An 8-year-old's discovery while playing in a Swedish lake is normally the type of story you'd find at the beginning of a fantasy novel. But, Saga Vanecek isn't the chosen one, just a Swedish-American girl who found a 33-inch, pre-Viking-era sword at the bottom of a lake near her family's vacation home in southern Sweden.
According to her father, Andy Vanecek, his daughter found the relic in the muddy clay on the bottom of Lake Vidösten. "She picked up the object, lifted it high above her head, and shouted as if she was Pippi Longstocking, “DADDY! I FOUND A SWORD!”" Vanecek wrote on Facebook.
Saga pulled the sword from the bottom of the lake, held it up in the air to show her father. "Daddy, I found a sword!" the Swedish news website The Local reported.
"I felt something in the water and lifted it up. Then there was a handle and I went to tell my dad that it looked like a sword," Saga told the Sveriges Radio broadcaster.
The sword is made out of wood, leather and metal, is thought to be made about 1,500 years ago, experts say. Finding the sword was made easier for Saga thanks to a drought that had lowered the lake's water level, the BBC reports.
At first, Saga's father believed his daughter had uncovered an interesting branch or unusual stick in the water. It was only after he asked a friend to take a closer look at the relic that he learned of Saga's true discovery.
When an archaeologist came to verify the find, she took photos of the sword, laying it in the water to make sure it didn't decompose from being in the air for the first time in a thousand years.
"It is the first sword of its kind to ever be found in Scandinavia," Vanecek said. "Now, questions are many, and fantasies abound as we wonder what happened so long ago which led to a sword, in its scabbard, being lost to the bottom of the lake. Did someone fall overboard, or through the ice during a winter trek? Was a wealthy noble buried in the lake, as from a scene in Game of Thrones?"
The sword was taken to the local Jonkoping county museum where it is now being kept.
The discovery of the sword led the museum and the local council to call for additional excavations at the lake, where they also found a brooch from the 3rd century. Evacuations are still on-going and experts say there could be more ancient items hidden there.