Gold diggers: Hoard shows Vikings liked their bling
A Danish farm field has yielded a priceless harvest: a buried treasure of Viking gold necklaces, arm rings and other precious objects that could help shed light on the relationships among the Viking elite.
Metal-detector enthusiasts and archaeologists have uncovered roughly 3 pounds of gold from the field, almost all of it discovered in the past 18 months. The cache, known as the Fæsted hoard, is the second-largest known haul of Viking gold and the biggest in Denmark.
The find shows that the king who owned the hoard was “filthy rich,” says curator Lars Grundvad of Denmark’s Sønderskov Museum, who is studying the find. “It raises the question: Where did they get all this gold?”
Despite the image of the Vikings as brutes, many of the objects are exquisitely worked. There are bracelets of gold strands twisted together, goldand-crystal pendants and a unique brooch from which delicate gold chains dangle. There are also silver bracelets, gold beads and fragments of golden jewelry hacked into bits to serve as currency.
No inscriptions accompany the hoard to reveal its history. But Viking age histories provide a clue: Kings evidently showered sumptuous gifts on local chiefs to build alliances. The style of some of the jewelry connects it to the dynasty of Viking King Harald Bluetooth, Grundvad says.
“When we found the first bracelet, we felt we had found gold at the end of the rainbow,” said Marie Aagaard Larsen of Team Rainbow Power, a group of metal-detector enthusiasts. “But when more bracelets appeared, it became almost unreal.”