DNA analysis of a medieval man thrown into a well suggests that the story from the Scandinavian saga actually happened

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A new scientific study of 800-year-old human remains in Norway backs up a royal story that claims a corpse was dumped there to poison the water.

The skeletal remains of a man were found in a well in a Norwegian castle in 1938. Now the new study is published Friday (October 24) in the journal. iScienceunites radiocarbon dating and DNA testing to determine that he likely died in 1197 during a raid on the castle of the Norwegian king Sverre Sigurdsson near Trondheim, in central Norway. Events are recorded in “Sverris Saga“, one of the “Royal 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 humans have been found in the Norse sagas.

He noted that genetic analysis was used to identify the remains. King of England Richard IIIbut they were dated 1485. However, the body in the well dates back centuries earlier, to 1197: “This is the earliest time that genomic approaches have been used,” Martin said.

New ancient DNA analysis has also revealed that the deceased’s ancestors came from southern Norway, casting doubt on some researchers’ suggestion that he was one of the castle’s defenders from central Norway. Instead, either the defender was from the South, or the attackers threw one of their dead into the well, the authors write.

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Well poisoning

Archaeologists believe that the Sverre Saga was written around the time of the events it describes, and possibly under the direction of Sverre himself, who reigned from about 1177 until his death in 1202.

According to the study, the prose poem, consisting of 182 verses, narrates Sverre’s rise to royal power in Norway in the second half of the 12th century. It details the many battles his soldiers fought, called “Birkebeiner” or “birch legs” after the birch bark bandages they wore to protect their shins; while Sverre’s main enemies were a rival faction called the Baglers, the study authors write. During Bugler’s attack in 1197, a dead man is reported to have been thrown into a well near a castle near Trondheim to poison the water for Sverre and his Birkebeiner defenders.

“They took the dead man and threw him into the well, and then covered him with stones,” says the translated saga.

It is possible that the bones in the well did not belong to the dead man in the saga, but radiocarbon dating shows that he died at the same time, the study authors write.

“Although we cannot prove that the remains recovered from the well inside the ruins of Sverresborg Castle belong to the person mentioned in the Sverris Saga, the circumstantial evidence is consistent with this conclusion,” they wrote.

Southern man

Genetic analysis shows that the man from the well likely had blue eyes and blond or light brown hair, and that he had the typical ancestry of people raised in the southern region of Agder.

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However, the Agder region appears to have been a Bagler stronghold, so it is now unknown whether the deceased was from Birkebeiner’s or Bagler’s army, the study authors write.

Archaeologist and historian of Stavanger Roderick DaleA specialist in Old Norse literature who was not involved in the new study agreed that the analysis appears to confirm the events described in the saga. But he noted that Sverris’s Saga, like many royal sagas, was “more propaganda than history.”

“So we could approach this in the same way we might approach the autobiography of a modern politician,” Dale told Live Science in an email. “It is not history as such, although it does deal with historical events that occurred during the author’s lifetime.”