A sword is probably the last thing you'd expect to find on a hike -- especially one that's more than a millennium old.
But that's what happened to a man in Norway who recently stumbled across a 1,200-year-old Viking sword while walking an ancient route.
The find, which dates from approximately 750 A.D. and is in exceptionally good condition, was announced by Hordaland County Council.
County Conservator Per Morten Ekerhovd described the discovery as "quite extraordinary."
What will future hikers think of our civilization when they stumble across our CueCats lying, discarded, under rocks?
Related Stories
The New York Times has written about study results published recently in Nature which show rather precisely when Vikings had been living in what is now Canada, specifically at L’Anse aux Meadows.
But in results published Wednesday in Nature, scientists presented what they think are new answers to this mystery. By analyzing the imprint of a rare solar storm in tree rings from wood found at the Canadian site, scientists have decisively pinned down when Norse explorers were in Newfoundland: the year A.D. 1021, or exactly 1,000 years ago.
The date was calculated from a combination of dendrochronology and astrophysics.
Journal Reference:
Margot Kuitems, Birgitta L. Wallace, Charles Lindsay, et al. Evidence for European presence in the Americas in ad 1021 [open], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03972-8)
Previously:
(2020) Archaeologists in Norway Find Rare Viking Ship Burial Using Only Radar
(2020) Melting Ice Reveals an Ancient, Once-Thriving Trade Route
(2018) 8-Year-Old Girl Pulls Ancient Sword From Lake, is Our Ruler Now
(2016) Vikings, Crystal 'Sunstones,' and the Discovery of America
(2015) 1,200-year-old Viking Sword Discovered by Hiker
(2014) The Vikings' Navigational Mystery: Calcite
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Hyperturtle on Saturday October 24 2015, @02:47PM
I am hoping that future civilization also understands the futility of the utility of the CueCat and grants us the benefit of presuming we had some wisdom, despite everything else. If even we knew to discard it -- and hide it, under a rock, so that no one would get it garbage picking or on ebay (same thing), then perhaps we will be remembered favorably.
I, for one, would like to believe they were hackable enough to be turned into something of use or at least become less useless, but I think people wiser than me decided against that and began the campaign to hide them under rocks. I mean, at least with the viking sword, there is a cool factor. With a CueCat, it's like a junk item you find on a bad roll and sell as vendor trash. Except no vendor in our world will accept such trash except as an example of what they refuse to accept.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by crb3 on Saturday October 24 2015, @02:57PM
> What will future hikers think of our civilization when they stumble across our CueCats lying, discarded, under rocks?
Not bloody likely. The 'responsible' (I'm being charitable here) company had them smashed and trashed at the local Radio Shack and everywhere else I looked.
So their initial market plan of aggregating all your online/catalog purchase data by middlemanning their servers didn't work. They still could have leveraged the scanner distribution they had by cooperating with open-sourcers to make the things ubiquitous, and recouped with a 'new - improved' V2 that improved the robustness of the scanning and overcame the red-blindness of the first model. Nope -- they demanded success on their own terms or not at all, and that's what they got, so they expunged the remaining hardware and went home.
I have three of the things. I wrote code to do command-line and CGI barcode scanning and entering into a PSQL db, thinking to increment my way into a decent home/soho kitchen/lab/bookshelf inventory system and Perl-DBI experience all at once, but halted that when I found that they'd gone unavailable so there wasn't going to be a userbase for anything I created. No, nobody's gonna find any CueCats by the roadside.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday October 24 2015, @03:02PM
I did something similar. I had 2-3 of the things and wrote code thinking I'd make an accurate catalog of my books. Typical me, once I got the code working I never got around to scanning more than 10% of my books.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 24 2015, @04:23PM
Miun has been waiting for the man with the black sword.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday October 24 2015, @04:48PM
Since I didn't know what that was:
http://phantasystar.wikia.com/wiki/Miun [wikia.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 24 2015, @04:34PM
I noticed it looks like a single-edged profile, which I don't recall seeing on viking swords I'd seen before.
Had to scroll a few pages through an image search for [viking sword] before I found an example, originating from (appropriately enough) this thread https://sbg-sword-forum.forums.net/thread/21626/single-edged-viking-swords [forums.net].
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 24 2015, @08:52PM
What is popular today in an image search and what was are not at all the same.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Rickter on Saturday October 24 2015, @04:41PM
I saw a very interesting NOVA on PBS recently about a series of swords used by the Vikings labeled with the word ULFBERHT (many labelled similarly were counterfeits (like fake Swiss watches)). Unlike other swords of the time, these swords were made with a quality of steel not reproduced until modern times. In the program, a man from Wisconsin used only tools and techniques available to blacksmiths of the era to manufacture a copy of the sword. His effort was really cool and showed that somebody of that era had figured out how to make high quality steel about 1150 years ago, and then the techniques were lost.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Saturday October 24 2015, @05:56PM
Damascus steel [wikipedia.org]?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Sunday October 25 2015, @02:09PM
Yes, I saw a show about this. May have been the same one. They decided this high quality steel could only have come from the Middle East, possibly through current day Russia, and this proved that Vikings traded extensively. The Rus originated from the Vikings. As to the steel, the high quality can only be achieved with kilns that can get the temperature hot enough, and civilization in and around the Middle East was one of the places that had such kilns.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 24 2015, @05:26PM
I misread this as "1,200-year-old Viking Sword Discovered by Hitler" and thought it was the plot of a comic book
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday October 24 2015, @05:40PM
That was my first impression as well.
(Score: 1) by snufu on Saturday October 24 2015, @05:41PM
they found evidence of a 1200 year old swap meet.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday October 24 2015, @06:55PM
Well, here's a report I received from that time through a time warp:
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.