Ok I'm supposed to be doing uni stuff right now but instead I'm researching Danish ancient history and I need to tell y'all about Guldhornene.
So basically some peasant girl in the 17th century named Kirsten Svendsdatter was walking around in a field one day when she saw something shiny poking out of the ground and so she pulled it out and came to find it was this ancient horn made out of pure gold and silver and she decided instead of keeping it to write a letter to Christian IV who went and retrieved it before giving it to his son who screwed a pommel at the end of it and used it as a drinking cup. About a hundred years later, another person spots the same thing in the same area, sends it to Christian VI through the Count of Schackenborg, and gets paid, as the horns go on to be displayed in what is now the Rigsarkivet. One had original inscriptions of the Proto-Norse language in the Futhark script and the other had images of one of the oldest board games in history.
But that's not the crazy part.
One day, a watchmaker named Niels Heidenreich who was well known as a forging con man decided to take a look at these priceless, centuries old artifacts and thought "y'know what? I bet these would look even better melted down and turned into shitty lumps of gold that I call coins" and stole both of them and casted them into coins. Obviously, they quickly became aware of the theft and quickly put a bounty on Heidenreich because like everyone knew it was probably him who stole them, especially given the fact that he did something similar with a fake set of pagoda coins just a few years before... oh, that and he was of course seen the day prior dumping coin stamps into the moat...
They had made a set of plaster castings beforehand, but due to the fact that travelling anywhere by ship sucked butt ass, the ship carrying them to Rome sunk and so they became lost to time.
So in the end, Heidenreich was sentenced to prison until 1840, but died about 4 years into his sentence.
But you wanna know the worst part? The original horns were made in THE END OF THE BRONZE AGE CIRCA 400 AD. THEY WERE LITERALLY ONE OF THE OLDEST AND MOST LEGIBLE WRITTEN EXAMPLES OF PROTO-NORSE. Oh, and they also happened to be some of THE ONLY known inscriptions in Proto-Norse in centuries.
These days, the only remnants we have left of them are two sets of carefully constructed replicas, one of which was also stolen.
