Viking Sword in Ancient Grave Unearthed Under Family Home

A family in Norway have found a grave in their backyard while preparing the area to build a house extension.

Oddbjørn Holum Heiland began digging behind his house in Setesdal on Friday night when he made the discovery. "I wasn't going to dig a lot, just a little bit in the slope behind the house, to get some more space between the house and the land," Heiland told sciencenorway.no.

However, when he began to remove the top soil, he uncovered an oblong stone. At first he didn't think anything of it but, as he dug a little deeper, he found something he could not ignore.

"I looked at it and thought that this looks a lot like a sword blade," Heiland said. "And then when I released the contents of the digging bucket, the hilt of the sword fell out."

Immediately, he stopped digging and waited to call the county municipality.

Local archaeologist, Joakim Wintervoll, was first alerted to the discover on Monday morning. "At first I thought 'is this for real?'" he told Newsweek. "At that point I hadn't even eaten breakfast yet and knew nothing about the circumstances."

Wintervoll asked Heiland to send a photo of the discovery. "That was when it sunk that this was a big deal," he said. "From the picture it was clearly a sword and lot of other I object I could identify a historic artifact."

Along with Jo-Simon Frøshaug Stokke from the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, Wintervoll arrived at the site and was able to confirm the identity of the sword.

"We think it is from the Viking period around 9th to 10th century, based on the shape on the handle," he said. "The conservationist at the Museum in Oslo will give the final verdict when the have had a bit of time to analyse it closer."

On further investigation, the grave also contained a lance, glass bead gilded with gold, a belt buckle and a broach. "It is easy to think, based on the sword and the lance, that a warrior was buried here," Wintervoll said. "Possibly someone used to mounted combat. The findings of gilded glass beads, gold-painted belt buckle and a broach with hand-crafted animal figures on it, show that this person was a some-one of means."

The area of Setesdalen as a whole is littered with Viking finds, although finding a sword like this is still very unusual. "Most archaeologist never get to see or touch a sword in their career, so I did feel quite lucky," Wintervoll said. "The most recent find of a sword was in 2011 when there was an excavation in the neighboring municipality."

Interestingly, a grave with similar contents was unearthed close by Heiland's home in 1930. "It is too early to day if these two graves have a connection, but it is interesting that they are relatively close and have almost identical finds in them," Wintervoll said.

The sword and the rest of the grave's contents have now been sent to the Cultural Heritage Museum in Oslo and Wintervoll will continue to excavate what is left of the grave this week. "We don't have high hopes to find anything more, but we want to take scientific sample from the grave and maybe the might be something that the finder missed," he said.

Further analysis will be performed on the objects by conservationists at the museum to learn more about the history of these items and the grave's inhabitant.