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A new scientific examination of 800-year-old human remains in Norway has confirmed the validity of a royal history claiming that a body was dumped there to poison its waters.
The man's skeletal remains were found in a well in a Norwegian castle in 1938. Now, a new study published Friday (October 24) in the journal iSciencecollects Radiocarbon dating DNA analysis was conducted to determine that he may have died in 1197 during a raid on the castle of Norwegian King Sverd Sigurdsson near Trondheim in central Norway. Events recorded in “Spheres Saga“, one of the “king's sagas” or prose poems, written in Norway and Iceland between the 12th and 14th centuries to glorify the Scandinavian kings.
Co-author of the study Michael MartinAn evolutionary geneticist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology told Live Science that this may be the first time a person has been found in the Norse sagas.
He noted that genetic analysis was used to identify the remains King of England Richard IIIBut it was from 1485. However, the body found in the well dates back centuries earlier, to 1197. “This is the first time genomic methods have been applied,” Martin said.
New ancient DNA analysis also indicated that the deceased man's ancestors came from southern Norway, challenging some researchers' assumptions that he was one of the castle's defenders from central Norway. Alternatively, either this defender had origins in the south, or the attackers threw one of their dead into the well, the authors write.
Related to: Medieval walrus ivory may reveal trade between Scandinavians and Native Americans hundreds of years before Columbus, study finds.
Poisoning the well
Archaeologists believe that the “Sverris Saga” was written around the time of the events it describes, perhaps under the direction of Sverris himself, who ruled from about 1177 until his death in 1202.
According to the study, the 182-line prose poem concerns the rise of an ambassador to royal power in Norway in the second half of the twelfth century.He details many of the battles his soldiers fought in, calling them “birkbeiner” or “birch-legged” after the birch bark wrappings they wore to protect the lower part of their legs. The Saphir's main enemies were a rival faction called the Baglers, the study's authors wrote. During the Bagler attack in 1197, the dead man was reportedly thrown into the well outside the castle near Trondheim to poison its waters for the benefit of Sverre and his defenders Birkebeiner.
The translated epic says: “They took a dead man and threw him into a well and then filled him with stones.”
It's possible that the bones in the well were not those of the dead man from the saga, but radiocarbon dating shows he died at the same time, the study's authors wrote.
“Although we cannot prove that the remains recovered from the well within the ruins of Sverrisborg Castle are those of the person mentioned in the Sverris Saga, the circumstantial evidence is consistent with this conclusion,” they wrote.
Southern gentleman
Genetic analysis suggests that the man who lived in the well may have had blue eyes and blond or light brown hair, and that he was of typical ancestry for people who grew up in the southern Agder region.
However, the Agder region appears to have been a stronghold of the Bagler tribe, so it is now unknown whether the dead man was from Birkebeiner's army or the Bagler army, the study's authors wrote.
Archaeologist and historian at the University of Stavanger Roderick Dalea specialist in Old Norse literature who was not involved in the new study, agreed that the analysis seemed to support the events described in the saga. But he noted that the “Sverris Saga”, like many of the king's sagas, was “more propaganda than history”.
“As such, we might think of it in the same way we might treat a modern politician's autobiography,” Dale told Live Science in an email. “It is not history per se, although it deals with historical events that occurred in the author's life.”
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