The chest was found in Mastrmyr on the the island of Gotland, Sweden in 1936. More than 200 objects were found in and around it. Most are tools that were used by blacksmiths and carpenters, many of them amazingly modern in appearance.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A Swedish tool chest a thousand years old,
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This review is from: The Mästermyr Find: A Viking Age Tool Chest from Gotland (Paperback)
One of the joys of visiting craft shows is meeting the crafts people and learning more about their passions. At a recent show on the shores of the Hudson River at Tarrytown, I met a blacksmith. He had some very nice work, was was a great talker, and lent me a copy of this interesting book to demonstrate some of his tools. It was a particularly slow day, he was passionate about the Mästermyr chest and its contents, and I learned a great deal.The Mästermyr chest is made of oak, 86.0 - 88.5 cm in length and dates from 1000 A.D. It is now displayed at the Statens Historiska Museum in Stockholm, Sweden. It was found in 1936 when a farmer was plowing an ancient lake bed in Sweden. The chest was encircled by an iron chain, and contained the largest collection of tools from that era so far discovered. Greta Arwidsson described the oak chest: "Chest of oak with lock and hinges of iron. The chest is rectangular with a lid curved in cross section and a flat bottom. The bottom is joined to the ends by mortice and tenon joints. The chest is held together by wooden pegs at the ends and sides. The ends and sides are trapezoid and therefore slope inwards at a slight angle. The ends, which are made of a slightly thicker scantling than the sides and bottom, have a rectangular mortice about 4 cm from the lower edge for the tenons of the bottom plank. The lower portion of each end thus forms a raised base. "The ends, sides, bottom and lid each seem to have been made from a single piece of wood. The underside of the lid is hollowed out, leaving an oval, trough-like depression. On either side of the depression the underside of the lid is flat, where the original thickness of the plank has been preserved; this provides a good fit against the upper edges of the end planks. "The sides are pegged to the ends and the bottom and the bottom is joined by mortice and tenon to the ends; a rectangular tenon at each end of the bottom plank fits into a mortice in the ends...." There are two editions of this book, one dated 1998 and one dated 1999. I looked through the 1999 edition, and am not certain how extensive the differences are between the two editions. This volume has dozens of black and white photographs and a number of drawings. It's amazing, really, how similar many of the objects are to those in use today. I learned that there are a number of projects revolving around this chest and its contents. I've included a couple of links in the first Comment, one which describes how to make a similar chest, together with some excellent pictures, and the second to a project among American blacksmiths to make a collection of tools similar to those found in the chest. A third link is to a discussion group describing a number of other hoards of early tools found in Europe, which includes some excellent pictures. This book is recognized as the best reference work on the Mästermyr chest and its contents. I found the book a fascinating insight into how a blacksmith did business a thousand years ago. Robert C. Ross 2009 PS: It pays to shop carefully for this book; I've seen a wide variety of prices online. B.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A norse blacksmiths treasure,
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This review is from: The Mästermyr Find: A Viking Age Tool Chest from Gotland (Paperback)
This is great for anyone doing research or documentation on our ancestors. It shows what they usedin their day to day lives. If you love old tools and how they were made you will enjoy this book.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Book Review: "The Mästermyr Find - A Viking Age Tool Chest from Gotland",
This review is from: The Mästermyr Find: A Viking Age Tool Chest from Gotland (Paperback)
When I first started looking into medieval jewellery, I found a lot of interesting material on the Vikings, in particular the Gotland tool find. Further reading on the find quickly led me to this book, The Mästermyr Find. Unlike many of the other texts I've bought, (eg. Theophilus or Agricola), this is an entirely modern text, and does not discuss technique or process. What's significant about it is the subject - a full wooden tool chest, weighing upwards of 40kgs, and probably dating from around 1000AD.It isn't a jeweller's toolkit, that much is certain. Instead, it seems to belong to a jack-of-all-trades - primarily working in iron and wood, but with evidence of work with bronze, brass and copper. There doesn't seem to be direct evidence of precious metal-work, but many of the tools are shared between copper-, white- and blacksmithing. Only the woodworking tools are of no conceivable use to the jeweller. The book provides excellent analysis of the find and it's context. There are 14 pages of photographs, and, more importantly, a further 16 pages of line drawings of the find, with compreshensive cross-sections for the items. Alongside the catalogue, which is a text description of the items, this makes for an impressive snapshot of Viking hardware - it covers not just tools, but padlocks, chains and raw materials. I presume that the book was originally written in Swedish, and translated, but the English is excellent, unlike some books I have. Less than a third of the book is in the form of prose - a short description of the context of the find precedes the catalogue, and later on, ethnological aspects are discussed, particularly how the tools relate to other finds throughout Europe, of the same era. Because of the lack of technique, this isn't by any means an essential text for the metalworker, but it's a fascinating read, and it will be very important to me when I try to make some of my own tools. If you're interested in the subject, some of the information is available online, at The Mästermyr Project. [...]
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