A metal detectorist has discovered a small silver coin marked with the name of a famous Viking king. However, it was unearthed not in Scandinavia, but in southern Hungary, where it was lost almost 1,000 years ago.

The find has baffled archaeologists, who have struggled to explain how the coin might have ended up there - it's even possible that it arrived with the traveling court of a medieval Hungarian king.

The early Norwegian coin, denominated as a "penning," was not especially valuable at the time, even though it's made from silver, and was worth the equivalent of around $20 in today's money.

"This penning was equivalent to the denar used in Hungary at the time," Máté Varga, an archaeologist at the Rippl-Rónai Museum in the southern Hungarian city of Kaposvár and a doctoral student at Hungary's University of Szeged, told Live Science in an email. "It was not worth much - perhaps enough to feed a family for a day."

An 1865 engraving of the Harald Hardrada penning coin. (Image credit: By Zeichner: C. I. Schive, Lithograf Bucher in Bergen - C. I. Schive: Norges Mynter i Middelalderen. Christiania 1865., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15634852)

The coin found at the Várdomb site is in poor condition, but it's recognizable as a Norwegian penning minted between 1046 and 1066 for King Harald Sigurdsson III - also known as Harald Hardrada - at Nidarnes or Nidaros(opens in new tab), a medieval mint at Trondheim in central Norway.

The description of a similar coin(opens in new tab) notes that the front features the name of the king "HARALD REX NO" - meaning Harald, king of Norway - and is decorated with a "triquetra," a three-sided symbol representing Christianity's Holy Trinity.

The other side is marked with a Christian cross in double lines, two ornamental sets of dots, and another inscription naming the master of the mint at Nidarnes.

Harald Hardrada ("Hardrada" translates as "hard ruler" in Norwegian) was the son of a Norwegian chief and half-brother to the Norwegian king Olaf II, according to Britannica(opens in new tab). He lived at the end of the Viking Age, and is sometimes considered the last of the great Viking warrior-kings.

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