Imagine you’re 6 years old, it wouldn’t get much better than finding a dinosaur bone or a sword—and that’s exactly when young Henrik turned up on a school field trip.
If there were teachers close at hand, they may have told Henrik not to touch the “rusty piece of metal” he saw sticking out of the ground—tetanus and all that.
If they had, he wouldn’t have found this sword which given it was Norway would have likely belonged to a warrior of the early Viking Age.
Henrik and his class were visiting Gran which is in Hadeland, a region of Norway that translates to “warrior land” and where many important archaeological discoveries have been made.
After he showed the teachers and chaperons the rusty piece of metal, they rather quickly contacted the cultural authorities, who confirmed it was historic.
The weapon is a single-sided iron sword known at the time as a scramseax, also spelled scramasax, and was meant to be sharp on only one side to increase the weight behind its cutting ability.
While it could have been of Norwegian origin, it might also have been forged in France as the earliest date falls before the Viking Age and in the middle of the Merovingian Period.
The sword has now been transferred to the Museum of Cultural History (Kulturhistorisk Museum) in Oslo for preservation.
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In medieval Scandinavia, the word Viking was sort of both a noun and a verb that described the act of sailing abroad with the intention to raid, trade, or both. A warrior at home and not on the sea wasn’t referred to as a Viking, and in the Icelandic family sagas, the characters are sometimes described as “going Viking.”
In that sense, the sword, though undoubtedly belonging to someone familiar with battle, may not necessarily have belonged to a Viking.
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