The Græsli Hoard

In 1878 a farmer at Græsli, in the mountain valley of Tydal south-east of Trondheim, was hilling his potato rows when he dug into a mass of silver. The spot had once been covered by a heap of stones, since cleared from the field. Out came 2,253 coins, pieces of chopped silver, a twisted ring and a small gilt brooch in the shape of a bird. The whole find weighs about 2.25 kg. At the time it was the largest coin hoard ever found in Norway, and it is still among the largest.

Its real value is to numismatists. The coins are overwhelmingly Norwegian, 2,209 pennies, almost all of them struck for King Olav Kyrre, 'the Peaceful', who ruled from 1067 to 1093. Before about 1060 Norwegian hoards are full of foreign coins; from then on they contain almost nothing but Norwegian ones. Græsli catches that change in progress, and it holds so many of Olav's coin types that it has become the main source for his extensive coinage. The director of the University of Oslo's coin cabinet published a meticulous catalogue of it in 1881.

A handful of coins came from elsewhere: 38 German pennies, two Danish, two imitations of Anglo-Saxon pennies and two that cannot be identified. The latest Norwegian types put the burial after about 1080.

The bird brooch is the hoard's showpiece. It is a flat openwork figure of a bird with a curving neck and long tail feathers, made in gilded silver in the late Viking Ringerike tradition. Bird brooches were made in large numbers in Scandinavia in the later eleventh century, but this one is unusually elegant.

Why so much silver ended up under a cairn in a remote valley is not known. Tydal lies on an old route over the mountains between Trøndelag and Sweden, and one idea is that a traveller hid it on the way to or from Trondheim. The cathedral at Trondheim was begun around this time, and local tradition has linked the money to that project or to the silver shrine of St Olav, but these are guesses. The museum that photographed the find estimates it was worth 30 to 40 cows in its day.

In 1978, a century after the discovery, a memorial stone carrying an enlarged copy of the bird brooch was set up at the find spot.