Cool Finds

A 6-Year-Old Boy Spotted Something Sticking Out of the Ground in a Field. It Turned Out to Be a Viking Sword

Henrik Refsnes Mørtvedt was on a school field trip when he found the roughly 1,200-year-old weapon. The single-edged blade will now be preserved at an Oslo museum

Meilan Solly | Senior Associate Digital Editor, History

June 18, 2026 5:20 p.m.

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In late April, a 6-year-old boy named Henrik Refsnes Mørtvedt noticed something strange while combing through the dirt in a field in southern Norway. Tasked with finding rocks for an arts and crafts project at school, Mørtvedt instead spotted a piece of metal protruding from the ground.

“This part stuck out,” he tells Hadeland’s Astrid Hexeberg, pointing to the top of his find. “It was rust and dirt. So I thought I would pick it up and see what it was.”

The eagle-eyed first grader had stumbled upon a well-preserved artifact: a roughly 1,200-year-old iron sword. Per a statement, the weapon is a single-edged blade known as an enegget.

Experts from the Innlandet County Cultural Heritage Department initially suggested that the sword dated to the Merovingian era (which spanned 476 to 750 C.E.) or the beginning of the Viking Age (which started around 793). More recently, however, archaeologist Øystein Lia told Fox News Digital’s Andrea Margolis that it was probably crafted in Norway between 750 and 850. Swords of this kind gained traction in Viking society around this time, evolving from smaller fighting and hunting knives called seaxes.

The 6-year-old’s discovery is “relatively rare,” Lia said. Viking swords are typically found in the region about once every two years. The archaeologist added that the weapon probably “belonged to someone of high status within Viking Age society,” perhaps a male landowner and warrior who “served as a military adviser to a local Viking chieftain.”

Mørtvedt made his find during a field trip with his first-grade class. On the way home, the students walked through a field in Brandbu owned by farmer Ola Rækstad. That’s where the 6-year-old spotted the sword’s hilt, which he pulled from the soil. Realizing that he’d unearthed something significant, Mørtvedt tried—unsuccessfully—to bend the blade back before informing a teacher of his discovery.

Speaking with Hadeland, Mørtvedt offers two explanations for his interest in the mysterious artifact: First, he wanted to ensure that a tractor wouldn’t drive over the weapon and puncture its tire. He also reasoned that the object should be preserved in a museum rather than left to decay in a field—although this didn’t stop the first grader from joking that he’d been tempted to take the find home with him.

In a Facebook video shared by Hadeland, an individual off screen asks Mørtvedt how old he thinks the sword is. The boy stops to ponder the question before offering a tentative answer. A million years old? A thousand years? Finally, he lands on a timeframe that he feels more confident about: Perhaps 100 years old.

Thanks to Mørtvedt, the sword will now be preserved at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, where experts will analyze it in hopes of learning more about its history. As Lia told Fox News, the spot where the blade was found is 131 feet away from previously documented Iron Age burial mounds, suggesting that the weapon may have been placed in a grave as a funerary good.

Mørtvedt’s sword isn’t the only major Viking find unveiled in Innlandet County this year. Also in April, a pair of metal detectorists uncovered 19 silver coins in a field in Rena, a town northeast of Brandbu. The men notified local authorities, who sent archaeologists to investigate the site. In the weeks since, excavations have revealed more than 4,700 coins—a stash that has now been identified as the largest Viking Age hoard ever found in Norway.

“It has been absolutely unbelievable to stand there and watch these coins be lifted out of the ground, and to see the quality of the coins,” archaeologist May-Tove Smiseth told Science Norway’s Ida Irene Bergstrøm. “They have been preserved so well that they almost look newly minted.”

Meilan Solly | Read More

Meilan Solly is a senior associate digital editor at Smithsonian magazine, where she oversees the online history section. Solly's specialties are Tudor England, medieval Europe and World War II.