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‘Viking treasure’ of 252 silver coins found in Denmark

Coins found near Ribe in Jutland in August have proved to be part of a collection of 252 pieces of Viking silver.

Published: 25 October 2018 10:00 CEST

'Viking treasure' of 252 silver coins found in Denmark

This file photo shows a Viking coin found previously at a different location in Denmark. Photo: Henning Bagger/Scanpix 2017

The discovery of the first coins led to an archaeological investigation of the area, resulting in the coins now being in the hands of the Museum of Southwest Jutland, DR Syd reports.

The ninth-century coins are extremely rare, according to experts, with only 11 such coins previously found anywhere in the world.

“Coins of this type are ridiculously rare. The ones that have been found are very well-preserved. More than we normally see with this period,” Museum of Southwest Jutland curator Claus Feveile told Ritzau.

The August discovery was made by a man with a metal detector walking in a wetland area.

After the first 16-18 coins had been turned up, the man contacted Museum of Southwest Jutland, where experts could immediately see a special find had been made.

“That on its own was a treasure – it was more than the total number of coins we already knew of,” Feveile said.

“So we were aware that this was big. It has turned out to be even bigger,” he added.

The wet conditions in which the coins were buried helped to preserve the metal, enabling archaeologists to study markings and learn more about the Viking rulers of the time.

Feveile said that the coins were used for trade at Ribe’s market.

“Not that it should be imagined that everyone was walking around with coins like these in their pockets. If that was the case, we’d have found them in many other places too,” he said.

The coins will be displayed for a limited period at the Ribe’s Vikings Museum before being transferred to the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.

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'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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