Under the plank floor of a building on Gotland lay two deposits with a combined 67 kilograms of silver: 14,295 coins, mostly of Islamic origin, plus 486 arm rings and 20 silver ingots. Next to them lay a third deposit with roughly 20 kilograms of bronze.<\/p>\n
This is the Spillings hoard, deposited after 870 or 871 and found in 1999 during filming for Swedish television. The previously largest known Swedish hoard, discovered in 1967 at Burge, weighed 10.4 kilograms – barely a sixth of that. An ordinary Gotlandic hoard amounts to 200 to 300 grams.<\/p>\n
These figures show what silver was in the Viking Age: not jewelry, not coinage in the modern sense, but weight. And weight could be divided, cut, hacked.<\/p>\n
“Hacksilver” is not a Viking Age word. It is a modern technical term of German-language archaeology, adopted into English as hacksilver<\/em>. It refers to cut pieces of jewelry, ingot fragments, sheet metal, and coin fragments – anything separated from a larger silver object to assemble a specific quantity. An Old Norse technical term for the material itself is not attested.<\/p>\n For the process<\/em>, the opposite holds. Skaldic poetry knows the ring-breaker<\/strong>: baugbrj\u00f3tr<\/em>, hringbrj\u00f3tr<\/em>. It is a kenning for the generous ruler – the one who breaks rings in order to give pieces of them away.<\/p>\n This is the actual finding of this section. For the hacked silver as an object, there is no transmitted word. For the act that produces it, there is a fixed poetic formula – and it describes it not as bookkeeping, but as generosity.<\/p>\n It was precisely this kenning that Ralf Wiechmann drew on when he titled his study of the precious-metal deposits of Schleswig-Holstein “Vom \u201aRingbrecher’ zur M\u00fcnzwirtschaft”. His image describes how, over centuries, intact jewelry increasingly became a means of payment and finally minted coinage.<\/p>\n A linguistic afterlife may also exist for the practice: the Russian word rubel<\/em> derives from \u0440\u0443\u0431\u0438\u0442\u044c<\/em>, “to hack, to chop.” The direct connection to Viking Age practice is often claimed, but cannot be strictly proven.<\/p>\n Caution is called for here, in the other direction. The terms m\u00f6rk<\/em> (mark), eyrir<\/em> (\u00f6re, plural aurar<\/em>), and \u00f6rtug<\/em> come from post-Viking Age texts. A mark counted 8 \u00f6re, an \u00f6re 3 \u00f6rtugar.<\/p>\n Anton Wilhelm Br\u00f8gger, in his 1921 work Ertog og \u00f8re<\/em>, calculated for the Viking Age an \u00f6re of roughly 24.5 grams, thus an \u00f6rtug of just over 8 grams. This is a back-projection from later sources, not a Viking Age self-testimony. Anyone working with these values should treat them as a computational model, not as a transmitted measure.<\/p>\n In a weight-money economy, what counts is not the shape of the metal but its weight and purity. Silver existed as ingots, as jewelry, or as coin, and was cut with a knife as needed until the right amount was reached. Hand scales with folding arms and a set of standardized weights therefore belonged to the basic equipment of every merchant.<\/p>\n Two testing techniques secured quality. Nicking<\/strong> refers to small knife notches on the edge of ingots or arm rings, visible today as crescent-shaped cuts. Pecking<\/strong> means short jabs with the knife point into the surface, mainly on coins. Both techniques tested whether inferior metal lay beneath a silver layer – good silver is soft and behaves differently under the blade than a plated forgery.<\/p>\n Coins, too, were not valued according to their stamped face value. They were weighed like any other piece of silver, because the new owners simply did not know the fineness of foreign coinages. A dirham from Baghdad, an Anglo-Saxon coin, and an ingot fragment from Haithabu thus faced each other on the same scale pan.<\/p>\n Two weight forms can be dated. Cubo-octahedral weights – small, many-faceted cubes with truncated corners – appear from around 860. Flattened-spherical, so-called oblate-spheroid weights, follow from around 870. The spherical ones are based on the Islamic standard weight mitq\u0101l<\/em> of roughly 4.23 grams and reach Scandinavia in the late 9th century together with dirham coins.<\/p>\n The cubo-octahedral weights typically weigh between 0.75 and 4 grams. Each stamped dot on their surface apparently corresponds to roughly 0.75 grams – a system by which the weight itself indicated the value it embodied.<\/p>\n The quantities found show how everyday these objects were. Torksey in England has yielded over 350 weights, nearly a hundred of them cubo-octahedral. At Kaupang in Norway, the excavations of 1998 to 2003 alone identified a total of 378 weights. These are not isolated grave goods but tools of everyday trade.<\/p>\n Spillings.<\/strong> The Gotlandic find remains the largest known silver hoard of the Viking Age: 67 kilograms in two deposits, 14,295 coins, 486 arm rings, 20 ingots, plus roughly 20 kilograms of bronze in a third deposit. Deposited after 870\/871 beneath the floor of a building, discovered in 1999.<\/p>\n Burge.<\/strong> The hoard discovered in 1967 weighed 10.4 kilograms and was, until the discovery of Spillings, the largest Swedish find of its kind. Both were buried in the same era – only more than three decades lay between their discoveries.