“They took a dead man, threw him into a well and filled him with stones.” It was explained in the Saga of Sverre, a Norse poem written by a Benedictine poet (Karl Jónsson) in the early 1200s.

Well then, we just found that guy.

As? What you hear. It’s a random line lost in a saga about a battle in the middle of 11th century Norway; but a team of researchers from different universities from Scandinavia, Iceland and Ireland they just “identified” the bones of the dead man who ended up at the bottom of the well.

And I speak of identifying because, strictly speaking, the bones they found each other at the bottom of an old well in Sverresborg Castle in 1938. The problem is that the technologies of the time did not allow us to know much more about it and the bones were kept in a drawer.

The mythical vision of the past. From afar, the Norse sagas often seem to us like a genre of pre-modern mythology. We know that’s not the case, of course. For centuries, northern kings hired ‘scalds‘ (warrior poets) who wrote chronicles about their exploits. It is clear that there was a lot of literature there, but (as we see) not only literature.

Ultimately, it was a matter of time before archaeological evidence in favor of the sagas began to appear. What we didn’t expect was that they were so specific and exact.

How have they done it? A couple of years ago, a team from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology decided to revisit the topic. They didn’t have much to work with: just the dust of a tooth. But, today, this is enough (for many things).

The first thing they discovered is that the man in the well was between 30 and 40 years old when he died. From there, they used techniques of “radiocarbon dating, genetic sequencing, and isotope analysis to obtain the most complete picture of the man’s identity.”

For example: they discovered that he died about 900 years ago (which coincides in dates with the event recounted in the saga). “We also know, thanks to genomic analysis, that he probably had blonde or light brown hair and blue eyes,” the researchers explain.

What’s a guy like you doing in a place like this? If your estimates are correct: the guy genetically came from the “southernmost Norwegian county, Vest-Agder”. That is, hundreds of kilometers from where it appeared.

It is true that they do not yet know the name or history of the man at the well; but the story seems to fit (and go beyond what the saga says): everything seems to indicate that it was one of the Catholic fighters who tried to assault the castle taking advantage of the fact that King Sverre was away.

The most interesting thing is not that. The interesting thing is that new technologies are allowing us to remove ancient texts from the mists of oblivion and give them flesh and blood. It is, in a sense, the Scandinavian equivalent of the discovery of Troy.

Image | Bragi Boddason / Norwegian Cultural Heritage Research Institute

In techopiniones | The indomitable George Dantzig and the truth hidden in urban legends, ancient stories and traditional remedies