Joy & Nostalgia in the Gold Room

Filigree detail on Seven-ringed collar
Source:Historiska Museet

How would you like to spend all day wandering through a room filled with treasures made of gold; rings, coins, cups, brooches, chains, collars, buckles, torques, etc?

Dude, is it ever cool.

Especially if the room in question is the Gold Room exhibit at the Historiska Museet (The Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm, Sweden). I went here in ’96 when I was an impressionable teenager and did it ever make an impression on me. I would go back to Stockholm in a heartbeat just to visit the Historiska Museet and the Gold Room again.

Tiny gold figure plaques
Source:Historiska Museet

I was poking around the internet a few weeks ago, just casually looking for good Viking sites and old Norse recipes and was suddenly reminded of the hours I spent gazing at all that gold so long ago. Don’t ask how my brain made the leap from boiling apple leaves to a golden hoard. Maybe the thought of taking a gander at the Historika’s site was beginning to percolate just then.

What was so nifty about the Gold Room, I mean besides the cases filled with the good stuff, is that the room itself had this great, serene Asian-style setting. The room is round and the center, at that time, was sort of inset and had benches for sitting around a little fountain, while the exhibit itself formed a sort of raised ring around this indoor courtyard. I just really enjoyed the contrast of looking at all these bright treasures from more ancient days while strolling round a dark, modern room. It was so awesome.

My memory says there was a kind of soft Japanesy sort of music quietly playing near the ceiling to the lazy accompaniment of the little fountain.

I was a bit disappointed to see from their website that the Historiska’s changed the architecture of the Gold Room; it’s still round but it’s paved with yellow flagstone and brightly lit with the cases set into the walls instead of being freestanding so each side houses a different display. Just proves once again that you can never go home again.

My favorite case in the ever-so-cool Gold Room housed just one little artifact. It wasn’t an intricately filigreed collar. It wasn’t a reliquary cup. It wasn’t the typical delicately wrought work of goldsmithing mastery that the other cases contained. It was a bent, rectangle-ish loop of scrunched gold. What I loved wasn’t so much the object itself but it’s story. Because the beat up little bit of metal was a prehistoric gold neck ring. A farm family had found it in their field and it was doing service as their gate latch. Some historians came by asking for directions to some nearby site and there was this priceless golden treasure holding the gate closed. I found it hilarious, but then I’m a farmer’s granddaughter. (at least, that’s the version I remember)

Screen shot of the Gold Room video showing roman coins and Norse coinage rings

My second favorite display in the Gold Room was a case with treasures from the Viking Age. It was almost half-filled with old Roman silver and gold coins and little rings and armlets. The placard said, if I’m recalling it correctly, that the Vikings and Norse traders (yes, there IS a difference) liked to get paid in coin by the Romans because coins were easy to carry and sell back home.

They preferred to be paid in silver because it was actually more valuable in Sweden because it wasn’t as common. I found it really amusing that all of these coins were being used as smelting stock, essentially, instead of having any value as Roman money. I’m sure the Romans would have had a conniption if they realized.

You can see a good video about this exhibit and ogle some of it’s treasures here. Statistics about the treasures housed in the Gold Room and little segments highlighting a few of their number one artifacts (one of which turns out to be my favorite exhibit mentioned above).

The video has English subtitles, so no worries if you don’t speak Swedish.

Review: The Tomb by Defilippis, Mitten & Weir

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