Paul Knutson

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Paul Knutson (Paal Knutzsson and numerous other variants) was a 14th-century law officer at Bergen in Norway. In the 1340s he was an ombudsman, and by 1348 he had been promoted to lawman of the Gulathing. In November 1354 he was directed by King Magnus of Sweden and Norway to travel to Greenland and work to preserve Christian culture there^*. However, Magnus was ruling Norway only as regent for his son Haakon, who came of age a few months later, and there is no evidence that the expedition ever sailed- except for the negative evidence that the 1354 order seems to be the only document mentioning Knutson after 1348.^[1] Although this indicates that Knutson survived the arrival of the Black Death plague at Bergen in 1349, many other government officials throughout the country did not, and a breakdown in record-keeping means that it is very difficult to tell what was actually happening in the years following the plague. Some researchers assert that Knutson's expedition journeyed deep into North America, met with disaster, and created the Kensington Runestone.

^* Unlike most earlier documents relating to Knutson, this order only survives via a 16th century Danish translation, so its precise significance is open to interpretation.