Family digging in backyard stumbles on sword — and finds ‘incredible’ Viking grave
The phone rang at a local government office in Norway. On the line was a man claiming to have found a Viking-age sword while digging by his home.
“At first, I thought, ‘Is this for real?’” Joakim Wintervoll, an archaeologist for Agder County Municipality, told The Viking Herald.
Anne and Oddbjørn Holum Heiland started digging in their backyard to extend their house in Setesdal, the family told ScienceNorway.no. As they were excavating, they stumbled on something unusual.
“I looked at it and thought that this looks a lot like a sword blade,” Oddbjørn Holum Heiland told the outlet. “And then when I released the contents of the digging bucket, the hilt of the sword fell out.”
The Heilands stopped digging and alerted local archaeologists of their find, the Agder County Municipality’s Department for Cultural Heritage Protection and Cultural Tourism said in a June 27 news release.
The family sent a picture of the artifacts to a skeptical Wintervoll, The Viking Herald reported.
“From the picture, it was clearly a sword and many other objects I could identify as historical artifacts,” Wintervoll told the outlet. “That was when it sunk (in) that this was a big deal.”
The Heilands had stumbled on a Viking-era grave, county officials said.
Archaeologists identified the artifacts as a sword, lance, gold-plated belt buckle and several gold-plated beads, the release said. Photos show these finds.
The burial “definitely” belonged to “someone of means, based on the gold-gilded jewelry,” Wintervoll told LiveScience.
Based on the design of the sword, Wintervoll identified the weapon as about 1,100 years old, LiveScience reported.
But the Heiland family had only uncovered about half of the burial site, Jo-Simon Frøshaug Stokke, an archaeologist with the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, told ScienceNorway.no.
The backyard contained a second treasure-filled Viking grave in the backyard, he told the outlet.
Archaeologists found almost 100 jewelry beads, two spinning wheels, several brooches, a saw, an ax, a shield and a mysterious iron object, county officials said on July 7. The burial contains a complete set of weapons.
“It was incredible to sit there and scrape away at the earth, and see more and more objects just appear,” Stokke told ScienceNorway.no.
Excavations also uncovered a “pet rock” whose purpose was to be “smooth and nice to hold,” a possible frying pan, fragments of a wooden jewelry box and some knives, he told the outlet.
The artifacts have been taken to the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo for further study, county officials said.
Setesdal is in Adger County, about 190 miles southwest of Oslo.
Facebook Translate and Google Translate were used to translate the news release from the Agder County Municipality’s Department for Cultural Heritage Protection and Cultural Tourism.
This story was originally published July 11, 2023 at 1:10 PM with the headline "Family digging in backyard stumbles on sword — and finds ‘incredible’ Viking grave."
