In 1197, an ancient saga relates, a body was flung into a well by the besiegers of Sverresborg castle outside Nidaros, now the central Norwegian city of Trondheim. More than 800 years later, scientists think they may have found him.
“We can never be 100% sure that the remains in the well are those of the man described in the saga,” said Michael Martin of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, a co-author of the study published in the journal iScience.
“But the circumstantial and scientific evidence is very convincing. In a hypothetical trial, if a jury were presented with the scientific evidence and the text of the saga, I know they would be convinced that we had found the victim.”
The Sverris saga relates the life of the ambitious Norwegian king Sverre Sigurdsson, who rose to power in the late 12th century during a period of political instability and civil war that continued for decades after his death in 1202.
The 182-verse saga, believed to have been written at the time of the events it relates to – and partly under the king’s supervision – by an Icelandic abbot who was close to Sverre, is described as unique in the rich accounts it gives of his many battles.
One passage describes in vivid detail how in 1197 the king’s Roman Catholic enemies attacked his stronghold at Sverresborg, pillaging the castle and razing every dwelling inside while the monarch was away in Bergen.
The besieging forces, known as Baglers from the Norse word for “bishop’s wand”, entered the castle through a secret door while its defenders, known as Birkebeiner or “birch legs”, supposedly because they wore birch bark on their legs, were eating.
The Baglers “took all the goods that were in the castle, and then they burned every single house that was there,” the Sverris saga reads. “They took a dead man, and cast him headfirst into the well. Then they piled stones into it until it was full.”
Historians had long assumed that, if the incident actually happened, the dead man was a Birkebeiner, and that the attackers most likely acted to humiliate the king, or to contaminate the water in the well in an early form of biological warfare.
Then, in 1938, archeologists excavating the well found, about 7 metres down the shaft and buried beneath multiple layers of stones, a human skeleton. But the second world war came, the German army occupied the area, and “well man” stayed where he was.
In 2014 and 2016, a team led by archaeologist Anna Petersén resumed the dig and, beneath further mounds of rubbish dumped down the well by the Nazi forces, partially exhumed the remains of a man aged between 30 and 40. There was a “high probability” he was the man in the saga, Petersén told public broadcaster NRK.
He had been about 1.75 metres tall and hurled into the well wearing only a leather shoe, and short of a foot and his left arm. His skull – found separated from his body – bore a blunt force injury and sharp cuts that were probably inflicted before he died.
Determined to “provide independent sources of information about events in the historical record”, combining literary, historical, archaeological and scientific data, the research scientists have now discovered a great deal more about the man.
Radiocarbon dating of bone from the skeleton “produced a conventional radiocarbon age of 940, plus or minus 30 years”, they said in their paper – consistent with the date of the Baglers’ attack on Sverrisborg castle as described in the Sverris saga.
The team tried to sequence the man’s genome from his bones, but found the DNA had not been adequately preserved. Instead, scientist Martin Ellegard obtained a DNA sample from one of the well man’s teeth.
Analysis revealed he had blond or light brown hair and blue eyes. Comparing his genome with those of modern Norwegians, with the help of the Icelandic firm deCode Genetics, showed the man was from southern Norway.
That was a surprise, because Sverre’s men were from central Norway: the southern besiegers may have thrown one of their own into the well.
Either way, the researchers believe this may be the first time that genomic information has been recovered from a specific character – or even an actual person – described in a saga.
“We have showed the sagas are not entirely fiction, which was perhaps a sentiment held by the public, though certainly not by historians,” Martin said. “And I think it will help people to have a greater appreciation of the content of the sagas.”
Advanced scientific analyses had “added previously unknown details to a story that has been told for nearly 900 years”, he added. “The man thrown into the well was a trivial side character, mentioned in passing in a single sentence, but our work has given him a background and a physical description.”
