You can now see the first 100 coins from the unique Viking hoard
The first 100 coins from the Mørstad Hoard have now been published in the Museum of Cultural History’s databases. They will soon also be put on display.
The first 100 coins from the Mørstad Hoard have now been published.(Photo: Screenshot)
"Coin number 75 is exciting," says Anne Skogsfjord. "We haven't received one like that before."
Skogsfjord is a senior adviser at the Museum of Cultural History, where her work includes cataloguing coins.
In a typical year, she receives between 30 and 70 coins dating from the Viking Age.
This summer, however, she has been working tirelessly to document and catalogue the nearly 5,000 coins discovered by metal detectorists in a field in eastern Norway. The first 100 are now available in the Museum of Cultural History's Unimus database under museum number M152600.
Most of the coins are familiar.
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But not number 75.
“It was issued by Sigtrygg Olafsson Silkbeard. We may have around ten of these in the Mørstad Hoard. Coin number 925 in the hoard identifies him as king of Dublin,” says Skogsfjord.
“This is a person I'm curious about. Sigtrygg Silkbeard, the king of Dublin – who was he? It's exciting. I'd like to learn more about him,” she adds.
Anne Skogsfjord has spent the whole summer cataloguing the coins from the Mørstad Hoard. Here she is holding an English coin issued by Cnut the Great that has not yet been published in the database.(Photo: Tea Kristiansen / Museum of Cultural History)
Cnut, Otto, and Otto’s grandmother
Most of them, however, are familiar coins from kingdoms in what are now England and Germany.
When Skogsfjord starts working on a bag of coins – usually grouped into larger bags of 100 or 200 – she begins by sorting them according to the rulers who issued them.
She starts with the familiar ones:
English coins issued by Æthelred II, King of England
Danish and English coins issued by King Cnut the Great
German coins issued by the Holy Roman emperors Otto I, Otto II, and Otto III, as well as Adelaide
The three Ottos can be difficult to tell apart.
Otto III was crowned at the age of three in 983, and his grandmother Adelaide served as co-regent during the first years. Otto-Adelaide pennies are among the most common types in the Mørstad Hoard.
"Towards the end of the bag, you get to the difficult coins," Skogsfjord says. "But most of the time, I manage to identify them."
Sigtrygg Olafsson Silkbeard’s coin.(Photo: Julia H. Hiorthøy / Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo)
Did Vikings have jobs minting coins?
The coins have a front and a back.
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From these, Skogsfjord can determine who issued the coin, the city in which it was issued and, in some cases, even the person who struck it.
English coins often bear the name of the person who struck them, Skogsfjord explains.
"What makes this so interesting is that the names can sound rather Norwegian, such as Beorn, Aslac, and Cetil. It makes you wonder: was there a Viking here who found work striking coins?"
The other coins often bear the name of a city. There are, for example, many coins from Cologne.
Coin number 1 – an English silver coin from King Æthelred II, minted around 985–991. Most English coins from this period have a cross on the reverse, but here we instead see the 'Hand of God' between alpha and omega, a symbol of God’s power and eternity.(Photo: Julia H. Hiorthøy / Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo)
Almost perfect condition
Some of the coins in the Mørstad Hoard are worn, like many of the coins previously found using metal detectors. Coins found in fields often pass through the plough repeatedly, leaving them damaged and difficult to decipher.
What's special about the Mørstad coins is that most of them are in such good condition.
"They’re almost all in perfect condition, or at least a very large number of them are. You can clearly see both the front and the back. Much of the expertise I've built up comes from examining badly preserved coins for ten years. So getting to work with coins this nice is very rare. Most of them are good enough to be exhibited," Skogsfjord says.
It takes around an hour to document and catalogue each individual coin.(Photo: Tea Kristiansen / Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo)
The work will take at least a year
Skogsfjord and the other numismatists working on the hoard spend around an hour on each coin.
"If we're very optimistic, we think we can complete the cataloguing within a year," says Skogsfjord.
So far, 100 of the coins have been published, but Skogsfjord worked her way through just over 1,000 of the coins during the summer. Before they can be published, however, they must be reviewed and photographed.
