What Is a Viking Ring Money Hoard and How Was It Traded?

Written by Simon Williams

There is a moment in the Egils Saga, one of the great Icelandic family sagas written down in the 13th century, in which the Norwegian king Athelstan rewards the warrior Egil Skallagrimsson with two chests of silver as payment for his service. Egil does not receive coins. He receives silver. The distinction matters enormously.

The Viking Age economy across most of Scandinavia and the Norse diaspora did not run on coinage in any modern sense. It ran on silver, and specifically on the ability to weigh silver accurately and divide it reliably into portions that could settle a transaction of any size. Ring money, the open-ended penannular silver rings that appear in their hundreds in Viking Age hoards across northern Europe, was the physical infrastructure of that economy. Understanding how it worked changes everything about how you read the material record of the Viking Age.

What Is Ring Money?

The term ring money is used by archaeologists and numismatists to describe open-ended silver rings, typically penannular in form, that were produced and circulated as portable bullion rather than as personal ornaments. They are distinguished from arm rings and neck rings used primarily as status display by their standardised weight, their relatively plain surface decoration, and their appearance in contexts that suggest commercial rather than personal use.

The basic form is simple: a rod of silver, round or square in cross-section, bent into an open-ended hoop with the terminals left plain or lightly finished. The diameter varied, but many examples cluster around sizes consistent with use as finger rings or small hand rings rather than the larger arm ring forms. The defining characteristic is not the size but the weight standardisation: ring money pieces tend to cluster around specific weight units that correspond to known Viking Age weight standards.

It is important to note that the boundary between ring money and personal jewellery was not always clear in the Viking Age itself, and was probably not intended to be. The same object could function as currency in one transaction and as personal adornment in another. The hack-silver economy, in which any silver object could be cut into fragments and weighed for payment, meant that the distinction between money and jewellery was fundamentally fluid in a way that has no direct modern equivalent.

The Weight Standards Behind the System

The Viking Age bullion economy was not an informal or chaotic system. It was governed by a set of weight standards that were understood and applied consistently across the Norse world and its trading partners, allowing transactions to take place between people who shared no common language, coinage tradition, or political authority.

The basic unit of the Norse weight system was the eyrir (plural aurar), a term that appears in both the sagas and the legal codes as a standard measure of silver value. One eyrir weighed approximately 26.6 grams, though regional variations existed. Subdivisions of the eyrir were also standardised: the ortug was approximately one third of an eyrir, or roughly 8.5 grams, and the penningr was a smaller subdivision used for minor transactions.

Ring money pieces found in Scandinavian and British hoards frequently correspond to these weight units or simple fractions and multiples of them. A ring weighing approximately one eyrir was not a coincidence. It was a designed object, produced to a known weight standard so that its value was immediately legible to any trader who had handled Norse silver before.

This standardisation is what made the system work across the enormous distances and cultural differences of the Viking Age trading network. A merchant in York did not need to speak the same language as a merchant in Hedeby or a trader in Novgorod. They both needed a scale, a set of lead weights calibrated to the same standards, and silver they could both recognise as genuine. Ring money provided the silver. The shared weight standards provided the legibility.

"The Norse weight system was not a primitive precursor to coinage. It was a sophisticated alternative to it, one that functioned effectively across three continents and several centuries without requiring any central issuing authority."

How Transactions Actually Worked

The physical process of a Viking Age silver transaction is one of the most direct connections we have to the economic life of the Norse world, because it left its marks on the objects themselves.

A trader wishing to pay for goods in silver would reach for his or her purse or arm ring assemblage and select a piece of the appropriate approximate weight. A small folding scale, the kind found in several Viking Age male and female graves across Scandinavia and the British Isles, would be produced. The silver would be placed on one pan of the scale, and the appropriate lead counterweight on the other. If the silver was too heavy, a knife would cut a fragment from the ring or ingot to bring the weight down to the required amount. If too light, a second piece of hack-silver would be added.

Before accepting the silver, the recipient would almost certainly test it. A small punch or nick driven into the surface would reveal whether the metal was solid silver throughout or merely a silver-plated base. This is the origin of the test marks visible on so many Viking Age silver pieces, including the arm rings of the Cuerdale Hoard discussed in our earlier article in this series.

The scales used in this process are among the most informative objects in the Viking Age archaeological record. They appear in both male and female graves, which suggests that silver weighing was not a specialist activity confined to professional merchants but a routine practical skill exercised by a wide range of people in Viking Age society. The lead weights found with the scales frequently show signs of adjustment, small additions of lead to bring an underweight piece up to the correct standard, which is itself evidence of a system that was actively maintained and monitored rather than simply accepted at face value.

