If the fable of King Arthur and Excalibur is anything to go by , anyone who successfully extracts aswordin a stone will be treated like royalty . The fable does n’t say anything about the payoff one cause for removing a mediaeval weapon from feces , though .
AsSmithsonianreports , a organ pipe layer and an engineer recently find a blade from the chivalric era while doing construction work on a gutter in Aalborg , Denmark ’s fourth - largest city . The souvenir was plucked from a layer of waste that had accumulated atop an honest-to-goodness slab of pavement that once operate through the city .
Most remarkably , the steel was still intact — and the steel still sharp . It ’s about 3.5 feet long and of extremely gamey timber , according to archaeologists . The steel may have been used between 1100 and 1400 , but the likeliest explanation is that it got separated from its owner sometime in the fourteenth hundred . “ Findings from here have always pointed to the 1300s , so the sword must have ended up in the ground in this one C , ” archaeologist Kenneth Nielsen say in a translatedstatement .
It ’s rare for such an of import historical artefact to turn up in such an unlikely — and unhygienic — topographic point . Swords were worthful and highly prized possessions , and they were treated as such . They were typically buried with their owners , but no Steffi Graf are situate above the sewer where the weapon was found .
The country ’s history offer some clues about what may have transpired , though . In the 1300s , world power struggle and internecine state of war were common throughout Denmark . “ The best explanation we can come up with is that the owner of the sword was defeated in a battle , ” Nielsen toldThe Local Denmark . “ In the tumult , it was then trod down into the bed of mud that formed the street back then . ”
Similarly , a 14th - one C brand was found in aPolish peat bogin 2017 , and archaeologists suspect the owner either dip into the Reginald Marsh and play a grisly end , or merely set down his artillery and was ineffective to retrieve it .
While these question will likely remain unreciprocated , fellow member of the world will have the chance to look up to the Danish " toilet sword " in all its nimbus at the Aalborg Historiske Museum ( Aalborg Historical Museum ) , which is locate near the site where the sword was see . Fortunately for succeeding visitor , it will be clean and preserved first .
[ h / tSmithsonian ]
