A man on a hike in Austrått, Norway, accidentally made a discovery straight out of a King Arthur legend.
The Norwegian hiker, who has preferred to remain anonymous, said he noticed a tree felled by a recent storm, and began skimming and probing the ground around the fallen tree. “I like to explore and get to know the local area,” he told Fox News. “I saw a slight rise in the soil under the tree and poked at it with a stick. Suddenly I saw something gleaming. I didn’t quite understand what I had found.”
When he finished digging up the sword, he found himself holding a small, six centimeter-wide blade fragment, seemingly forged entirely out of gold. It was richly decorated with lavish designs and crenulations.
While not actually turning out to be a piece of a sword straight out of legends, officials were still awestruck by the find. “It is richly decorated and would have adorned a scabbard worn on a belt, from which the sword hung,” they noted. Officials also said that a blade like this “likely belonged to a chieftain who ruled at Hove.” A find like this one is incredibly rare. “This is the first time such a find has been made in Rogaland, and only 17 others have been found in Northern Europe so far.” The fragment dates back all the way to the sixth century, nearly 1,500-years-old. This was the time of Norway’s Migration Period, an era of unrest and disruption after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Archaeologist and university professor Håkon Reiersen shed some more light on the blade fragment. He claimed that the sword’s owner, “was likely the leader in this area in the first half of the sixth century, with a retinue of loyal warriors. Gold scabbard fittings usually show little sign of use, but this one is worn and well used, which suggests the chieftain actually used it a great deal. It emphasized his position and power.” When the fragment was first discovered, Professor Reiersen was quite struck by it. “You are completely taken by surprise when finds like this appear. The odds of finding something like this are minimal.”
But why was this sword fragment buried in this small crevice to begin with? Officials believe that the blade fragment was placed here as an offering to the gods. “At that time, there were crop failures and crisis, and people likely deposited valuable objects as offerings in hopes of better times,” officials said.
The discovery was first announced on May 5th by the University of Stavanger, a public university in Norway. Kristin Armstrong-Oma, the director of the Museum of Archaeology and a professor at the University of Stavanger, said she “extend[s] a big thank you to a very observant hiker.”
The blade fragment has been placed within this museum for the public to view. “At the museum we have some of the world’s leading researchers on such objects, which allows us to continue studying the find itself and its ornamentation and to discover new answers about the elite who ruled here at that time,” she said. “This find will be made available to the public, so people can see it and share in the gold fever with us.”
