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An 800-year-old Norse saga makes a glancing mention of a dead man tossed in a drinking well after a raid on a castle in Norway, almost as an aside. The poor guy doesn't even get a name.
Scientists now believe they've found him. In the journal iScience on Friday, researchers report the results of radiocarbon dating, ancient DNA analysis and a detailed study of a skeleton discovered decades ago at the bottom of a well outside Sverresborg castle near Trondheim. They make the case that this "Well-man" is the same person briefly mentioned in Sverris saga, a 182-verse story about an early Norwegian king who came to power during the last half of the 12th century.
To be clear, the dead guy in the well was not a major figure in the annals of medieval Norwegian history. He gets a single line: "They cast a dead man into a well, and then filled it up with stones."
The Sverris saga has been thought by scholars to be a mostly reliable source of information about events in early Norway, according to Armann Jakobsson, a professor of old Icelandic literature of the University of Iceland not involved in the study. But the saga was written in collaboration with King Sverre Sigurdsson, meaning it also serves as a piece of propaganda and contains clear biases.
The Well-man corroborates and fleshes out a tiny piece of the tale. Radiocarbon analysis of the skeleton suggests he died around the time of the castle invasion in 1197. The study also turns him from a plot device - a body thrown into the water supply to poison it - into a person.
He was 30 to 40 years old, blue-eyed and fair skinned, with light brown or blond hair. His ancestry traces to the southernmost part of Norway, the study suggests, showing the power of modern scientific techniques to help fill in some of the blanks of history - including people whose names never appeared in history books.
"This guy is a marginal character. 'Character' is not even the right word to describe the passing mention of this man," said Michael D. Martin, a professor of evolutionary genomics at the University Museum of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and one of the leaders of the work. "With this sophisticated analysis, it's possible to add new details to him. He actually becomes a character."
• Rediscovering the Well-man
The Well-man was first discovered during a restoration project at Sverresborg castle in 1938. When the well was emptied, a body was revealed.
But the skeleton was never properly excavated, and World War II began the next year. For decades, the remains were forgotten.
The castle ruins are now part of a museum, and to make the area more accessible to the public, officials needed to secure the well. Archaeologists were called in for a test excavation in 2014. The well had been a trash pit for German soldiers during the war, full of wine bottles, old ammunition and stones, said Anna Petersen, an archaeologist at the Norwegian Institute of Cultural Heritage Research who led excavations in 2014 and 2016.
"We thought: There is no chance there is anything left of the bones, they must be crushed under the weight," Petersen said. To her surprise, they were able to recover more than 90 percent of the skeleton.
Radiocarbon dating, calibrated to account for the fact that this individual probably ate a fair amount of fish, which can make a sample look older than it is, pinpointed the remains to the time of the battle.
It's not possible to say with certainty how the man died. Researchers think he was probably dead before he was thrown in the well because of injuries to the skull - which also squares with the saga.
Finally, DNA extracted from his tooth confirmed that he was male and allowed researchers to ascertain his likely appearance. By comparing his genome to a database of modern-day Norwegians, they determined he came from the Vest-Agder region in the south.
Martin Sikora, an associate professor who focuses on ancient genomics at the University of Copenhagen, said the analysis was well done and that it was interesting to see genetic differences that exist today in southern Norwegian people trace back to the medieval time period.
Multiple outside researchers said the study builds a convincing case but can't definitively prove this is the man from the saga. Jakobsson applauded efforts to study ancient remains and see how they map onto historical texts.
"I would not be surprised if a modern DNA study could confirm some of the events of Sverris saga, although there are obviously limits to what they can verify," Jakobsson wrote in an email.
• Baglers vs. Birkebeiners
Sverris saga depicts a formative period in Norway's early history and is the product of a collaboration by the Icelandic abbot Karl Jonsson and King Sverre Sigurdsson.
"The battle descriptions in Sverris saga are many, fairly detailed and very political in that they are between warring factions fighting for power in Norway," Jakobsson wrote in an email.
In the battle scene that precedes the Well-man's appearance, an army of "baglers" loyal to the Catholic Church sneak through a secret door into a castle held by "birkebeiners" loyal to the king. The baglers pillage, raid and burn. Then they throw the dead man into the well, presumably to poison the water supply.
It's natural to assume that the dead man was one of the slain enemy, a birkebeiner. But the birkebeiner army was based out of central Norway, while the invaders were based in the southwest. Did the baglers throw one of their own men into the well?
"That strikes me as kind of unlikely. Generally speaking, the dead on the victorious side are treated very well. You don't desecrate your friends' bodies," said John Sexton, an English professor at Bridgewater State University who co-hosts "Saga Thing," a podcast about the Icelandic sagas. Another possibility is that the Well-man was a birkebeiner who came from the south originally, but moved and found themselves on the opposite side.
Sexton spitballed a few other possibilities: It's known from the saga that the invaders got into the castle because of a traitor on the inside. Maybe the Well-man was a turncoat within their own ranks. Or maybe, in the aftermath of battle, it was just human error, and they picked up a guy from their own side.
Scholars can now debate the question with this new line of evidence.
"Reality is always more complicated than sagas or stories," Petersen said. "So I think it's an achievement just to be able to say that this man, whoever he was or why he ended up in the well, came from this part of Norway."
(COMMENT, BELOW)