Swedish Legends of Buried Treasure

ON OCTOBER 15, 1937, FIVE WORKERS were digging out the area over the cellar vaulting in a potato shop in the Old Town (Gamla Stan) in Stockholm. At 10:30 a.m. one of them found a silver coin, and soon many others were unearthed. Before long, personnel from the Historical Museum were on the scene and a crowd had gathered outside. In all, 84 silver objects, some 18,000 coins, and a few other pieces were found. The silver weighed a total of 205 kilograms, and together the value of the treasure would be several million dollars today. This treasure, which had been buried for unknown reasons by the Lohe family during the mid-18th century, remains the largest ever found in Sweden (Thordemann 1948). Although it was the largest, the Lohe treasure was only one in a series of treasures found over the years in Scandinavia. Enumerated in the journals Nordisk numismatisk unions medlemsblad (Oslo, 1936ff.) and Nordisk numismatisk drskrift (Copenhagen, 1936ff.), these finds indicate how ubiquitous the burial of treasure has been for over a millenium in Scandinavia. The prevalence of the phenomenon throughout the early Germanic world is assured by the etymology of the word hoard (Old English and Old Saxon hord, Old High German hort, Old Norse hodd, Gothic huzd), which originally denoted (buried) treasure. It is derived from Proto-Germanic *huzda-, in turn from IndoEuropean *kuz-dho-. Der Stamm bedeutet 'verbergen'..., die Endung geh6rt zu *dhe'setzen', somit 'in Verborgenheit Gebrachtes' (Kluge 1967:317-318). Thus, hoarding as we understand it has probably been common since Indo-European times. That treasures have long been found in Scandinavia is assured by provisions for dealing with them in the medieval laws, similar to stipulations in other European laws (Jrgensen 1950:265-270). Indeed, in Denmark a special term was used for treasure recovered from the ground: danafee death's money (C. A. Christiansen 1957; Lund 1942). More generally the term was used for the estate of one who died without an heir, as in Swedish danaarv. Although the etymology of the term danafae suggests an association of treasure with the dead, the convergence of the two meanings of the term may well have been caused by the fact that the crown laid claim to both sorts of wealth. In any