An eight-year-old girl is being hailed as a future queen after she pulled a 1,500-year-old sword from a lake in central Sweden. 

Saga, whose name means "seeing one" in Old Norse, pulled the sword from Vidöstern lake in Tånnö, Småland, earlier this summer, as she was scrabbling for rocks and clam shells to skim across the surface. 

“She picked it up, and when she realised it had a handle, she said ‘Daddy I’ve got a sword!’,” her father Andy Vanecek, 44, told The Daily Telegraph. 

“She lifted it up kind of like a warrior, and then it bent, and I realised that’s not how a stick would break, so I ran up to her and thought, ‘Can this really be the real thing?’.

Mr Vanecek, who moved to Sweden from Minnesota a year ago with Saga and his Swedish wife Madeleine, said the family had had to sit on their secret for two months until the find was officially announced this week by the local county museum in the city of Jönköping.  

He said his daughter had been excited to talk to Swedish television, radio and newspaper reporters at the time of the announcement, but was today oblivious to the explosion of interest on social media. 

“Everyone is saying on Twitter and Reddit, ‘We have a new queen!’ and people want Saga to overthrow Trump, which I think is awesome,” Mr Vanecek laughed. "They’re saying, ‘She’s called Saga’. The sword found her!" 

“The funny thing is that I’m a huge Minnesota Vikings fan. How funny is it that the daughter of a Vikings Fan from Minnesota found a Viking sword in Sweden?”

The water levels in the Vidöstern lake were unusually low this year because of the dry summer, and the eight-year-old found the sword while helping her father fix a new buoy to warn boats of a slab of concrete now dangerously close to the  surface. 

Mr Vanecek initially thought the sword might be a toy from the 1950s, but when a work colleague shared photos of it with Annie Rosén, an archeologist at the local county museum, he said she had immediately identified it. 

"She said, ‘That’s the real thing. We need to get it preserved quickly, so it doesn’t rust into dust’."  

The museum’s conservationists now estimate that the 85cm long sword could be around 1,500 years old, meaning it probably predates the Viking Age. 

What makes the find doubly remarkable is the sword’s wood and leather scabbard, which is still largely intact having been preserved under silt.