Archaeological findings are not always achieved through intense expeditions or excavations in untouched places on our planet. Sometimes they appear in the least expected places and are stumbled upon by people who know absolutely nothing about the subject. That’s what happened to a Norwegian farmer named Oyvind Tveitane Lovra, when he came across a Viking sword, about 1,000 years old.
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Imagine the number of people who must have come across valuable objects for humanity and, out of ignorance, threw them in the trash. That almost happened to the Norwegian farmer. He was with his son, clearing a field that had never been cultivated for planting, and after cleaning it up, they went to dispose of the waste.
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Some of them were made of metal and he decided to check what he had found. He was surprised when he saw a T-shaped handle in one of those scraps. Yes, that was the sword. According to a review on the Nat Geo portal, Oyvind Tveitane Lovra called the authorities to come and look for the artifact.
So, after several days of analysis, they found out that it was a very special Viking sword.
"This is very rare. The sword was the ultimate status symbol in the Viking era, and it was a privilege for someone to be allowed to carry a sword. It is not often that we, as archaeologists, experience something like this," said the archaeologists of the Cultural Heritage of the Provincial Council of Rogaland, Lars Søgaard Sørensen and Kim Thunheim, in a statement.
What makes this Viking sword special?
It was measured and the result was 37 centimeters (it is missing half of the sheet). The fact that it has a T shape is a sign that it was manufactured between the years 900 and 1050. But when a deeper analysis was done, they found the word VLFBERHT.
What does that mean? "This means that it could be a sword known as VLFBERHT, from the Viking era or the High Middle Ages. These are high-quality swords produced in the Frankish Empire that are marked with the name of the weapon's manufacturer," experts said.
Viking swords are a kind of relic for humanity. Figures published by the aforementioned site state that between 3 and 4 thousand Viking swords have been found, but only 45 of them were found in Norway, where theoretically there should be more.