Two Viking-era swords were recently unearthed by archaeologists in Sweden. The weapons were once plunged into the earth vertically, between tombs at a mass burial site. While severely corroded by time, incredibly, they had lasted intact and remained in place for some 1,200 years.
It was a motorway expansion that prompted the two-year-long dig in Viby/Norrtuna, outside Köping in Västmanland, southeastern Sweden. Researchers shared their discovery.
The Late Iron Age burial site, dating from approximately 600 to 1000 A.D., consists of 100 graves and includes two mass burial mounds and three stone tombs founded some 200 to 300 years after the underlying site. The position of the swords is unusual, Seiler said. They had been impaled into the ground vertically, on purpose apparently, between two of the three stone tombs.
Knives and arrowheads were also scattered over the ground, so as to prevent the dead from rising, the scientists said. It is also believed that swords’ positions next to the graves of offered those burried there companionship during the voyage to the next world.
By that, we mean “Valhalla,” the legendary great hall of the Norse warrior god, Odin, where slain Vikings are welcomed and received in the afterlife. The researchers shared another compelling possibility: “[The swords] were next to each other, built in the same burial mound and with similar grave goods. Perhaps they reflect two brothers/sisters in arms who died in the same battle?”
Surviving relatives may also have intended the shallow, visible position of the swords as symbolic of honor and remembrance for the dead. It was a costly sacrifice, though; the expensive blades would have been “shattered when pressed into the ground,” the researchers stated, and rendered “unavailable for future use.”
In a third, swordless stone tomb, archaeologists unearthed a collection of beautiful glass beads. They do not know whether these tombs belonged to men or women, nor why some of the bodies were buried together, yet they hope osteological analyses of the dig samples will provide answers.
There is still more history hidden beneath the Viby/Norrtuna burial site, which was built over a Bronze or Iron Age farm. They have also unearthed artifacts such as cremated human and animal bones, parts of a comb, and bear claws.
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