Ghost of a medieval glove found on sea floor in Oslo

In Oslo’s Bispevika neighborhood, which was once the city’s port, archaeologists have discovered the remains of a rare medieval iron glove. Archaeologists from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage (NIKU) used metal detectors to find the piece of iron, but only a fragment of the metal actually remained. Most of the glove had shattered, but a clear impression of the iron flakes (sheets) remained.

Since excavating the site began in 2019, archaeologists have found a surprising number of weapons, including daggers, swords and axes. Weapons and equipment such as iron gloves are very expensive and it is unlikely that such a large number of them were lost or discarded carelessly. One hypothesis is that customs officials confiscated the weapons and threw them into the water to destroy them.
There is no documentary evidence to support this assumption. In the 18th century, Copenhagen burned many medieval documents, including all of Oslo’s municipal regulations. If customs officials did confiscate weapons and throw them into the sea, there is no record of this.

How the glove ended up in the sea remains a mystery.

“It’s hard for me to imagine someone losing a glove in a fight. It would be more interesting if there was an arm in the glove, but that’s not the case,” he said.

Hegdal also doesn’t believe they’ll find anything more to explain the discovery.

“If there was anything else associated with this gauntlet, we would have found it long ago. The archaeologist’s dream is to find remnants of some battle that took place in the fjords, but we haven’t found any. So the best explanation we have so far is that someone lost it. You could call it bad luck,” he said.