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.