A Metal Detectorist Found 5 Full Pounds of Viking Treasure. Then He Found the Second Stash.

3 min readHere’s what you’ll find when you read this story:Days after the announcement of Denmark’s largest-ever Viking Age silver hoard discovery (and months after Norway’s largest find), comes a fresh discovery out of Finland.At about 10 pounds, the find is Finland's biggest Viking Age silver discovery on record.Curiously, whoever hid the silver split it between two separate containers, each buried about 40 feet from the other. Viking Age silver hoards keep cropping up across Scandinavia. And they’re bigger than ever before.On September 3, a metal detectorist in Finland discovered the country’s largest-ever Viking Age hoard, uncovering two caches of silver buried roughly 40 feet apart that together weigh about 10 pounds, easily eclipsing Finland’s previous record for the largest Viking treasure.Archaeologist Esko Tikkala of Lahti City Museums inspected the site the next day, and he plans to clean, sort, and weigh the silver, hoping to pin down its precise date and origins, according to a translated statement from the museum.Kalle Lappinen, the metal detectorist who made the discovery, said a “sense of disbelief” overcame him after unearthing the hoard near Sysmä church village in southern Finland, according to Arkeonews. The hoard was split between two birch-bark containers, each buried about 17 inches deep, but separated by about 40 feet. The haul included thousands of silver coins, along with a silver bracelet, a clasp, and a silver bead. Viking Age silver hoards typically contain a mixture of coins, hacksilver, and jewelry since weight was the most important aspect in determining overall value.The coins came out of the ground clumped and corroded, so the museum says their exact number and weight will be confirmed later. Traces of birch bark were discovered intact alongside the silver, which is highly unusual because such organic material rarely survives long in Finland's acidic, well-drained soils. The birch bark used for the containers may reveal how the hoard was packed before it went into the ground, so researchers are studying it for clues about when and why the hoard was buried.Considered as a whole, the collection of silver objects found in the Sysmä church village is about twice as large as the previous largest-ever Viking Age silver hoard discovered in Finland, which was unearthed in 1895 and contained 1,700 coins and other objects totaling nearly five pounds of silver.The discovery of Finland’s largest Viking hoard comes just days after the announcement of Denmark’s largest-ever Viking Age silver hoard discovery. While working on a new patio for his house in Rebild, Denmark, a man discovered 40 pounds of 10th-century silver lying beneath the soil, a mix of 700 objects spilling out of a clay pot, including ingots, armbands, cut silver, 47 coins and coin fragments, and even a tiny silver pendant in the shape of Thor’s hammer.“It is like finding a Viking Age safe,” Torben Sarauw, head of cultural heritage and an archaeologist at the Museums of North Jutland, said of the Danish hoard.Norway’s largest Viking Age silver hoard discovery also happened in 2026. In April, a field near Rena in Østerdalen yielded 2,970 silver coins, according to the University of Oslo.However, none of the record-setting finds of 2026—the 10 pounds of Viking silver from Finland, the thousands of Viking Age silver coins in Norway, nor the 40-pound Viking hoard in Denmark—can claim to be the largest Viking hoard ever discovered in Scandinavia or the world. The largest Viking treasure ever found remains a 150-pound hoard discovered on the Swedish island of Gotland. Known as the Spillings Hoard, the 1999 discovery featured more than 14,000 silver coins. In that find, most of the coins came from Islamic countries or other European sources, which allowed archaeologists and historians to reconstruct trade routes and learn the sources of Viking Age wealth.Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, gear, infrastructure, and more for a variety of publications, including Popular Mechanics. His favorite interviews have included sit-downs with Roger Federer in Switzerland, Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, and Tinker Hatfield in Portland.