More than 800 years ago, raiders dumped a body in a well outside a Norwegian castle. The incident is chronicled in a Norse medieval text, which suggests the men hoped to poison the area’s water supply. Known as Sveris Sagathe story bears the name King Sverre Sigurdssonwho was fighting enemies affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1938, archaeologists excavated the well and found a skeleton. Now, by analyzing DNA extracted from the skeleton’s tooth, researchers have learned new information about the physical characteristics and parentage of the so-called “Well Man,” according to a recent study published in the journal. iScience.

“This is the first time that the remains of a person or character described in a Norse saga have been positively identified,” co-author. Michael Martinan evolutionary genomicist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, tells him New York TimesFranz Lidz. “It is also the earliest case where we have retrieved the complete genome sequence from a specific person mentioned in a medieval text.”

The fountain is located next to the ruin Sverresborg Castle outside the city of Trondheim in central Norway. During a period of political instability in the 12th century, Sverre insisted that he had a claim to the throne, but faced opposition from the archbishop. Verse 182 Sveris Sagawhich Sverre ordered one of his associates to write, describes the battles between the new king and his opposition, although historians do not know whether these accounts are correct. According to one passage, the Roman Catholic “Baglers”—Scandinavian for “bishop’s wand”—attacked Sverresborg Castle while Sverre was out of town in 1197.

The Baglers did not harm the inhabitants of the castle, “but they completely destroyed the castle”, co-author Anna Petersensays an archaeologist at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research Prit’s Ari Daniel. “They burned all the houses.”

After that, she adds, “the archbishop’s people wanted to do something bad.”

According to the saga, the Baglers “took a dead man and threw him headfirst into the well, then filled it with stones.” Scholars have long assumed that the man was related to the king and that the Baglers dumped his body there to taint the water and perhaps humiliate Sverre. The text includes “nothing about who this dead man was, where he came from, what group he belonged to,” says Petersén.

Although the skeleton had been discovered more than 20 feet deep in 1938, the well was not properly excavated until 2014, when Petersén and a team of researchers partially exhumed the man’s remains. According to one statementthey determined that he probably died in his 30s. Radiocarbon dating showed the bones to be about 900 years old.

“To me, it looked like he was seriously injured before he was thrown into the well,” Petersén tells them. Times. Wearing a single well-preserved leather shoe, the skeleton was missing an arm, leg and shoulder blade and had a wound on the back of the skull.

To conduct the genetic analysis, Martin and his team first tried to extract DNA from the man’s damaged skull and leg bones.

“We were very frustrated to find that it was almost entirely bacterial DNA,” Martin tells NPR. “There has been a great deal of degradation of the original human DNA.” But once they retrieved a tooth from the skeleton, “things really changed.”

The researchers learned that the man probably had blond hair and blue eyes, and his ancestors probably came from what he is now. West-Agderthe southernmost county of Norway. This surprised the researchers: Sverre’s men were from central Norway, meaning that the Baglers from the south could have thrown one of their men into the well, according to Tutorit’s Jon Henley.

Researchers say they can never be sure that the skeleton is really the dead man referred to in Sveris Sagaalthough they think the evidence is quite strong.

“I showed that the sagas are not entirely fiction, which was probably a sentiment held by the public, though certainly not by historians,” says Martin. Tutor. The new research also adds to the medieval story, providing a backstory and physical description for someone who was “a trivial supporting character, mentioned in passing in a single sentence.”