Rune Sætre and Vegard Sørlie were hoping for a quiet start to metal-detecting season.
They picked a field near Rena in eastern Norway that apparently nobody had ever searched with metal detectors before.
Why that field?
Basically, why not?
They asked the farmer for permission and started walking.
Beep.
Silver coin.
Then another.
And another.
By the time they’d found 19 of them, they had enough sense to stop.
This was no longer two guys wandering around a field with metal detectors. They called the archaeologists.
The next day the count reached 70.
The county archaeologist, May-Tove Smiseth, figured maybe they’d find a few hundred.
They passed 500.
Then 1,000.
Then 3,000.
Eventually they reached 4,886 silver coins.
Norway had never found a Viking Age coin hoard this large.
So they searched the field.
They excavated it.
They brought in ground-penetrating radar.
Nothing.
Apparently 4,886 was the number.
The farmer, Ole Erik Hørstad, had a farm to run, so he planted his grain.
End of story.
Except the field wasn’t done.
After the grain was harvested, they went back.
Beep.
Another coin.
Then another.
Coin number 5,000 came out of the ground in late September.
It was an Otto-Adelheid penny, a German coin roughly a thousand years old.
And then they kept finding more.
As of the latest report I could find, they’re at about 5,200 coins.
The detectors are still beeping.
Just a little less often and a little deeper.
I love this story.
Somebody probably buried all that silver around 1046 or 1047.
Most of the coins came from England and what is now Germany, but there are also coins from Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Norway, Bohemia and even the Islamic world.
Which makes you wonder how the heck all of them ended up together in a field in Norway.
Archaeologists think the coins may originally have been buried in a leather pouch or something similar. The container disappeared centuries ago, and generations of farming scattered the coins through the soil.
But nobody knows who buried them.
Or why.
Or why they never came back.
One archaeologist made a pretty good point:
You don’t forget where you buried almost 5,000 silver coins.
Something happened.
We just don’t know what.
And a thousand years later, two guys looking for a quiet start to metal-detecting season wandered into the field.
Beep.