‘Queen Saga’, 8, pulls ancient sword from a Swedish lake
AN EIGHT-YEAR-OLD girl is being hailed as a future queen after she pulled a 1,500-year-old sword from a lake in central Sweden.
Saga Vanecek pulled the sword from Vidöstern lake in Tånnö, Småland, 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, told The Daily Telegraph.
“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 had to sit on their secret for two months until the find was officially announced this week by the local Jönköping County Museum.
‘When she realised it had a handle, she said ‘Daddy I’ve got a sword’. She lifted it up like a warrior’
He said his daughter, whose first name means “seeing one” in Old Norse, had been excited to talk to Swedish television, radio and newspaper reporters at the time of the announcement, but 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,” Vanecek laughed. “They’re saying ‘she’s called Saga. The sword found her!’”
Mr Vanecek initially thought the sword might be a toy from the Fifties, but when a colleague shared photos of it with Annie Rosén, an archeologist at the local county museum, she immediately identified it. “She said, ‘that’s the real thing. We need to get it preserved quickly, so it doesn’t rust into dust’.”
The museum’s conservationists now estimate that the three-foot (85cm) sword is 1,500 years old, meaning it predates the Viking Age by more than 200 years.
The sword is now at the region’s conservation studio, Studio Västsvensk Konservering, in Gothenburg, where it will be X-rayed next week, and possibly studied under a microscope to see if there are any engravings, and find out about the materials used.