They always said he was a sharp student.
A schoolboy in Norway made the discovery of a lifetime when he spotted a rusty object protruding from the ground on a field trip that was actually a 1,300-year-old sword predating the Viking era.
First-grader Henrik Refsnes Mørtvedt, 6, was on a class trip to Norway’s Innlandet county, a vast expanse of untamed wilderness and jaw-dropping mountain ranges, when he made the unusual find as the group made their way across a field.
Rather than trying to yank it out of the ground and potentially destroy the relic, the teachers and students reached out to local archaeologists.
Upon examination, they identified the object as a single-edged sword from Scandinavia’s Merovingian Period — roughly between 550 and 880 AD — which came immediately before the region’s storied Viking Age.
Once the blade was unearthed, it was brought to the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, according to Arkeonews, where it will be studied and properly conserved.
Although the medieval weapon is badly corroded, methods like X-rays and metallurgical analysis could unlock its secrets, including its construction and how it was used centuries ago.
The outlet surmised the sword could have belonged to “a warrior, a farmer with status or someone living through the turbulent centuries that shaped early medieval Norway.”
The rare find happened in Hadeland, in the southeast of the country, which has long attracted archaeologists thanks to its “fertile landscape, old farms, burial mounds and Iron Age remains.”
As incredible as Mørtvedt’s discovery was, 8-year-old Saga Vanacek did him one better when she found a 1,500-year-old pre-Viking sword while swimming in Vidöstern lake in Sweden in 2018.
A year earlier, a group of reindeer hunter on an excursion in southern Norway found a 1,100-year-old sword from the Viking Age on a remote mountain.
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