The Sandur Hoard

In 1863 a gravedigger working in the churchyard at Sandur, a village on the southern Faroese island of Sandoy, turned up a small heap of silver coins. There were 98 of them, and they remain the only coin hoard ever found in the Faroe Islands. Danish numismatists published them the same year, and they have been argued over ever since, because they fix a moment when this remote North Atlantic community was trading with half of Europe.

The coins span roughly the eleventh century. Half are German pennies, from imperial, ducal and bishops' mints along the Rhine, in Saxony and in the Low Countries. Twenty-four are English, from Æthelred II through Cnut and Harold I to Edward the Confessor, including a few contemporary imitations. Seventeen are Norwegian, struck under Magnus the Good and Harald Hardrada and their successors, and these Norwegian pieces have made the hoard a key reference for dating early Norwegian coinage. Five are Danish, one Hiberno-Norse from Dublin, and one Hungarian penny of King Stephen.

The mixture speaks of trade rather than plunder. Wool was the islands' main export, and the large German share hints that Faroese wool or cloth reached markets supplied with German silver, perhaps through middlemen in Norway. The Norwegian coins fit the islands' growing ties to the Norwegian crown in the later eleventh century.

The find spot matters. Sandur church has been rebuilt again and again: excavations beneath the present building, which dates from 1839, found five earlier churches, the oldest a small stave church of the eleventh century. In 1972 archaeologists examined the south-east corner of the old churchyard, where the hoard is said to have come from, and found a finely paved floor that the excavator read as part of a Viking-age longhouse. He suggested the coins had been buried under that floor. Later excavations just south of the churchyard uncovered an early burial ground, still undated when it was published in 1991.

An older account, repeated in encyclopaedias, places the hoard where the altar of the first church stood and suggests the church was a private chapel of a wealthy farm. Either way, the coins look like the savings of a well-off household at one of the islands' important early farms, hidden around 1070-1090 for reasons no one knows and never recovered.

The hoard is small next to the great Baltic finds, but it is the best evidence for coin use in the Faroes in the Viking and early medieval period, and it shows how far the islands' links ran: from Dublin to Hungary, through England, Germany, Denmark and Norway.