For over a century, an unremarkable lump sat in a British Museum drawer; a 2013 X-ray revealed a rare Celtic brooch buried with a Viking-era Norwegian woman

For over a century, the unassuming lump of soil, wood and rusted metal was stored away in a drawer at the British Museum. Despite its appearance, no one took much interest in it until late 2013, when Barry Ager, the museum curator, took notice of a small piece of metal sticking out and sent it for an X-ray. The scan revealed a richly decorated Celtic disc embedded within the corroded block, identified as a Celtic brooch dating to the eighth or ninth century. According to a 2014 Archaeology Magazine publication, Ager believed was originally made in Ireland or Scotland but was stolen by Vikings and buried with a high-status Norwegian woman over 1,000 years ago.

How a thousand-year-old brooch ended up in a museum basement

The lump of material was discovered during excavation work by British archaeologist Alfred Heneage Cocks in 1886. During excavations of Viking burial sites in Lilleberge in Norway, he discovered the lump. This was then purchased by the British Museum in 1891. As so often happens in museums, the material was stored away and forgotten.

According to a Museums Association report, it wasn’t until Ager was preparing for a visit from a Norwegian researcher that he examined the lump more closely and noticed a piece of curved metal protruding from it. Conservators then carefully extracted the brooch from the block. The block was found to contain rare fragments of Viking-age textile, including herringbone-patterned fabric, along with remnants of the wooden box in which the brooch may once have been kept. As a result, conservators used scalpels to remove the brooch piece by piece.

Why Vikings wanted a Christian relic badly enough to wear it

The object was not originally made as jewellery. It began as a decorative mount fixed to a sacred item, likely a reliquary or church shrine, crafted in Ireland or Scotland. Vikings stripped the mount from its original setting, punched holes into it, and fitted it with rivets and a pin so it could be worn as a brooch. This practice was not an isolated case.

A 2018 peer-reviewed research paper titled “An Insular Reliquary from Melhus: The Significance of Insular Ecclesiastical Material in Early Viking-Age Norway,” by Heen-Pettersen and Murray, published in the journal Medieval Archaeology, notes that numerous Viking-age graves in Norway contain Insular church items, including crosiers, shrine fragments, and book mounts: objects taken from churches and repurposed as status jewellery. It’s weird to think a piece of jewellery designed to celebrate a Christian saint’s remains had been unearthed a thousand years later and now surrounded the remains of a pagan Norwegian woman who likely didn’t know where it had come from.

The find is quietly rewriting the Viking raiding timeline

The Lilleberge brooch has contributed to wider research into when Viking raids began in Britain and Ireland. Traditionally, we know the raids began in 793CE with the infamous attack on the Lindisfarne monastery. However, research by archaeologist Aina Margrethe Heen-Pettersen in their 2019 study titled “The Earliest Wave of Viking Activity? The Norwegian Evidence Revisited,” published in the European Journal of Archaeology, argues that the distribution of Insular metalwork found in Norway, along with the burial context of finds like this one, suggests Norse seafarers may have been exploring, and possibly raiding, British shores earlier than previously thought.

What this tells us about museum stores

The British Museum contains approximately eight million objects; however, very few are ever displayed. This fact regularly comes up during discussions regarding looted artefacts. The Lilleberge brooch complicates that criticism: it was not only rediscovered but researched and placed on permanent display in Room 41, alongside the Sutton Hoo treasures. Even so, it raises a genuine question about how many other significant items may still be sitting unidentified in storage.