An 8-year-old Swedish girl plucked a 1,000-year-old sword from a lake like it was no big deal Susanna Heller 17 hrs ago
© Jönköpings läns museum/Facebook
An 8-year-old girl was skipping rocks in a lake in Sweden.
She found a sword in the water that dates back over 1,000 years.
Some people think this means she could be a queen.
An 8-year-old girl was skipping rocks in a lake nearby her family's summer house in Sweden when she saw something strange in the water, The Local Sweden reported.
Saga Vanecek thought it was a stick, so she reached for it.
Turns out, it was something, uh, completely different.
"I picked it up and was going to drop it back in the water, but it had a handle, and I saw that it was a little bit pointy at the end and all rusty," Saga said of the moment of discovery. "I held it up in the air and I said 'Daddy, I found a sword!' When he saw that it bent and was rusty, he came running up and took it."
According to the Jönköpings Läns Museum, the sword is believed to be about 1,000 to 1,500 years old, dating back to the pre-Viking era. The object is about 2.75 feet long and remained well-preserved because it was stored in a wood and leather casing, per the museum. At this time, it's unclear why the sword was in the water.
After news of Saga's discovery spread, people on Twitter were quick to wonder if this meant that Saga would be the next queen of Sweden.
The museum has since done a sweep of the surrounding area and found a brooch from the same time period in the search.
While Saga said she thinks "old stuff" is interesting, her father Andy Vanecek has really seemed to enjoy the situation. "It's cool that it will be in a museum and it might even say 'Saga's sword,' and it might be there for thousands of years," he said.
What's more, the Vanecek family moved from Minnesota to Sweden in 2017, making Saga's discovery even more poignant.
"The cool thing is that I'm a huge Minnesota Vikings fan, and this looks just like a Viking sword!" Andy said.
And the magnitude of the 8-year-old's finding isn't lost on the archaeological community either.
"It's not every day that one steps on a sword in the lake!" Mikael Nordström of the Jönköpings Läns Museum told The Local Sweden. Which, true.
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