Ore and Lore

Last fall, a Swedish man spotted a circular object in a marsh on the Swedish island of Öland. He thought it was a tool.

It turns out, however, that it was a Viking Age iron arm bracelet, likely more than 1,000 years old.

The C-shaped object is ornately decorated with rows of raised dots and animal heads on its ends, Smithsonian Magazine reported.

It’s thanks to these markings and figures that the artifact was dated to the Swedish Viking Age, between 800 and 1050 CE, by archeologists who compared it with artifacts at the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm, according to the Viking Herald.

For Vikings – Scandinavian warriors who violently colonized coastal Europe between the ninth and 11th centuries – it was common to wear jewelry, like necklaces, brooches, and arm bracelets, known as armlets.

Chieftains and other Vikings of rank used to gift armlets to their supporters to secure loyalty and demonstrate wealth. Still, this find stands out.

“What is unusual is that this one is made of iron,” archeologist Karl-Oskar Erlandsson told Swedish radio station P4 Kalmar. Most surviving Viking armlets are made of silver or bronze, and out of the more than 1,000 stored in the Swedish History Museum’s collection, only three are made of iron.

Iron jewelry wasn’t uncommon among Vikings, but finding such an artifact is: The metal is highly susceptible to corrosion and degrades when exposed to water and oxygen.

This specific armlet was likely preserved by the marsh – the soil and sediment of wetlands are oxygen-free.

Moreover, according to Swedish law, people are obliged to report artifacts made of silver and gold but not those made of iron, which is likely one more reason why iron Viking jewelry is hard to come by.

The marsh where the armlet was found wasn’t part of a grave, as Vikings did not usually bury people in wetlands, nor was it a Viking settlement.

“It could be a sacrificial bog, where they made sacrifices to the gods or higher powers,” Erlandsson added. “So then there may be more objects to find in this wetland.”

Archeologists are planning to search the marsh this spring.