Saga Vanecek tells of finding
1,500-year-old sword in lake.
“I was crawling
along the bottom of the lake on my arms and knees, looking for stones to skim,
when my hand and knee felt something long and hard buried in the clay and sand.
I pulled it out and saw that it was different from the sticks or rocks I
usually find. One end had a point, and the other had a handle, so I pointed it
up to the sky, put my other hand on my hip and called out, ‘Daddy, I’ve found a
sword!’
“I felt like a
warrior, but Daddy said I looked like Pippi Longstocking. The sword felt rough
and hard, and I got some sticky, icky brown rust on my hands. It started to
bend and Daddy splashed up to me, and said I should let him hold it. It was my
sword and now he was taking it away! I gave it to him in the end.
“I ran to my mamma
and my mormor – my grandma – and some other relatives who were all sitting
outside having fika, which is Swedish for having a sit-down with coffee and
cookies. I was yelling, ‘I found a sword, I found a sword!’ Daddy went to show
it to our neighbours, whose family has lived in the village for more than 100
years, and they said it looked like a Viking sword. Daddy didn’t get to watch
the football in the end.
“When he showed it
to an archaeologist, she said she had goosebumps and that it was at least 1,000
years old. Actually, they now think it’s 1,500 years old – from before the
Vikings. She called it ‘sensational’ and said nothing like this had ever been
found in Scandinavia before, and that maybe I had found it because of the low
water levels. She made me promise not to tell anyone because she and other
archaeologists wanted to see if there was anything else buried in the lake;
they didn’t want anyone else to come and take the treasures.
“Now, whenever I go
swimming in the lake, I will be looking to see what I can find. It feels like
that lake might be a little bit magic. On that day I felt a little bit magic,
too.”
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