Month: March 2026

Footballer donates Norway’s most expensive book to home town

Medieval, Museums, Renaissance

Manchester City star footballer Erling Haaland and his father, retired footballer Alf-Inge Haaland, have donated the most expensive Norwegian book ever sold to their hometown of Time, southwestern Norway. It is the only known surviving copy of the 1594 edition of the Viking royal sagas by Icelander Snorri Sturluson, translated and printed for the first time in Norwegian at a time when there were no printing presses in Norway. It sold at auction in December for 1.3 million krone ($134,000), the highest price ever paid for a Norwegian book.

The book was an abridged collection of Snorri’s sagas translated by magistrate, military commander and historian Mattis Størssøn. It is the oldest printed history of Norway, published in Copenhagen by Jens Mortensen 25 years after Størssøn’s death from a manuscript owned by historian Arild Huitfeldt.

Haaland bought it with the intention of giving it to the Time Municipality so it could be placed on public display in the town’s library and inspire people to read and develop connections to their shared cultural heritage. The municipality is working with the EH9 Foundation to create a secure permanent exhibit for the precious volume.

“I want the book always to lie open so that people can read about those who came from where I come from, from Bryne and Jæren,” Erling Braut Haaland says in a comment. “It’s easier to feel drawn to reading when you can recognise yourself in the people and places being written about.”

To help achieve the goal, the Haalands are sponsoring a reading competition with a pretty sweet prize.

The competition, which will be organised by Time Municipality, will begin in the 2026/2027 school year. Pupils in middle school and lower secondary school in Time will then be invited to read as much as they can, and the classes that eventually win will be invited to Ullevaal Stadium for a match together with Erling Braut Haaland and the rest of the national team. […]

It is the schools in Time that will organise the reading competition, and it is no coincidence that this effort is starting here. Alfie’s parents and several others in the family have been teachers in the schools here, and both Erling and Alfie attended school in Time. “Roots are important,” Alfie Haaland says in a comment. “Our roots are here in the municipality, and we also all have deep roots that can be found in the stories in Snorri’s royal sagas. We hope that both the book and the competition can bring joy and help form the roots of new generations in Time.”

Site where unique Iberian wolf ceramic was found excavated again

Ancient

An archaeological site in Cunit, on the northeastern coast of Spain, that was flattened by urban development decades ago, is now being excavated again. The ancient Iberian Corral del Castell site was discovered when the housing development was built, but after all the moveable artifacts were recovered, the site was destroyed in the construction of the buildings. The current location was made into a park, so there’s hope that there may be archaeological material surviving under the surface.

The archaeological investigation is particularly important as a painted ceramic fragment depicting a wolf was found here. It is the only representation of a wolf on Iberian pottery ever discovered in the region.
Iberians held the wolf to be a sacred animal, representing the power, strength of the hunter and warrior. Depictions of wolves have been found in sculpture, on armor pectorals, ceramics and exceptional pieces like the silver paterae found in Castellet de Banyoles.

The Corral del Castell site was built around 2,400 years ago on a hilltop parallel to the coastline about 35 feet above sea level. It was occupied in two phases: the exclusively Iberian phase of the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C., and the Romano-Iberian phase of the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C. There is no evidence that it was still occupied in the Imperial era.

Archaeological materials recovered at the site are primarily utilitarian ceramics like amphorae for transport of goods and pithoi for storage. In addition to Iberian ceramics, there are examples imported from Greece, Italy and Carthaginian territories, attesting to the commercial activity that took place along the coast.

The few structures that have been documented — the remains of stone silos, a few walls — suggest that it was not an inhabited urban center, but rather a grouping of storage structures shared by surrounding villages or farms. This system of populations spread out over agricultural nuclei was supplanted by urban centers after the arrival of the Romans.

Section of Eiffel Tower staircase goes under the hammer

Modern(ish)

A section of the helical staircase trod by millions of visitors to reach the summit of the Eiffel Tower is going under the hammer at Artcurial in Paris in May.

Eiffel Tower staircase sections have been sold at auction before. There are 24 of them from when the top two floors of the helical staircase were removed to install an elevator in 1983. There’s one exhibited on the first floor of the Tower today and three more in French museums. The remaining 20 sections, ranging in size from 6.5 to 30 feet high, were sold at auction in December 1983.

The one on sale at Artcurial now is lot no. 1 of the 1983 staircase auction. It is 2.75 meters (9 feet) high with 14 steps spiraling around a riveted sheet metal cylinder mounted on a cross-shaped base. It has been in the same private collection since the sale, and has been restored by the workshops charged with the continuing maintenance of the Eiffel Tower. It is painted brown to match the color it was when the staircase was removed.

Of the twenty sections sold in 1983, few have remained in France and are still in the possession of their original buyers. Several elements have joined prestigious collections and sites around the world. One of them can be seen in the gardens of the Yoishii Foundation in Yamanashi, Japan, another near the Statue of Liberty in New York, and even at Disneyland. Others now belong to major international private collections.

