DNA helps match ‘healthy human’ skeleton to 800-year-old Norse saga

A Norwegian saga written more than 800 years ago describes how a dead man was thrown into a castle well – and now researchers believe they have identified the man’s remains.

Sverris Saga is an Old Norse text of 182 verses that describes the exploits of King Sverre Sigurdsson, who rose to power in the second half of the 12th century AD. One section says that a rival clan that attacked Sverresborg Castle near Trondheim, Norway, “took a dead man and threw him into a well and then covered him with stones.”

The well was located inside the castle ramparts and was the only permanent source of water for the community. It has been suggested that the man thrown into the well in the saga may have been sick, and putting him there was an early act of biological warfare.

In 1938, a medieval well in the ruins of Sverresborg Castle was partially drained, and a skeleton was found under the debris and boulders at the bottom. Although it was widely believed that the skeleton known as the Well Man was the remains of an individual mentioned in the saga, this could not be confirmed at the time.

now, Anna Petersen at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research in Oslo and her colleagues used radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis of a tooth from the body to show that the range of dates the man was alive was consistent with the raid on the castle. While this is not definitive proof that this particular person is mentioned in the saga, “circumstantial evidence is consistent with this conclusion,” says Perersen.

What’s more, the team was able to add to the story. “The research we did revealed a lot of details about both the event and the person that are not mentioned in the saga episode,” says Petersen.

For example, DNA suggests that he most likely had blue eyes and blond or blond hair. The researchers also believe that his ancestors came from what is now West Agder, Norway’s southernmost county, based on DNA comparisons between modern and ancient Norwegians.

One thing they couldn’t find was any evidence that the man was thrown into the well because of illness or to make the water unfit for drinking, but they also found no evidence against it, leaving the question unanswered.

Michael Martin from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim says the team’s approach of matching historical documents with DNA evidence could also be applied to building family trees of long-dead royal families or to “physically describe and sketch life histories, such as movement between geographic regions, of anonymous people , whose remains were found during archaeological excavations.”

“To my knowledge, this is the earliest case where genomic information has been recovered from a specific character or even a specific individual mentioned in an ancient text,” says Martin.

He says that by generating genomic information from ancient skeletal remains, we can provide new details about humans. “These details are not in the original text, so the genetic data enriches the story and makes it possible to separate fact from fiction,” says Martin.