The Coin That Shouldn't Be There: A Viking Clue on the Coast of Maine

In the summer of 1957, on a quiet stretch of the Maine coast near the small town of Brooklin, a man named Guy Mellgren made a discovery that would challenge historical narratives and captivate the world. Bending over a patch of soil, he brushed the earth from what he thought was another ordinary find. Mellgren, a weekend digger interested in local history, was not a professional archaeologist. The site he was excavating was known as the Goddard Site, a location rich in Native American relics, nestled along Naskeag Point. It was the place that had quietly preserved centuries of human life, a crossroads where tools, pottery, and trade goods told a story of bustling prehistoric activity. On that particular day, Mellgren’s hand closed around a small, round object unlike anything he had found.

At first, the coin did not cause much excitement. Mellgren thought it might be a colonial artifact, maybe even something left behind by early English settlers. He took it home and added it to his collection, where it sat for years in relative obscurity. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the coin began to attract real attention. After Mellgren passed away, his collection was donated to the Maine State Museum, and in 1978, a photograph of the coin was published in a regional archaeological newsletter. That was when a London-based coin dealer saw the image and recognized something extraordinary.

The coin was not English. It was not colonial. It was, beyond reasonable doubt, Norse. More specifically, it was a silver penny minted during the reign of King Olaf Kyrre of Norway, who ruled from 1067 to 1093. The realization stunned archaeologists and historians. The only confirmed Norse settlement in North America was L’Anse aux Meadows, located in Newfoundland and dated to roughly the same era. There had been no reliable evidence that Viking explorers had ventured as far south as the coast of Maine. The appearance of a Norse coin in an archaeological dig so distant from Newfoundland challenged the boundaries of accepted history.

The setting of the coin’s discovery only deepened the mystery. The Goddard Site was known to be a vibrant Native American trading center during the late Ceramic Period, which spanned roughly from the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries. Excavations had unearthed over thirty thousand artifacts from the site, including items that had traveled from distant parts of the northeastern seaboard. Pottery from New Jersey, stone tools from Nova Scotia, and exotic ornaments from across New England all turned up in the soil. The site played a key role in a web of exchange routes that extended far beyond the immediate region.

If the Norse penny had entered that trade network at L’Anse aux Meadows or another Norse outpost, it could have passed from group to group, eventually finding its way to Maine. The coin bore a hole through it, suggesting it may have been worn as a pendant. That detail is essential because Native peoples often repurposed foreign items for adornment, imbuing them with new cultural meaning. Perhaps it was not the coin’s value as currency that mattered, but its uniqueness, its gleam, its story. The Maine Penny could symbolize cultural exchange, a tangible link between distant peoples, a testament to the human impulse to adorn and cherish the unique.

However, the story has always had its skeptics. Some questioned whether the coin was truly found where Mellgren said it was. A hoax, they suggested, could not be ruled out. Mellgren was interested in Norse exploration and could have come across a similar coin at an antiquities shop or through a private dealer. While such coins were uncommon, they were not entirely unavailable on the European market in the mid-twentieth century. If Mellgren had planted the coin at the site, intentionally or otherwise, the implications would be vastly different. It would no longer be an archaeological clue to early transatlantic contact but a modern anomaly that fooled the field for decades.

Yet the evidence for such a hoax is thin. Mellgren never sought fame or fortune from the coin. He did not promote it as a significant discovery or attempt to profit from its existence. Furthermore, metallurgical analysis indicated that the coin had been in the ground for a considerable time. Its patina, wear, and corrosion all seemed consistent with long-term burial. Even if Mellgren had possessed both the motive and the means to fake the find, the scientific evidence does not easily support that conclusion.

Yet the central mystery remains unresolved, inviting us to ponder the possibilities. Was this coin a singular fluke, a one-in-a-million artifact that slipped through centuries of trade and ended up buried in a shell midden in coastal Maine? Or was it a faint echo of something far more ambitious? Some scholars have speculated that Viking explorers made more extensive forays into the North American continent than previously thought. While there is no direct evidence of a Norse presence in Maine beyond this one coin, the possibility lingers like smoke from a long-extinguished fire, keeping the debate alive and the imagination engaged.

The coin, known popularly as the Maine Penny, resides in the Maine State Museum. It lies beneath glass, unassuming in appearance but dense with questions. No Norse artifacts have ever been conclusively found in the United States, making this object a curiosity and a cornerstone of a much larger debate. It speaks to a moment when the known world may have briefly overlapped with the unknown, when cultures separated by an ocean might have glimpsed one another across the foggy shorelines of a continent still unfolding.

Ultimately, the Maine Penny is as much about what we know as we do not. It is a reminder that history is not fixed but constantly revised by new evidence, new interpretations, and occasionally, a tiny silver coin unearthed by someone with no idea of the storm it would one day cause.