Chick buys a box of cheap jewelry online, finds a gold viking era ring.

 

Either Mari is a small person, or that ring is huge.  That guy's hand must have been like a ham hock.  I'm gonna speculate that the dude had red hair, and carried an axe.

Mari Ingelin of Alver, Norway, hit the history buff’s jackpot when she found a gold ring from the Viking era in a box lot of cheap jewelry she’d bought at an online auction. The auction was an estate sale with lots of mixed objects packed into boxes. Ingelin bought the box containing some mall jewelry and trinkets. She was initially only interested in one of the items, but had to buy the whole box to get it.

I'd wear that.

When looking through the box, the ring stood out from the other pieces. It was heavy and was more roughly made than the modern pieces. She consulted with her father-in-law and he suggested it might be really old, like Viking old. That’s when she contacted the Vestland County officials and alerted them to the find. County archaeologist Sigrun Wølstad examined the ring and confirmed that it was indeed a Viking era artifact.

The ring weighs .353 Troy ounces, or just over 7 pennyweight.  There is no way to tell where it came from, so speculation on its history is perfectly appropriate.

I say the ring is made of Irish gold the dude got when raiding Lindisfarne, Scotland.  It's been to Iceland and the Faroe Islands.  While crossing a storm swollen river back home in Norway, it slipped off his finger, and lay in the gravel until a trout gobbled it up, thinking the glitter meant food. 

 Then, a week later, local boy Thorvald "Bobby" Sjunnessen caught the trout, and discovered the ring (of power) when cleaning his catch.

After admiring this incredible find, Bobby put it on, and immediately vanished from the view of all other humans.  

And that's the last we saw of it until Mari bought it online.

Via the always good History Blog.