A Norwegian has used a metal detector to find nine pendants, three rings and ten gold beads that someone may have worn as eye-catching jewelry 1,500 years ago
September 7, 2023, 9:28 am ET
• 2 min reading
COPENHAGEN, Denmark — At first, the Norwegian thought his metal detector was responding to chocolate money buried in the ground. It turned out to be nine pendants, three rings and ten gold beads that someone 1,500 years ago might have worn as showy jewelry.
The rare find was made by 51-year-old Erlend Bore this summer on the southern island of Rennesoey, near the city of Stavanger. Bore bought his first metal detector earlier this year to pursue a hobby after his doctor advised him to get out instead of sitting on the couch.
Ole Madsen, director of the University of Stavanger’s Archaeological Museum, said that it was “extremely unusual” to “find so much gold at the same time.”
In August, Bore began circling the mountainous island with his metal detector. A statement from the university said he first found some scrap metal but later discovered something “completely unreal” – the treasure, which weighed just over 100 grams.
Under Norwegian law, items from before 1537 and coins older than 1650 are considered state property and must be surrendered.
Associate Professor Håkon Reiersen from the museum said the gold pendants – flat, thin, single-faced gold medals called bracteates – date from around AD 500, the so-called Migration Period in Norway, which is between 400 and around 550 AD when it was discovered there were widespread migrations in Europe.
The pendants and gold beads were part of a “very eye-catching necklace” made by skilled jewelers and worn by the most powerful in society, Reiersen said. He added that “a similar discovery has not been made in Norway since the 19th century and it is also a very unusual discovery in the Scandinavian context.”
An expert on such pendants, Professor Sigmund Oehrl from the same museum, said that about 1,000 golden bracteates have been found so far in Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
He said the symbols on the pendants usually show the Norse god Odin healing his son’s sick horse. In Rennesoey’s models, the horse’s tongue hangs out from the gold tags and “its slumped posture and twisted legs show that it is injured,” Oehrl said.
“The horse symbol symbolized illness and suffering, but at the same time the hope for healing and new life,” he added.
The plan is to exhibit the find at the Archaeological Museum in Stavanger, about 300 kilometers southwest of Oslo.