Cool Finds

An English King Minted These Coins to Ward Off a Viking Invasion. Instead, the Seafaring Raiders Turned the Pennies Into Jewelry

Aethelred the Unready viewed the attacks on his kingdom as divine retribution. He hoped that a show of public penance, including the creation of coins featuring religious imagery, would help earn God’s forgiveness

Meilan Solly | Senior Associate Digital Editor, History

May 12, 2026 7:30 a.m.

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When Viking raiders led by the imposingly nicknamed Thorkell the Tall besieged England in 1009, the kingdom’s leader, Aethelred II, concluded that the invasion was punishment for his people’s sins. To atone for these wrongs, the English king ordered his subjects to engage in three days of penance by fasting, offering alms, walking barefoot to church and attending mass. Aethelred also had a new type of penny minted, imbuing it with religious symbolism intended to ward off the invaders.

“The coins were a kind of prayer—part of a broader religious response to the Viking attacks,” Gitte Tarnow Ingvardson, a curator at the National Museum of Denmark, tells Smithsonian magazine. “Only a few examples have survived to the present day, which suggests that the coinage was limited in scale.”

More than a millennium later, two of these so-called Lamb of God coins have resurfaced in Denmark, the country that Thorkell and his fellow raiders called home. In an intriguing twist, the Vikings seemingly transformed the pennies into jewelry.

In a new statement announcing the discovery, Ingvardson says the find “gave me goose bumps, because these coins are extremely rare, and they convey a special and also paradoxical part of history. Speaking with Smithsonian, she adds, “What I find fascinating is the irony: The coins were meant to protect against the Vikings—but the Vikings actually admired them, turned them into jewelry and even copied the designs.”

Different metal detectorists found the pennies at two separate locations in Denmark several years ago. One side of the coin depicts a lamb pierced by a cross (an allusion to Jesus’s crucifixion), while the other features a dove symbolizing the Holy Spirit. Per the statement, just 30 Lamb of God coins are known to survive today, with most of these specimens surfacing in Scandinavia and the Baltics rather than the country in which they were minted. Many of the pennies found in Viking territory contain holes that suggest they were worn around the neck, perhaps as an amulet.

The newly discovered pennies stand in stark contrast to other coins minted under Aethelred, which typically pair the king’s likeness with Christian imagery. As Kate Wiles wrote for History Today in 2016, coins dated to the beginning of Aethelred’s reign, around 980, show “the hand of God and the presence of Christ … [to] signify divine approval.” By the time of the Viking raids, however, the design had shifted to a simple cross in a style popularized by one of Aethelred’s predecessors, recalling “the earlier peace and stability of Edgar’s reign.”

Ingvardson theorizes that Viking invaders turned Lamb of God coins into jewelry because they recognized the religious significance of the pennies’ design. “At this time, some Vikings were adopting at least parts of the Christian religion, so they may also have understood and appreciated the Christian symbols,” she tells Smithsonian.

The Vikings didn’t view English coins solely as a fashion statement. “They quickly realized that coins were much more practical for trade than cutting up pieces of silver, and Viking kings therefore began copying English coins and the English monetary system,” Ingvardson says.

Harald Hardrada, for example, was the first Norwegian king to introduce a standardized currency, minting silver pennies that featured a cross and a symbol representing the Holy Trinity. Just last month, metal detectorists in Norway stumbled upon the country’s largest-ever Viking hoard, a cache of 2,970 silver coins (and counting) featuring the likenesses of Harald; Aethelred; and Cnut the Great, an 11th-century king who united England, Denmark and Norway under a single crown. As the Oslo-based Historical Museum notes on its website, foreign coins like Aethelred’s circulated widely in Norway prior to Harald’s reign (1046 to 1066), but they were “soon replaced” by the Viking king’s newly introduced currency.

Back in 1009, Aethelred’s call for atonement failed to dispel the Viking threat. “The collective act of penance may have been intended to lend the nation moral courage, but it seems more likely to have added to a pervading sense of doom and despair,” author Harriet O’Brien wrote in Queen Emma and the Vikings: Power, Love and Greed in 11th-Century England. By 1013, Aethelred had lost his throne to the Danish king Sweyn Forkbeard, though he briefly regained the crown before his death in 1016.

The Lamb of God coins are “important pieces in the puzzle of Denmark and England’s at times very troubled shared history,” Ingvardson says. “That is really what makes these coins so fascinating: Such a small object contains a huge story—about English kings, Christianity, Viking raids, and even the beginnings of Danish coinage and the Danish state itself. In many ways, they reflect an entire society.”

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.