The Sverre Saga tells the story of King Sverre Sigurdsson (1151-1202 AD), who reigned over medieval Norway about 800 years ago. A document so important that much of the country’s early history is known from this single text, which describes a period of political instability characterized by conflicts and civil wars that lasted more than a century and that had Sverre as one of its protagonists. But what is true in these documents? Now a passage from the saga combined with the DNA of some ancient bones indicates that there is a lot of reality behind the legend, but that it was even more complicated than previously thought. The conclusions have just been published in the journal ‘iScience’.
One of the stories tells how in the year 1197 Bagley’s rival army sneaked through a secret door of Sverresborg Castle (now in the city of Trondheim) while the residents were dining. Although King Sverre was not staying there (he was spending the winter in Bergen at the time), the Bagleys raided, looted and burned all the houses inside the fortress “leaving them with only the clothes on their backs,” the story goes. They didn’t end there: they decided to throw a corpse of one of their enemies into a nearby well to infect the complex’s entire water supply with its putrefaction. They finished off with some stones on the body, to close the hole.
In 1938 archaeologists found some bones in what looked like an old well near the facilities. However, it was not until the excavations that took place between 2014 and 2016 that the entire corpse could be recovered and new analyzes carried out. Thus, the results revealed that, indeed, it was a man of about 30 or 40 years old who died about eight centuries ago, coinciding with the stories of the Sverre saga. In addition, evidence of several traumas was found, including a blunt force blow to the left back of the skull and two more cuts that “probably were not postmortem,” although it cannot be known with certainty which occurred before or after death.
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A surprising provenance
Now, new technologies have supported the hypothesis that the remains belong to the man in the well. Thanks to the DNA extracted from his tooth, his entire genome has been completed, corroborating everything that the previous study found, in addition to the fact that this individual probably had light eyes, hair and skin, something that is not strange in that part of the world. world. What did catch the attention of the researchers was the results regarding the origin of the deceased: southern Norway, most likely the province of Vest-Agder, in which inbreeding has caused a characteristic genetic drift in the area.
«King Sverre’s defeated army is believed to have consisted of mercenaries from central Norway known as Birkebeiner. On the contrary, it is said that it was the Baglers, the victorious invaders from southern Norway, who threw the man into the well. Accordingly, previous reports had assumed that the man in the well was a Central Norwegian, from the losing side of the Birkebeiners, the authors note. “Our results show unequivocally that the ancestry of the man in the well was typical of the current population of the southern counties of Agder, but of course they cannot tell us whether the man in the well belonged to the Birkebeiner army or the Baglers.”
Although it cannot be determined whether the man in the well belonged to one side or the other, the results do show that endogamy in southern Norway had already begun eight centuries ago. “The text is not entirely correct: what we have seen is that reality is much more complex than the stories in the saga,” says archaeologist Anna Petersén, from the Norwegian Cultural Heritage Research Institute in Oslo (Norway).
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