6-Year-Old Finds Ancient Viking Sword on School Trip

The sword - believed to be around 1,300 years old - was uncovered by Henrik on a class trip to Gran in Norway. Imagine how exciting that would be.

Henrik and his class were visiting a region of Norway called Hadeland, which translates to “warrior land” and it is where many important archaeological discoveries have been made. And, the 6-year-old has just made another one, after he noticed a rusty piece of metal sticking out of the ground and picked it up to show to his teachers.

After looking closer at it and realising that it might not just be a piece of rusty metal, his teachers contacted a team of local archaeologists who later confirmed that it was an important historic discovery.

The weapon is a single-sided iron sword known at the time as a scramseax, and was designed to be sharp on only one side in order to increase the heft behind its cutting ability. Archaeologists from the Cultural Heritage authority in Innlandet think the sword is from the late Merovingian Period, or early Viking Age, around AD 550 to 800. The sword has now been transferred to the Museum of Cultural History (Kulturhistorisk Museum) in Oslo, where it will be cleaned and preserved so that it can be studied further.

Did you know that in medieval Scandinavia, the word Viking was more of a verb than a noun? It described the act of sailing abroad with the intention to raid, trade, or both. A warrior at home and not on the sea was not referred to as a Viking, and in the Icelandic family sagas, the characters are sometimes described as “going Viking.”