<\/p>\n Ireland.<\/strong> From the early Viking Age, 107 hoards are known, 51 of them without coins, 56 with coins, plus 150 single finds. The picture is not a single spectacular treasure but a landscape of scattered, mostly small deposits.<\/p>\n Woodstown.<\/strong> Near Waterford, hacksilver was found alongside smithing tools at the same site. This suggests that silver was not only stored here but also processed – a trading site with its own production, not merely a way station.<\/p>\n Where did the metal actually come from? Jane Kershaw of the University of Oxford had the Bedale hoard, found in 2012 and published in 2025, examined geochemically. The result: most of the silver comes from western European sources, probably Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian coins from plunder or ransom. A significant portion, however, is Islamic dirham silver that reached the West via Scandinavian trade routes.<\/p>\n The method exploits a chemical difference: Abbasid dirhams contain on average only about 0.2 weight percent gold, while Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian coins of the 9th century contain three to four times that. From this ratio, mixing proportions in melted-down material can be calculated.<\/p>\n An earlier 2021 work by Kershaw, published in Fornv\u00e4nnen, reaches further back: isotopic modeling shows that Islamic silver was already arriving in the central Baltic region in significant quantities in the first half of the 9th century. Until now, the period before roughly 860\/870 was regarded as a phase of low dirham import. The coins were routinely melted down, which has long obscured their early presence. The early Baltic economy was thus more closely tied to Eurasian silver networks than research had previously assumed.<\/p>\n A further find confirms the mixture directly in the material: the hacksilver hoard of Kettilstorp in V\u00e4sterg\u00f6tland, examined by Kershaw and Stephen W. Merkel in 2022, contains both Islamic dirhams – eight Umayyad, 22 Abbasid – and Carolingian coins. Individual cast pieces from this hoard mirror precisely this mixing ratio.<\/p>\n Hacking as testing or as ritual?<\/strong> One line of research, prominently represented by Marion Archibald, sees Nicking and Pecking as pure material testing: good silver is soft, and an experienced merchant feels the difference under the blade. Polish researchers in particular, including \u0141ukasz Czwojda and Mateusz Bogucki, interpret pecking, bending, notching, and hammering instead as deliberate, possibly ritual destruction of valuables. Both interpretations stand side by side in the material. Nothing has been decided.<\/p>\n Why did people bury hoards?<\/strong> The Viking Age is the period of the most intensive metal deposition in medieval Europe. The reasons – protection from plunder, ritual deposition, failed retrieval – are judged differently. In more recent numismatic literature, economic explanations outweigh purely ritual ones.<\/p>\n When did the flow of silver dry up?<\/strong> Dirham imports end in the late 10th century. The reasons given are the exhaustion of the Central Asian mines and the political collapse of the Samanid Empire, which fell in 999. One occasionally reads a dating into the 11th century – there is no basis for this.<\/p>\n Coin or weight?<\/strong> Hoards that contain both coins and hacksilver together point to a dual currency: counted coin alongside weighed silver, not one after the other. Kettilstorp is one example, the English finds of the Danelaw period another.<\/p>\n Ibn Fadlan left Baghdad in June 921 with a delegation to the king of the Volga Bulgars. He was not its leader but its secretary – which explains his eye for trading details rather than diminishing it.<\/p>\n His account, the Risala, is the only surviving eyewitness text about the Rus, the Scandinavian traders on the Volga. He describes women with neck rings of gold and silver – for every 10,000 dirhams of a man’s wealth, one more ring – and a merchant who, before a wooden idol, lists how many slave girls and sable furs he has brought, and asks for a buyer, “with many dinars and dirhams,” who does not haggle.<\/p>\n This is the outside view of a Baghdad scribe, not a neutral trade record, but the only contemporary first-hand description.<\/p>\n From England, the same process can be captured in figures in reverse. The Danegeld – tribute to Viking attackers – is recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:<\/p>\n A doubling every ten years, over a quarter century. Whether England could really raise such sums is disputed: John Gillingham considers the higher figures unrealistic; M. K. Lawson and D. M. Metcalf defend them by pointing to the volume of coinage minted at the time.<\/p>\n Important for this topic: this weight-money did not consist only of hacksilver but to a large extent of English coins – further evidence that coin and cut metal stood side by side in the same reckoning.<\/p>\nThe Weight Units \u2013 With Reservations<\/h3>\n
How the System Worked<\/h2>\n
Weights as Datable Hardware<\/h2>\n
Hoards as a Benchmark<\/h2>\n
Origin of the Silver<\/h2>\n
What the Sources Leave Open<\/h2>\n
Written Sources: Ibn Fadlan and Danegeld<\/h2>\n
The Silver Drain in the Other Direction<\/h3>\n
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Gift or Commodity?<\/h3>\n