Metal detectorist stumbles on ‘beautiful’ item — and finds unique Viking artifact
On a farm in the Netherlands, a metal detectorist stumbled on an intricately shaped item. His small find turned out to be an “extraordinary” fragment of a unique Viking weapon.
Sander Visser swept his metal detector along the ground of a farm near Witmarsum in early May and heard a “high, clear sound” from the device. He dug a few inches and uncovered a decorated item, the Fries Museum and Fryske Akademy said in a Nov. 19 news release.
Visser gave his find to the museum, where archaeologists identified it as the pommel cap, or handle end, of a 1,000-year-old Viking sword.
The Fries Museum shared photos of the pommel cap on Facebook. It has five distinct sections with curling designs etched on each. The center section looks like a swirled knot.
Archaeologists identified the other sections as depicting the heads of “a wild boar,” the museum said. “The boars’ upward curling mouths” form the outer two sections and “are still clearly visible.”
Such an animal decoration is known as the “Mammen style … named after a discovery in the Danish town of Mammen,” the museum wrote on Facebook. A diagram shows what the full sword handle might have looked like.
“In Viking culture, wild boars symbolized strength and courage, and were associated with combat and protection,” the museum said.
“This beautiful pommel cap is the first of its kind to be found in the Netherlands (and) it enriches our understanding,” Nelleke IJssennagger-van der Pluijm, director of the Fryske Akademy, said in the release. “This extraordinary find shows that there is still a lot to discover about the Viking Age in Frisia.”
Experts don’t know how the sword fragment came to be in Witmarsum.
The pommel cap might have belonged to an “epic” sword, a type of early medieval weapon with “a formidable reputation” that would be “passed down for generations” and occasionally modified, the museum said.
Museum officials plan to put Visser’s find on display in 2025.
Witmarsum is a village in the northern Netherlands and a roughly 90-mile drive northeast from Amsterdam.
This story was originally published November 22, 2024 at 1:19 PM with the headline "Metal detectorist stumbles on ‘beautiful’ item — and finds unique Viking artifact."
