Discovery of Rare Viking Dragon Pin Solves 130-Year-Old Mystery


More than 130 years ago, a Swedish farmer discovered a black dragon — or, that is, a Viking carving of one that had a pointy horn on its head and a curled mane down its neck. The soft soapstone carving looked like a mold for casting metals, but the farmer never found any of the little dragons spawned by the mold.

But where the farmer flopped, modern scientists triumphed. In 2015, a team of archaeologists in Birka, a Viking archaeological hotspot in Sweden, discovered a Viking-made metal dragon that looks almost exactly like the mold, according to a new study published online today (June 28) in the journal Antiquity.

https://www.livescience.com/62931-dr...n-vikings.html