Yggdrasil · Humankind

The People Weighing Silver at Kaupang

A Norwegian Viking Age trading and craft site where silver was weighed, for reasons the finds do not fix.

Myth and literature

The story

Archaeological interpretation: the picture below is built from finds and from what is known of silver use elsewhere, not from any record of a person.

Kaupang lay on the Viksfjord in Vestfold, Norway, and is often called the first town in Norway. People there worked metal and other materials, traded with distant places, and handled silver. Silver of this age was often valued by weight, so people used small balances and weights, and cut or bent pieces of silver to make up an amount.

Such equipment could serve a sale. It could just as well serve the casting of metal, the settling of a tribute, or a gift between households. One weight does not identify a merchant. Popular retellings invent scenes of disputes and haggling at the market. Those are made up, and no source records a dispute at Kaupang.

Myth and literature · Context

What we know, and what we do not

What is recorded: that Kaupang was a busy site with imported silver and many crafts, and that a research volume was devoted to how silver was used in the Viking Age. Weighing silver is a known practice across the Viking world.

What is not recorded: who weighed, who paid, and why in any single case. Weighing equipment can relate to casting metal, tribute or gifts as well as trade, and a single weight does not show that its owner was a merchant. No price list survives, and none is offered here. The popular article itself admits that the rules of the market are not known, and its king, hall and dispute scenes are the author’s reconstruction rather than evidence. Whether Kaupang is the place called Skiringssal in old texts is likewise not settled.

Historical evidence

The evidence

Wikipedia describes Kaupang as a craft and trade centre of perhaps a thousand people, founded around 800 or in the 780s and abandoned in the early or mid-tenth century. Nicolay Nicolaysen excavated grave mounds there in 1867, Charlotte Blindheim worked at the site from 1947, and Dagfinn Skre led new excavations from 1997, including a University of Oslo programme in 2000 to 2002. About 100,000 finds are listed, among them Arab silver coins, a gold coin from Dorestad, glass beads and jewellery. The results appeared in three volumes between 2007 and 2011.

One of the volumes is Means of Exchange: Dealing with Silver in the Viking Age, edited by Skre, in the Kaupang Excavation Project Publication Series (2008). Wikipedia lists it among the works on the site. A popular article describes two weight systems used for silver in the Viking world, one based on a barley grain and one on the Arab dirham, and notes that forged dirhams turn up at Kaupang, Birka and Hedeby.