Ring Money in the Hoards

Ring money appears in Viking Age hoards across an extraordinarily wide geographical range, from Ireland in the west to the Russian river systems in the east, and from northern Norway to the former Danelaw in England. The distribution follows the Norse trading and raiding network with remarkable fidelity, appearing wherever Norse silver circulated and wherever the hack-silver weight economy was in use.

The Irish evidence is particularly rich. Ireland was deeply embedded in the Viking Age silver economy from the late 9th century onwards, when the Norse trading towns of Dublin, Waterford, and Limerick became major nodes in the western Norse commercial network. Irish hoards of the 9th and 10th centuries contain ring money in significant quantities alongside hack-silver, Abbasid dirhams, and Carolingian coins, reflecting the same cosmopolitan silver assemblage visible in the Cuerdale Hoard from Lancashire.

The National Museum of Ireland in Dublin holds one of the most important collections of Viking Age ring money in Europe, assembled from hoards found across Ireland and particularly from the Dublin Norse settlement area. The pieces in this collection demonstrate the weight standardisation and the test-mark evidence of commercial use with particular clarity.

In Scandinavia, the Swedish island of Gotland stands out as the site of the most extraordinary concentration of Viking Age silver anywhere in the Norse world. More than 700 silver hoards have been found on Gotland, containing a total weight of silver that dwarfs any comparable area of comparable size in medieval Europe. Ring money forms part of this assemblage, alongside the elaborate twisted torsade neck rings and other high-status silver forms that the island's position at the centre of Baltic trade made possible. The Gotland torsade article explores the island's extraordinary silver tradition in full.

The Penannular Form: Why Open-Ended?

The open-ended penannular form of ring money was not accidental. It was a design choice that served the commercial function of the object in several specific ways.

First, the open end allowed the ring to be adjusted to fit different finger or wrist sizes, which extended its useful life as a wearable object and made it easier to carry and display. Second, the open end made it easier to cut a terminal from the ring for use as hack-silver when a transaction required a smaller denomination than the full ring provided. Third, the penannular form was easy to produce in quantity from a length of silver rod, requiring only heating, drawing, and bending without the additional steps required to close the join cleanly.

The terminals of ring money pieces, the two ends of the open hoop, are often the most diagnostically useful part of the object for dating and provenance purposes. Simple blunt terminals suggest early production and plain commercial function. Expanded, decorated, or faceted terminals suggest later production or pieces that were edging toward personal ornament status. The transition from plain commercial ring money to decorated personal jewellery is visible in the terminal treatment, a gradual shift from pure function toward the kind of display value that the larger arm rings and neck rings represent.

Ring Money and the End of the Bullion Economy

The Viking Age bullion economy, in which ring money and hack-silver served as the primary medium of exchange across the Norse world, did not end abruptly. It gave way gradually to a coinage-based economy as the Norse kingdoms of Scandinavia developed more centralised political structures and as the pressure of commercial contact with the coin-using economies of Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian Europe made standardised coinage increasingly advantageous.

In England, the process was relatively rapid. The Danelaw economy of the late 9th and early 10th centuries used both silver bullion and Anglo-Saxon coinage, as the mixed assemblage of the Cuerdale Hoard confirms. By the mid-10th century, as English royal authority reasserted itself across the former Danelaw, coinage had largely displaced bullion as the primary medium of exchange, and the production and circulation of ring money in England effectively ceased.

In Scandinavia the transition was slower. Norwegian and Swedish silver hoards continue to show significant proportions of bullion alongside coinage well into the 11th century, and in some peripheral areas of the Norse world the bullion economy persisted even longer. The last great period of Gotland hoard deposition, in the late 11th and early 12th centuries, still contains ring money alongside the latest Scandinavian and foreign coins, suggesting that the old system and the new operated in parallel for a considerable period before the bullion tradition finally faded.

What replaced ring money was not simply coinage. It was a fundamentally different understanding of what money was, one in which value was certified by a central authority rather than established by weight in each individual transaction. The shift from ring money to coin is, in a real sense, the shift from a world in which every merchant was their own assayer to a world in which the king's stamp was the guarantee of value. The Norse world made that transition more slowly and more reluctantly than most of its neighbours, and the ring money hoards are the material record of the resistance.

For those drawn to the material culture of the Norse bullion world, the Viking collection at Histories and Castles includes pieces rooted in the same visual tradition, including the Elder Futhark Rune Viking Pendant and the Viking Vegvisir Arrowhead Necklace, both carrying the symbolic weight of a culture that understood value in the most direct physical terms possible.

This article is part of the Viking Jewellery series. Explore all articles at https://historiesandcastles.com/blogs/vikings