The Hiddensee Treasure

In 1872 the small Baltic island of Hiddensee was struck by destructive floods. Sometime around then, a wonderful hoard of gold objects from the Viking Age ended up in the museum at Rügen, a larger Baltic island now in Germany.

As to how they ended up there, most internet sources have little to say. The only exception I found is this numismatic site, which is so paranoid that even an attempt to screen cap their text generates a message about potential legal action. Anyway the paranoid coin collectors tell us that Baltic fishermen began offering extraordinary gold objects for sale around Rügen, including in the open marketplace. A local teacher and amateur archaeologist named Rudolf Baier realized their scholarly importance and bought all he could find for the sum of RM 2,257. Baier bought them by weight, paying ten times the going rate for plain 14 karat gold.

Baier eventually put them on display in the Stralsund Museum. That 2,257 marks was a lot of money, but not even the paranoid coin collectors have any speculations about how a schoolteacher raised a sum that was surely more than his annual salary. According to various sites, the purchases were made in 1873 and 1874, so likely at several separate times from multiple sellers, which raises the possibility that some objects from the hoard have disappeared.

Modern art historians think these finds date to the 10th century. The Danish National Museum, which included these in an exhibit a few years ago, tells us:

The processing of such a quantity of gold in the hollow jewelery bodies, with this precision of the granulation technique, in interaction with the braided ribbon and pearl wire ornamentation and with the bird of prey head on the hanging loops, can only have taken place in the environment of a princely centre. It is believed that the jewelry is related to the Danish Viking king Harald Bluetooth. After his baptism at the Ottonian court around 965 AD, Bluetooth led Christianity in Denmark. 

Which brings me to another point, because the identity of these objects is much disputed online. The Danish National Museum thinks this is an explicitly Christian hoard, but all the online sellers of Viking art call these Thor's hammers. I suppose that is just the pagan preferences of contemporary Viking fans, but I'm having trouble turning these into Christian symbols myself.

Anyway this is a remarkable find, and another insight into the vast amount of gold treasure that washed through the Viking world as they looted, conquered, and traded their way across Europe.