An 8-year-old girl is a strong contender for the title of Queen of Sweden, after pulling a 1500-year-old pre-Viking sword out of a lake in the country’s south.
Saga Vanecek, a Swedish-American girl on holiday at her family’s summer home in Tånnö, Småland, found the sword while skipping stones at the Vidöstern lake.
She told Swedish news site The Local:
I was outside in the water, throwing sticks and stones and stuff to see how far they skip, and then I found some kind of stick.
I picked it up and was going to drop it back in the water, but it had a handle, and I saw that it was a little bit pointy at the end and all rusty. I held it up in the air and I said ‘Daddy, I found a sword!’ When he saw that it bent and was rusty, he came running up and took it.
The family reported their discovery to the experts and the Jönköpings Läns Museum, who confirmed that it was a sword (not, as Saga’s dad had thought, a toy or a stick), and dated it to the 5th or 6th century A.D.
Mikael Nordström from the museum explained the find:
It’s about 85 centimetres long, and there is also preserved wood and metal around it. We are very keen to see the conservation staff do their work and see more of the details of the sword.
Why it has come to be there, we don’t know. When we searched a couple of weeks ago, we found another prehistoric object; a brooch from around the same period as the sword, so that means – we don’t know yet – but perhaps it’s a place of sacrifice. At first we thought it could be graves situated nearby the lake, but we don’t think that any more.
A coin from the same period has also been found in the area – but who cares! We’re all way more interested in the little girl who pulled the sword from the lake, who everyone agrees should definitely be put in charge of things because duh, that’s how this shit works.
In Britain, we consider that a basis for government. What does she get in Sweden?
— Mike/M.J. Hollows (He/Him) #TheGermanMessenger (@MikeHollows) October 4, 2018
And the name of the girl who pulled this Viking sword from the lake?
Saga. What else? https://t.co/eQ0aujXqGh
— Christian Christensen (@ChrChristensen) October 4, 2018
https://twitter.com/LyleBrennan/status/1047902275459567617
That last tweet is referring to the previous sword retrieved from a lake, this one by a 7-year-old girl in Cornwall. We need a buddy movie made about these two, stat. Long live the Queens!
