The Mästermyr tool chest is the largest single tool find of the Viking Age: an oak chest turned up by a farmer's plough in October 1936 in a drained marsh in southern Gotland, packed with hammers, tongs, anvils, axes, spoon augers, files, saws, padlocks and raw materials. Its owner could forge iron, shape timber and patch sheet metal, and the whole kit is now in Stockholm. This article walks through what the chest held, how old it is, who might have owned it, and what replicas and toolmark studies reveal about the man's work.
A plough bites into a field for the very first time. Thirty years earlier, this ground was marsh. Then a jolt, a grinding sound, iron on iron. What Hugo Kraft dragged out of the soil in October 1936 looked at first like a rusty lump. It turned out to be the complete working kit of a craftsman who lived about a thousand years ago – neatly packed, locked, wrapped in a chain. And never collected.
You know the famous objects of the Viking Age: swords with inlaid names, brooches crawling with interlaced beasts, ships with carved prows. What almost never survives are the tools that made them. That is exactly why Mästermyr matters so much. We will go through the find piece by piece, keep evidence and interpretation firmly apart, and end with why this chest speaks to us as a small family workshop.
Mästermyr is a former marsh and lake area in the south of Gotland, west of the village of Hemse, between the churches of Silte and Sproge. The Swedish word myr means "mire" or "bog". In the Viking Age there was open, shallow water here. In the early twentieth century the area was ditched and drained, and gradually turned into farmland.
In October 1936 the farmer Hugo Kraft was ploughing a plot in Sproge parish that had never been ploughed before. His ploughshare struck the chest. Remarkably, the box survived the hit largely intact. In the Swedish national heritage register the find spot is listed as Sproge 113:1, and at the Swedish History Museum (Statens historiska museum) in Stockholm the find carries the inventory number SHM 21592.
Gotland is famous for surprises like this. No region of Scandinavia has yielded more Viking-age silver hoards, and the island is also home to the Gotland picture stones. More on that in The Gotlanders – the Island of Silver Hoards. At Mästermyr, though, the ground held iron, not silver.
The container alone is a piece of craft history. It is made of oak, roughly 90 cm long, 26 cm wide and 24 cm high, with a slightly curved lid and a flat bottom. The sides are fixed with wooden pegs, and the ends are joined to the bottom with mortise and tenon. Iron hinges hold the lid, and an iron lock secured the contents.
A chain of 26 figure-of-eight links was wrapped around the chest. It probably served both as an extra lock and as a carrying handle. The picture speaks for itself: this was not a heap of tools thrown into a sack, but a compact, lockable, portable box. That is how you pack when you are on the move.
How many objects the chest held depends on how you count. The museum catalogued the find under 133 sub-numbers; many of these group several pieces together, such as rivets, fitting fragments or lock parts. Count every piece separately and you get more than 200 objects. Both figures circulate in the literature, and both are correct – they simply measure different things.
At the heart of the find is a complete blacksmith's kit. It includes several heavy sledgehammers and hand hammers, a large pair of forging tongs and further tongs, several small anvils, a nail header (an iron with a hole through which a nail shank is pushed so its head can be upset), stamps and punches, an ash rake for the forge, and a pair of metal snips. Add to that files – one round, three flat – and two rasps.
What is missing is telling. There is no big, heavy stationary anvil of the kind a permanent village forge would need. The Mästermyr anvils are small enough to carry. The bellows are missing too, but being made of wood and leather they would hardly have survived anyway. Whoever worked with this kit needed little more on site than a hearth, charcoal and a stump to set the anvil in. How bloomery furnaces and forge welding worked is explained in The Blacksmith's Craft of the Vikings.
The woodworking tools are at least as prominent. They include several smaller axes, a large hewing axe for dressing timber, a broad adze (a tool whose blade sits crosswise to the handle, used to work down surfaces), a hand saw and a second saw blade, six spoon augers of different sizes, chisels and a gouge, two drawknives and a moulding iron for cutting decorative grooves and profiles along the edges of boards.
A spoon auger is not the twist drill you know from the hardware shop. Its tip is hollowed like a spoon, lifting shavings out of the hole as you turn it. It was turned with a cross handle, and probably sometimes braced against a breastplate. Such augers were needed for treenails and rivets – in shipbuilding as much as in house building.
Greta Arwidsson and Gösta Berg, who published the find in full in 1983, read the woodworking tools mainly as gear for boatbuilding and fine carpentry. They based this on comparison with traditional crafts on Gotland and in Sweden that were still using very similar tools well into the twentieth century. More recent work cautions that Viking-age craftsmen may have combined their tools differently from later guild trades: the neat division between shipwright, carpenter and joiner belongs to later centuries.
The third big group concerns sheet-metal and non-ferrous work. Next to or on top of the chest lay cauldrons – three, according to the usual accounts – as well as three bells and an iron fire grid. Parts of this were evidently damaged or in progress: pieces of sheet, patches, rivets and raw stock suggest that the owner did not just own cauldrons but mended them, and perhaps made them too. A tinker in the most literal sense.
