The Hoen Hoard

On 12 August 1834 Halvor Torstensen Kvernmoen, a smallholder hired to drain a wet hollow on the farm of Nedre Hoen at Hokksund, west of Oslo near Drammen, was tidying the last stretch of ditch when he found a heavy gold neck-ring hanging on his spade. Digging carefully into a low mound in the trench, he uncovered a second neck-ring, arm-rings, gold coins, finger-rings, brooches and pendants, held together in what looked like a whitish film, perhaps the remains of a cloth bag. It came to about 2.5 kilograms, and it remains the largest Viking-age gold hoard from Norway.

There was no duty to hand in finds then, and the farmer was reportedly offered a small sum for the gold. Instead, a week later he and Kvernmoen drove it to Christiania (Oslo) and gave it to the Ministry of Finance. The reward, set at the value of the gold, was 2,060 speciedaler. The farmer split it equally with Kvernmoen, who used his share to buy a farm of his own; it was said to equal nearly fifty years' wages for a labourer.

Most Viking hoards are silver with a little gold. Hoen is the reverse. Its core is a set of massive Scandinavian ornaments: two twisted gold neck-rings, the larger weighing almost a kilogram, and plaited arm-rings, one of about 400 grams. Around these is jewellery from far away. The best-known piece is a gold Frankish mount with three short arms, covered in leaf ornament, made in the Carolingian empire to join the straps of a sword harness and later fitted with a pin to wear as a brooch. There is an Anglo-Saxon finger-ring, Byzantine pendants, and twenty coins, Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Frankish, each given a loop in a Scandinavian workshop so that it could hang from a necklace among the beads.

The beads and pendants probably made up one long, heavy necklace, and specialists think the whole group reads as a woman's jewellery. The mixture is the hoard's great value to historians: in one deposit there are objects that left Baghdad, Constantinople, the Frankish lands and England, gathered by people living on a fjord in eastern Norway. In the Viking age the sea came several metres higher up the Drammen river, so Hokksund was a landing place with access to inland valleys.

How that wealth arrived is guesswork. Earlier writers saw it as plunder; one local historian has floated a link with a chieftain named in saga tradition and with the huge ransom the Franks paid to Viking raiders in 858, but he called this speculation himself. The hoard may have been an offering in the bog or valuables hidden in a dangerous moment and never recovered. Analyses since the find show that much of the jewellery and the beads were made in Scandinavia, so this was not simply loot.

The hoard went to the university collection in Christiania in 1836 and was the centrepiece of the new Viking hall of the Historical Museum from 1904. It was hidden in a rural bank vault during the Second World War, has toured to Paris, London, New York and Berlin, and since 2019 has opened the museum's Víkingr exhibition.