Hampton, New Hampshire: Thorvald's Rock

My father, who is knowledgeable about the (Minnesota) Vikings, seems skeptical about the authenticity of Thorvald's Rock.

The Tuck Museum is really cute, showing the history of Hampton, but the rock is really nothing much.

This rock, with Viking runes, supposedly marks the AD 1004 grave of Thorvald, brother of Viking explorer Leif Eriksson and son of Erik the Red. Or -- maybe it's just a rock with scratches on it, packaged as a Viking relic by Hampton district court judge Charles A. Lamprey, who wanted to increase the value of land that he was developing for beach cottages in 1902 (Lamprey's claims were boosted, kind of, by runologist Ola Strandwold, who said that the scratches really were ancient, but that they read, "Bui raised stone 1043 AD"). Whatever its pedigree, Thorvald's Rock quickly became a bona-fide tourist attraction. People began to chip away at it for souvenirs. A Massachusetts man tried to drag the entire boulder away in a truck. In 1989 it was moved to the garden of the Tuck Museum, where it's now safely encased in a concrete well topped with a row of iron bars.