Then there are the locks. Three padlocks, two keys and a collection of springs, plates and other lock parts show that this man understood locking mechanisms. The padlocks belong to a type that goes back to Roman models and is also known from Birka. Locks were no mass-produced item in the Viking Age: if you could lock a chest, you owned something worth protecting. Keys as a symbol of the woman running the household are well attested in graves; someone still had to build the lock behind them.
The chest also held a steelyard (a lever balance with a sliding weight), whetstones, knives, awls, clamps, tripods, a spatula, a stone chisel and a hacksaw-like frame saw better suited to metal or bone than to wood. The balance is an important detail. In an economy where people often paid in weighed silver, an itinerant craftsman needed a way to weigh both materials and wages. How that worked is explained in Hacksilver – when the Vikings paid by the scales.
Some of the most revealing pieces are the plainest: raw materials and semi-finished items. Iron bars, scraps of sheet, a stock of rivets, fittings at various stages of work. They show that the chest was not a display cabinet but a working business. If you carry blanks with you, you expect to pick up jobs along the way.
Many of the tools show clear signs of wear. The poll of the large hewing axe (sub-number 61) is badly mushroomed from blows – somebody hammered on the back of this axe to drive it like a wedge through timber. The eyes of the axes, the holes for the handle, were forged in three different ways. The researchers who studied them most recently see certain shape features as something like the smith's personal signature. Whether the owner made his own tools cannot be proven from this, but it is possible.
This is where it gets tricky. The find contained not a single coin, nothing inscribed, nothing datable to the decade. So the dating is typological: the shape and make of the objects are compared with other, better-dated finds.
The result: the tools fit the Viking Age and the early Middle Ages. Popular accounts usually say "around 1000" or simply "Viking Age". That is a defensible rule of thumb, not a precise date. The most recent study, by Gunnar Almevik, Bertil Pärmsten and Magnus Sjöholm, notes that individual items might even be older, from the Vendel period before 800, while the chest as a whole is more likely early medieval – the very end of the Viking Age or just after.
Smith, carpenter, tinker, locksmith – all in one person? That is precisely the most widely held reading: the chest belonged to a travelling craftsman who moved from farm to farm, mending tools and cauldrons, fitting locks, forging hardware and working timber when needed. The idea goes back to Arwidsson and Berg and was taken up by, among others, the Norwegian researcher Erik Fridstrøm, who also stressed how little the forms of such tools changed right up to the early twentieth century.
The arguments are solid: the portable size of the chest, the small anvils, the chain as a handle, several trades side by side, raw stock for the road. On a big estate or in a trading town such as Hedeby, craftsmen specialised more. In the countryside, where not every farm had its own forge, someone who could do a bit of everything was worth his weight in silver (see Trades and Crafts of the Vikings).
But we know neither the name nor the origin of this person. Nor do we know whether the chest belonged to one individual or perhaps to a workshop, a farm or a family. "The smith of Mästermyr" is a useful character for storytelling – nothing more.
How the chest ended up in the lake is an open question that researchers have argued over for decades. Broadly, there are three explanations:
Supporters of the offering theory point out that tool finds from lakes and bogs are not unique in Scandinavia, and that smiths held a special place in the northern imagination. The mythical smiths of the Edda – dwarves forging treasures for the gods, or the vengeful Völund, known to the Anglo-Saxons as Weland and pictured on the Franks Casket – suggest that metalworking was seen as something powerful, even uncanny. You cannot, however, draw a straight line from those stories to a chest on Gotland. And one thing speaks against an offering: the chest looks so practically packed. People making offerings often break, bend or lay out objects one by one; people travelling lock up.
The chest was found in 1936 but only fully published almost fifty years later. In 1983 the archaeologist Greta Arwidsson and the ethnologist Gösta Berg brought out The Mästermyr Find. A Viking Age Tool Chest from Gotland, published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities (Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien) in Stockholm.
The book is slim – about 90 pages – but it has shaped generations of blacksmiths, woodworkers and re-enactors. It contains a catalogue of all the objects with photographs and drawings, measurements and comparisons, including with Roman tools such as those known from the Saalburg fort in the Taunus hills of Germany. One of its key observations is that many Viking-age tool forms go back to Roman models: northern tools were not isolated, but part of a European tradition.
The most exciting recent research on Mästermyr comes not from a metallurgy lab but from a church. About eight kilometres from the find spot stands the Romanesque stone church of Hemse. During its restoration in 1896, reused boards and planks from an older wooden stave church, probably from the early twelfth century, were found in its floor.
Gunnar Almevik, Bertil Pärmsten and Magnus Sjöholm of the University of Gothenburg asked a bold question: were these church timbers worked with tools like the ones from Mästermyr – maybe even with these very tools? They 3D-scanned ten tools from the chest, printed and forged copies, worked oak with them, and compared the resulting marks with the toolmarks on the Hemse planks.
The results are striking. Marks on the Hemse timbers match the large hewing axe (61), two adzes (63 and 64), the saw (41) and a drawknife (55) in size, shape and working method; the drawknife's damaged edge may have left a matching ridge in a groove. A bench profile at Hemse corresponds to the moulding iron (57). The authors consider the saw marks on the stave edges the oldest known saw marks on a historic building in Scandinavia.
