Tenth-Century Scandinavian Silver Pin and Chain Found in Ireland
A silver pin with a polyhedral head, slip-knot ring and chain, made in the Scandinavian style in the tenth century and found in Ireland; now in the Walters Art Museum. Paired chain-linked pins of this type were produced in Scandinavia and turn up wherever Norse settlers went.
The Norse reach across the Atlantic is usually told through sagas, which were written down centuries after the voyages they describe. Objects tell a duller and firmer story: Scandinavian metalwork found in Ireland, in the Northern Isles, in Iceland, in Greenland and finally at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, where a Norse building complex was excavated in the 1960s. Each find marks a place where people from the north lived rather than raided. This pin is one of them, from the Irish end of that chain. See the Norse voyages to North America.
Public domain — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
