Workers have unearthed a tenth-century sword at the bottom of a river in Poland. While the weapon has endured over a thousand years of corrosion, scans show that a “mysterious inscription” survives on its blade.
The discovery occurred last month in the Polish city of Włocławek, where construction crews were dredging the Vistula River. One of the workers, Sławomir Mularski, spotted the sword in a pile of extracted muck, according to Science in Poland’s Tomasz Więcławski. Per Google Translate, Mularski says that his heartbeat quickened as an image of “a Viking wielding a sword” began to take shape in his mind.
Mularski alerted officials with the Provincial Office for the Protection of Monuments in Toruń (a nearby city), who retrieved and examined the sword. McClatchy’s Aspen Pflughoeft writes that the “rust-covered weapon” featured a “long blade and a pommel that looks almost like a knot.”
The sword looks fairly ordinary at first glance. Weighing in at 2 lbs., 10 ounces (1.2 kilograms) and measuring 38 inches (964 millimeters) long, the weapon is steel, with a double edge and a hilt shaped like a cross. But on one side of the sword is a mysterious inscription, made by gold wire that has been inlaid into the steel, which reads, "+NDXOXCHWDRGHDXORVI+."