OSLO, NORWAY—According to a Science Norway report, exploration of the historic Bispevika fjord area of Oslo has yielded traces of a rare medieval iron gauntlet. Håvard Hegdal of the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage said that such a battle glove would have been very expensive, and that iron objects that were no longer in use were usually reforged. “[But] on the seabed, no one could have gotten hold of it,” he explained. Just a small part of the metal gauntlet survived, but it was enough to trigger a metal detector during a search of the historic harbor area. The rest of the artifact consists of a clear imprint of the gauntlet, which shows its lamellae or iron plates. Because other weapons, including daggers, swords, and axes, have also been recovered from the harbor, Hegdal thinks customs officers may have confiscated them as contraband and thrown them into the sea or destroyed them. “Many Norwegian medieval documents burned in Copenhagen in the 1700s,” he noted, so “the city law for Oslo is not preserved. We haven’t even found any regulations or documentation indicating that items were thrown into the sea. We only have all the weapons we’ve found out there,” Hegdal concluded. To read about an intact fourteenth-century gauntlet found in Switzerland, go to "Artifact: Medieval Iron Gauntlet."