What matters is how carefully the authors phrase it themselves. It is not proven that these exact tools were used at Hemse. The drawknife is corroded, and a similar blade could leave similar marks. What is shown is that the builders used tools of the same kind – and that the possibility that the chest belonged to one of the builders "cannot be dismissed". The study appeared in Swedish in the journal META in 2020 and in English, as a filmed research article, in FormAkademisk in 2021.
Few Viking-age finds have been copied as often as this one. Smiths in Scandinavia, Britain and North America have reconstructed whole sets of Mästermyr tools, often using methods close to those of the originals: forge welding, hardening, tempering, handles from riven rather than sawn wood.
A recent example: in May 2024 the Vesterheim Folk Art School, linked to the Norwegian-American museum in Decorah, Iowa, ran a three-part class series in which students built a chest from the measurements and drawings in Arwidsson and Berg – oak riven from the log, hewn and planed, joined with tenons and pegs – along with forged hinges, nails, lock and key. The instructors pointed out explicitly that the original ironwork is poorly preserved, so some details remain conjecture.
Mästermyr is the largest tool find of its time, but not the only one. Two more recent discoveries show how rare and valuable such ensembles are.
At Borgring on Zealand, a ring fortress attributed to King Harald Bluetooth and dated to around 980, archaeologists in 2016 found at least 14 iron hand tools in the area of the eastern gate, including spoon augers, a pair of pliers, a clinker nail and a drawplate for making wire. The workroom had collapsed in the late tenth century, burying the tools.
At Nordheim in Sogndal on Norway's west coast, an early Viking-age smith's grave came to light in 2014 under flagstones in a garden, with hammer and tongs and about 60 grave goods in all, including weapons and farming tools.
The comparison makes clear what sets Mästermyr apart: it is not a grave, so not a selection made for the afterlife, and not a collapsed workshop, but a kit assembled and packed by its owner. Here we see what one craftsman considered necessary in order to work.
Could you forge a top-quality sword with the Mästermyr tools? In theory a swordsmith needs similar basics: hammer, tongs, anvil, file. In practice a blade like the famous Ulfberht swords is another league. Those needed very clean, high-carbon steel, probably partly imported, and a workshop with a great deal of experience. The Mästermyr kit points to a versatile jobbing craftsman rather than a weaponsmith.
The same goes for jewellery. Fine brooches, filigree and granulation, as described in The Goldsmithing of the Vikings, call for moulds, crucibles, fine punches and solder – none of which is in the chest. Mästermyr does not show "the" Viking craft, but one particular kind: the work of the person who keeps things running.
The find belongs to the collection of the Swedish History Museum (Statens historiska museum, Historiska museet) in Stockholm. According to the Hemse study, a large part of the ensemble was shown in They call us Vikings, a touring exhibition of the museum. Which pieces are on display in Stockholm or on tour changes over time, so if you are travelling specifically for Mästermyr, check the museum's website or ask them directly first. More destinations are listed in Experience the Vikings: Museums and Sites.
Honestly, less than an advertising text would claim. We are not a Viking-age travelling smith, and our workshop in Alsdorf near Aachen also runs a laser and a computer. We do not beat out cauldron sheets or forge locks.
But one thing does connect us with the man from Mästermyr, and it is not marketing: a craft lives by its tools, and by knowing them, caring for them and using them properly. Before a design goes onto a slate plaque, a glass or a tree slice, wood is sanded, slate is picked, material is checked. Which tools we use for that, and why, is on our page Our tools, and how we work with wood is shown under wooden signs & tree slices.
Leafing through the drawings in Arwidsson and Berg, we mainly see one thing: worn edges, mushroomed polls, patched cauldrons. These are the traces of someone who worked every single day. The chest is a monument to the people who rarely appear in the sagas – and without whom there would not be a single saga scene.
What is the Mästermyr tool chest? An oak chest holding more than 200 tools and workpieces from the late Viking Age or early Middle Ages, found on Gotland in 1936. It is regarded as the largest single tool find of the period.
Where was the Mästermyr chest found? In a drained marsh at Mästermyr in Sproge parish, west of Hemse in southern Gotland. A farmer hit it while ploughing the plot for the first time.
How old is the Mästermyr tool chest? There is no exact date because no coins were found. Typologically it belongs to the late Viking Age or early Middle Ages; "around 1000" is a rough rule of thumb.
What tools were in the Mästermyr chest? Hammers, tongs, small anvils, a nail header, files, rasps, snips, axes, an adze, spoon augers, saws, drawknives, chisels, padlocks, a steelyard and raw material; cauldrons and bells lay with the chest.
Who owned the chest? Nobody knows. The common interpretation is a travelling craftsman who forged, worked wood and mended cauldrons – a well-founded assumption, not a finding.
Where is the Mästermyr chest now? In the collection of the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm (inventory number SHM 21592). Check with the museum before a visit whether it is currently on display.
For courage. For remembrance. For legends that live on.
Laser engraving on slate · Slate, Wood or Glass? · Slate plate care · Viking jewellery.
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