Rare Viking sword recovered from water using magnet

The Scandinavian weapon has rested at the bottom of the river since the 11th century.

A 1,100-year-old Viking sword recovered from a UK river. The rusted weapon was discovered by a “fisherman” searching for various objects in the water using a magnet. It was used between 850 and 975 AD, experts confirmed.

Briton Trevor Penny was searching for lost and discarded items in the River Cherwell in Oxfordshire when he made the discovery. The man used a magnet that day and it only pulled scaffolding posts out of the water, he told Live Science. When Penny pulled out the sword, he didn’t immediately realize what it was.

“I was on the edge of the bridge and I shouted to my friend on the other side, ‘What is this?’” Penny recalls. “She ran up screaming: ‘It looks like a sword!’”

Penny immediately uploaded images of the sword to an Internet search engine to try to identify it.

“No matter what angle of the photo I used, it ended up showing me looking for a Viking sword,” Penny admitted. The man then contacted the Oxfordshire County Public Relations Officer, who is responsible for recording archaeological finds made by the public, and referred the sword to experts for examination.

“The clerk said that from an archaeological point of view, it is rare to find complete swords and treasures of historical significance preserved intact,” Penney told the regional newspaper. — There was a small dispute with the landowner and the river fund, which do not allow magnetic fishing. The latter sent a legal document stating that they would not take any action provided that the sword was given to the museum, which I did.”

A newly discovered Viking sword is in the care of an Oxford museum and could eventually be put on public display, reports the Oxford Mail.

The artifact, which until now had only been tentatively dated, has been identified as Viking and is estimated to date back to 1,200 years ago. These weapons date from the period when the Normans traveled to the British Isles to plunder, conquer and trade with the ruling Saxons. Vikings set foot on British soil in the eighth century, raiding a monastery on Lindisfarne, an island off the northeast coast of Britain, in 793. Similar raids into Britain occurred for several centuries and intensified after 835, when larger Viking fleets began to arrive and fight the royal armies. The British kings gradually retook the territory captured by the Vikings throughout the 10th century and united what had been a patchwork of kingdoms into a new kingdom called Englalond. Conflicts with the Vikings and periods of rule continued until the 11th century, but the Viking Age ended after the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, when the Saxons defeated King Harald III Sigurdsson of Norway.