‘Daddy, I’ve got a sword’: weapon lost 1,500 years ago is found

AN EIGHT-YEAR-OLD girl is being hailed as a future queen after she pulled a 1,500-yearold sword from a lake in central Sweden.

Saga Vanecek pulled the sword from Vidostern lake in Tanno, Smaland, earlier this summer, as she was scrabbling for rocks to skim across the surface.

“She picked it up, and when she realised it had a handle, she said ‘Daddy, I’ve got a sword!’,” her father Andy Vanecek (44) said.

“She lifted it up kind of like a warrior, and then it bent, and I realised that’s not how a stick would break. So I ran up to her and thought ‘Can this really be the real thing?’.”

Mr Vanecek, who moved to Sweden from Minnesota a year ago with Saga and Madeleine, his Swedish wife, said the family had to sit on their secret for two months until the find was officially announced this week by the local Jonkoping County Museum.

Awesome

He said his daughter, whose first name means “seeing one” in Old Norse, was oblivious to the current explosion of interest on social media.

“Everyone is saying on Twitter and Reddit, ‘We have a new queen!’ and people want Saga to overthrow Trump, which I think is awesome,” Mr Vanecek laughed. “They’re saying ‘she’s called Saga. The sword found her!’.”

Mr Vanecek thought the sword might be an old toy but when a colleague shared photos of it with Annie Rosen, a local museum archaeologist, she immediately identified it. “She said: ‘We need to get it preserved quickly, so it doesn’t rust into dust’.”

The museum’s conservationists now estimate the 85cm sword is 1,500 years old, meaning it predates the Viking Age by more than 200 years.