The pre-sale estimate is €40,000 – 50,000 ($46,000-58,000), but it’s sure to go for much more than that. The last time Artcurial sold an Eiffel stair section in 2020, the pre-sale estimate was €30,000-40,000 and it ended up selling for €274,475. It also holds the record for the most expensive set ever sold, section no. 17 which sold in 2016 for €523,800.

The Eiffel Tower took only two years and 200 men to build. The finished structure was 300 meters (984 feet) high and had 1,710 stairs from bottom to top. It was built for the Exposition Universelle, the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, which coincided with the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. It was intended to be demolished after the Exhibition just like all the other pavilions, but Gustave Eiffel managed to convince the government to let it stand on the grounds that it was a great lookout tower in wartime and the ideal meteorological station in peacetime. Thus the “temporary” showpiece launched a new era in engineering and iron construction and became the forever icon of the city of Paris.

New gold foil “old man” found in Norway

Ancient

A rare Nordic Iron Age “gold man,” a tiny piece of gold foil stamped with the image of a man and a woman, has been discovered in southwestern Norway. It dates to between 550 A.D. and the beginning of the Viking age in 793 A.D. The piece was discovered by metal detectorist Kjetil Særheim on his family farm in Klepp. It is just 1cm (.4 inches) long and made of such thin foil that Særheim was surprised that it even registered on the detector.

Gullgubbe (literally “gold little old man”) have typically been found at important centers of power in Scandinavia. Most of the 3600 or so known examples have been found in Denmark. Only about 50 have been found in Norway, and this is the first one discovered in the southwestern Rogaland province in 127 years.

They often appear in connection with hall buildings, and archaeologists believe they were laid down as part of religious rituals.

“We believe they were used in ritual contexts, and that they were laid down as sacrifices in these hall buildings,” says [Sigmund Oehrl, professor of archaeology at the Archaeological Museum at the University of Stavanger].

In 1897, a total of 16 such “golden men” were found at Hauge in Klepp, not far from this latest discovery.

The Hauge gold men were unearthed by a farmer during agricultural work, so the details about the find site are unknown. The new discovery in Klepp gives archaeologists a precise find site close to the 19th century finds, a useful departure point for further research. The area is already recognized as archaeologically significant because several burial mounds and a ring-shaped courtyard have been found there. The gold man may indicate there was a large hall or god’s court at the site as well, which would have given it great cultural importance in Nordic Iron Age.

The 16 gold men found in Hauge were transferred to the University Museum in Bergen because there was no museum in Stavanger yet in the late 19th century. The Klepp gold man will therefore be the first one in the possession of the museum closest to where they were found.

Intact 17th c. storage barrels found in Norway

Modern(ish)

Three intact wooden storage barrels and a large wood rammer from the 17th century have been unearthed in the medieval center of Skien, Norway. They were covered in moist soil and trash fill which preserved the wood in excellent condition for 400 years.

Skien was one of only eight towns that existed in Norway during the Middle Ages. It was founded, perhaps as a small trading post, in the 9th century and grew into a thriving market town. Located on the lowest point of the Skien River system, it was conveniently located for trade and shipping, receiving goods like grain, whetstones and lumber from the northern parts of Telemark county and then exporting them to England and northern continental Europe.

Archaeological surveys have been conducted in the city center due to upgrades in the water and sewage systems. It is the largest excavation of the medieval city since the 1970s. The barrels were found in the excavation of Torggata, one of the main streets of the city whose current level overlays previous iterations. (Sections of the 18th century wooden street were uncovered in the excavation; it had a slightly different orientation, running almost exactly north-south.) They were on the west side of the 17th century road in an area that had been subject to extensive land reclamation.

The barrels were made of oak with bands of wood (hazel or beech) wrapped around the circumference. Those slim bands are now as soft as cheese. Unlike other wooden remains like road planks, the barrels and rammer were untouched by the many fires that ravaged the city (documented in 1671, 1732, 1766, 1777, 1779 and 1886).

The barrels and the ram were dug down to the ground level of the time from the 17th century. Around them was a layer of lime. Inside the barrels, cakes of lime were found at the bottom and some demolition material at the top.

The fact that the barrels are buried may indicate that they were used for safe and frost-free storage of finished slaked lime, before it was mixed with sand and water to make lime mortar. The barrels and pestle have probably been used for storing building lime over a long period of time.

Each time the barrels have been emptied, a little lime has been left at the bottom. The lime around the barrels tells archaeologists that they have been completely buried.

The find provides insight into the city’s construction activity and craft community, and is an indication of urban growth, infrastructure and business. Lime mortar was a key building material during the period, both for masonry and plaster, and was probably used in the reconstruction of stone buildings in the city center after a city fire.

The barrels and rammer have been dismantled and removed before the site is altered by the infrastructure work. Archaeologists hope they can be reassembled and placed on public display in the future.