Viking High Seat

Farmer Folke Trana, of Valo, Sweden, was plowing a boggy field when his plow dug out of the gooey dirt a crude wooden dragon's head about a foot long. Farmer Trana was agreeably surprised, but when he reported his find to the State Historical Museum, its experts were delighted. The carved head, they decided, might be part of a "High Seat" of the Viking Age.

All through ancient Scandinavian literature. High Seats play a prominent part. A High Seat was a kind of throne and a symbol of authority. The seat also had a mystical quality. The Norse invaders of Iceland, for instance, threw the posts of their High Seats overboard and settled in the spots where the pieces drifted ashore.

A powerful task force of learned Swedes descended on Farmer Trana's field and excavated enthusiastically. Eventually, Wilhelm Holmquist. keeper of the museum's Iron Age Department, dug up a wooden post with six bored holes. This was apparently an upright from the side of a High Seat. The dragon head fitted it perfectly.

By this time a sort of mass ecstasy was sweeping Sweden's archaeologists. One of them declared that the post "is literally worth more to us than a find of gold . . . It has unparalleled archaeological and cultural interest, as a link between west Scandinavian literature and east Scandinavian discoveries."

Sweden's King Gustaf VI, an avid amateur archaeologist, spent a whole day at the Valo High Seat diggings and acted as excited as a schoolboy. When he left, he gave Archaeologist Holmquist a rousing kick in the seat of the pants: the good old Swedish way of wishing him the best of luck in his follow-up diggings.

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