A Study Guide, available at http://jdbengt.net.
As always, grateful thanks go out to my editor, Alex Carr, my agent, Jill Marsal, and the book’s trusty team at 47North. John Baron, Jill Marsal, and Richard Ellis Preston, Jr. all read a pre-publication version of the manuscript and provided much appreciated feedback. Angela Polidoro is the most dedicated developmental editor an author could hope to have and the book benefited greatly from her input, as well as that of copyeditor Richard Camp. MPS Ltd. did the lovely runestone illustrations and The Book Designers are overdue thanks for the covers of both the first book and this second one.
The power of the electronic age is that an author can ping people with questions that arise during the creation of a manuscript, and my thanks go out to everyone who responded to requests I sent out regarding pronunciation, copyright, and other issues.
A shoutout also goes to all 47North authors, about as lively and supportive bunch as you could hope to meet.
Finally, as always, my deepest thanks go to my family—the Maslakovic and Baron clans, and, most of all, to my son, Dennis, and my husband, John.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Neve Maslakovic is the author of the Incident series, as well as a stand-alone novel, Regarding Ducks and Universes. Before turning her hand to writing fiction, Neve earned her PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford University’s STAR (Space, Telecommunications, and Radioscience) Laboratory. Born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), Neve currently lives with her husband and son near Minneapolis/St. Paul, where she admits to enjoying the winters. Find out more on www.nevemaslakovic.com or follow Neve on Twitter, @NeveMaslakovic.
The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) Page 27
