Bones found in the well of a castle have been analyzed and correspond to those of a character from a Nordic saga.
“The Man from the Well”, whose real name no one knows, appears in a medieval Norwegian tale called Sverris saga. The story recalls the reign of Norwegian king Sverre Sigurdsson (1151-1202 AD), a period punctuated by several civil wars. One passage recounts the attack on Sverresborg Castle by an army of Baglers, a faction loyal to the Catholic Church, facing the king’s faithful. In the story, the place is pillaged and burned and a dead man is thrown into a well and then buried under the stones. According to the story, this terrible act was committed in an attempt to poison the water source with the gradual rotting of the corpse.
This being said, a study carried out by a group of researchers and shared in iScience suggested that the story of this character was not so fictional. Specialists were interested in human remains found in 1938 in a well at Sverresborg Castle and under a pile of stones. These were forgotten with the Second World War and then for years before new excavations in 2014.
During these, 90% of the skeleton was still there. They then used carbon-14 to date the body and the results were recently revealed. The death dates back to around 1197, around the time of the events in the story. Additionally, analyzes of his genome and teeth revealed that he came from the Vest-Agder region of Norway and was a man between 30 and 40 years old with blue eyes and short hair. clear.
They could not determine the cause of his death, but injuries were noted on his skull, probably indicating that he had died before being thrown into the well. He therefore corresponds in many points to the character of the saga. “This man is a marginal character. The very term ‘character’ is an exaggeration to describe his brief mention in the saga. But thanks to this sophisticated analysis, we can add new details to his story. He really becomes a character”, declared to Washington Post Michael D. Martin, professor of evolutionary genomics who participated in the work.
He also clarified that this was the first time that a person described in these texts “was found”. Archaeologist Anna Petersén of the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research nuanced this by explaining that “the text is not absolutely correct” and that “reality is much more complex than the text”.