Scientists Think a Skeleton Found in a Well Is the Same Man Described in an 800-Year-Old Norse Text

More than 800 years ago, raiders threw a dead body into a well outside a Norwegian castle. The incident is chronicled in a medieval Norse text, which suggests that the men hoped to poison the area’s water supply. Known as the Sverris Saga, the tale is named for King Sverre Sigurdsson, who was battling enemies affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1938, archaeologists excavated the well—and found a skeleton. Now, by analyzing the DNA extracted from the skeleton’s tooth, researchers have learned new information about the physical characteristics and lineage of the so-called “Well Man,” according to a recent study published in the journal iScience.

“This is the first time that the remains of a person or character described in a Norse saga has been positively identified,” co-author Michael Martin, an evolutionary genomicist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, tells the New York Times’ Franz Lidz. “It is also the oldest case in which we have retrieved the complete genome sequence from a specific person mentioned in a medieval text.”

The well is located near the ruined Sverresborg Castle outside the city of Trondheim in central Norway. During a period of political instability in the 12th century, Sverre insisted he had a claim to the throne, but he faced opposition from the archbishop. The 182-verse Sverris Saga, which Sverre ordered one of his associates to write, describes battles between the new king and his opposition, though historians don’t know whether these accounts are accurate. According to one passage, Roman Catholic “Baglers”—from the Norse for “bishop’s wand”—raided Sverresborg Castle while Sverre was out of town in 1197.

The Baglers didn’t harm the castle’s inhabitants, “but they completely destroyed the castle,” co-author Anna Petersén, an archaeologist at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, tells NPR’s Ari Daniel. “They burned all the houses.”

After that, she adds, “the archbishop’s people wanted to do something nasty.”

Per the saga, the Baglers “took a dead man and cast him into the well headfirst, and then filled it up with stones.” Scholars have long assumed the man was connected to the king, and that the Baglers dumped his body in that spot to taint the water and perhaps humiliate Sverre. The text includes “nothing about who this dead man was, where he came from, what group he belonged to,” says Petersén.

Though the skeleton had been discovered at more than 20 feet deep in 1938, the well wasn’t properly excavated until 2014, when Petersén and a team of researchers partially exhumed the man’s remains. According to a statement, they determined that he likely died in his 30s. Radiocarbon dating revealed that the bones are about 900 years old.

“To me, he looked as if he had been severely injured prior to being tossed in the well,” Petersén tells the Times. Wearing only one well-preserved leather shoe, the skeleton was missing an arm, a foot and a shoulder blade, and there was a wound on the back of his skull.

To conduct the genetic analysis, Martin and his team first attempted to extract DNA from the man’s damaged skull and leg bones.

“We were very frustrated to find that it was almost entirely bacterial DNA,” Martin tells NPR. “There’s been a lot of degradation of the original human DNA.” But once they recovered a tooth from the skeleton, “things really changed.”

The researchers learned that the man likely had blond hair and blue eyes, and his ancestors probably came from what is now Vest-Agder, Norway’s southernmost county. This surprised the researchers: Sverre’s men were from central Norway, meaning the southern Baglers may have dumped one of their own men into the well, per the Guardian’s Jon Henley.

The researchers say they can never be certain that the skeleton is really the dead man referenced in the Sverris Saga, though they think the evidence is quite strong.

“We have [shown] the sagas are not entirely fiction, which was perhaps a sentiment held by the public, though certainly not by historians,” Martin tells the Guardian. The new research also adds to the medieval story, providing a backstory and physical description for someone who was “a trivial side character, mentioned in passing in a single sentence.”

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.