The arm-rings are gold, which matters immediately. Iron-Age and early medieval Scandinavian hoards more commonly yield silver — hack-silver, coin fragments, ingots — the working currency of a raiding and trading economy. Gold at this scale and in this form belonged to a narrower register: gifts from a lord, markers of allegiance, objects that circulated between hands as proof of a relationship rather than a purchase. Their weight, recorded by Medievalists at over 750 grams across six rings, is specific enough to suggest these were not decorative trinkets but objects with the heft of obligation behind them.
The tenth century is the critical bracket. It falls inside the period when Scandinavian chieftaincies were consolidating into something closer to kingdoms, when the giving and receiving of arm-rings was a documented mechanism of political loyalty rather than mere ornamentation. Whether these rings moved as gifts, tribute or burial goods the find cannot say on its own.
What remains open is the context of deposition: a hoard buried deliberately, a grave assemblage, or something else entirely. That distinction will determine whether archaeologists are reading an act of concealment, a ritual and, in either case, whose hand last held them.
Marcus Azzopardi 
Harvey Jr.