Norway’s largest coin hoard has now officially passed the 5,000 coin count. The total is now up to around 5,200 coins recovered. The milestone 5,000th was an Otto-Adelheid penny, one of many of this type in the Mørstad Hoard.
The discovery was kept under wraps initially. When it was announced at the end of April, the coin count had just passed 3,000. Less than two weeks later, it had already passed 4,000. When excavation stopped for the summer, 4,886 coins have been unearthed. At that time, ground-penetrating radar found no evidence of further coins, so it seemed like maybe the silver harvest was complete, leaving farmer and landowner Ole Erik Hørstad free to sow and harvest his grain.
Metal detectorists returned after the harvest, and quickly found coins that were still there under the plow layer, so the count continued. The signals are becoming less frequent and the recent coins that have been found are at a greater depth.
As the new finds wind down, thousands of coins in the hoard are still being catalogued and examined by numismatists at the University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History. Earlier this summer, the first 100 coins were published in the museum’s online database. One of them is notable for having been issued by Sigtrygg Olafsson Silkbeard, Hiberno-Norse king of Dublin who ruled for 46 years (interrupted by conflict), until 1036. It was minted in Dublin between 995 and 1005 by moneyer Færemin.
The Silkbeard beard coin is unusual in the hoard because there are maybe 10 Irish issues among the thousands of coins recovered. Most of them were struck in modern-day England and Germany, with the name of the city included in the instruction. English coins typically also bear the name of the moneyer who struck them, and several of those names, for example Beorn, Aslac and Cetil, sound Scandinavian.
According to senior adviser and coin expert Anne Skogsfjord, each coin requires at least an hour of work to catalogue, so processing the whole hoard is estimated to take at least a year, if everything goes well. A small selection of coins from the Mørstad Hoard will be exhibited at the museum this fall.
