WIEJKOWO, Poland (AP) — More than 1,000 years after his death in present-day Poland, a European king whose nickname lives on thanks to the wireless generation is in the midst of an archaeological dispute.
Chronicles of the Middle Ages tell that King Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson of Denmark acquired his nickname thanks to a tooth, probably dead, that looked bluish. A chronicle of the time also indicates that the Viking king buried in Roskilde, Denmark, at the end of the tenth century.
But a Swedish archaeologist and a Polish researcher recently claimed in separate publications that they knew of his most likely burial in the village of Wiejkowo, in a region of northwestern Poland that had ties to the Vikings in Harald’s time.
Marek Kryda of the “Viking Poland” e-book told The Associated Press that a “pagan mound” he claims to have placed beneath the nineteenth-century Roman Catholic church in Wiejkowo likely houses the king’s remains. There was on a Polish government portal revealed a circular shape that resembled a Viking burial mound.
But Swedish archaeologist Sven Rosborn says Kryda is because Harald, who went from paganism to Christianity and founded churches in the area, will have to have won a suitable grave somewhere in the cemetery. The Church of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Wiejkowo is located at the top of a small circular hill.
Historians at the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen say they are with the “suggestion” that Wiejkowo is Harald’s burial place.
Rosborn detailed his in the 2021 e-book “The Golden Treasure of the Viking King” and Kryda questioned some of the Swede’s findings in her own e-book published this year.
Harald, who died in 985, probably in Jomsborg, what would today be the Polish city of Wolin, one of the last Viking kings to rule what is now Denmark, northern Germany and parts of Sweden and Norway. He spread Christianity in his kingdom.
Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson named its generation of Bluetooth wireless links after the king, reflecting how he united much of Scandinavia throughout his life. The generation is designed from the Scandinavian runic letters of the king’s initials, HB.
Rosborn, the former director of the Swedish museum in the city of Malmo, began his search in 2014 when an 11-year-old woman asked for his opinion on a small dirty coin-like object with an ancient text that had been on his family’s property for decades.
Experts have decided that the molten gold disc that aroused Maja Sielski’s interest dates from the tenth century. The Latin inscription of what is now known as “Curmsun disk” reads: “Harald Gormsson (Curmsun in Latin) king of the Danes, Scania, Jomsborg, city of Aldinburg. “
Sielski’s family, who moved to Sweden from Poland in 1986, said the disc came from a treasure discovered in 1841 in a tomb in the Wiejkowo church, which replaced a medieval chapel.
The Sielski family became the owner of the disc, as well as the Wiejkowo parish archives containing medieval chronicles on Latin parchment, in 1945, when the former German region became part of Poland after World War II.
A circle of relatives who knew Latin understood the price of the chronicles – dating from the tenth century – and translated some of them into Polish. They mention Harald, some other fact that links the wiejkowo church to him.
The nearby Baltic Sea island and the town of Wolin tame the region’s Viking history: it has a runestone in honor of Harald Bluetooth and hosts annual Slavic and Viking festivals.
Kryda says Curmsun’s disk is “phenomenal” with its significant inscription and insists she would examine Wiejkowo as Harald’s burial site, but lately there are no plans for excavations.