- Six-year-old Henrik Mortved found a 1,300-year-old sword in Norway's Innlandet county
- Experts identified the sword as a Merovingian period weapon from 550-880 AD
- The sword was transferred to Oslo's Museum of Cultural History for preservation
A six-year-old Norwegian schoolboy has made headlines after discovering a 1,300-year-old, pre-Viking sword during a field trip to the country's mountainous Innlandet county. First-grader Henrik Refsnes Mortved spotted a rusty object sticking out of the ground, which experts later confirmed to be a rare archaeological treasure.
After taking a closer look at the object, Mortved's teachers realised that it wasn't just a piece of rusty metal and contacted a team of local archaeologists, according to a report in the BBC.
Upon examination, archaeologists from the Cultural Heritage authority identified the object as a single-edged sword from Scandinavia's Merovingian period (550-880 AD), which came before the region's famous Viking Age.
The sword has now been transferred to the Museum of Cultural History (Kulturhistorisk Museum) in Oslo, where it will be cleaned and preserved so that it can be studied further.
Although the sword is heavily rusted, scientists are hopeful that methods like X-rays and metallurgical analysis could unlock its secrets, including its construction and how it was used centuries ago.
This is not the first instance when a Norwegian school student has managed to unearth a rare historical piece. In 2018, eight-year-old Saga Vanacek found a 1,500-year-old pre-Viking sword while swimming in Vidostern lake in Sweden in 2018.
"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," Vanacek said at the time.
"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."
