Study: DNA corroborates “Well-man” tale from Norse saga | Hacker News Reader

Study: DNA corroborates “Well-man” tale from Norse saga

arstechnica.com

116 pointsBender27 comments

Tangential, but anyone interested in literature should read "The Sagas of the Icelanders" if they have not already. The early Norse and Icelandic sagas are a treasure trove of great stories. I think about them nearly every day and it's fun to recognize similar plot points in modern novels.

Any good modern English translations of the Sagas that you would recommend? On a related note Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology is a great introduction to that topic.

Gaiman's Norse Mythology is quite readable, though it is VERY inaccurate. It's better read as an "inspired by Norse Mythology" book. Basically, it's fan fiction.

The gold standard of Icelanders Sagas is: https://sagas.is/vara.php (love for the little old website). It's complete, as it contains all the sagas and tales.

This is a good selection from above: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/53454/the-sagas-of-the-icela... (notably missing: Njal's Saga, but that's also available separately).

There are more sagas, though. Just not of the Icelanders.

For example the saga of the Volsungs.

If you are interested in general norse mythology then yes, Gaiman's book is really nice. The Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda are primary sources and not a difficult read.

Everything I mentioned (except Gaiman's) is published by Penguin and is a good translation.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-njals-saga might make for a good introduction.

LOL, I'm reading Njal's saga right now and this was exactly what I needed.

I really felt this: “Everyone sounds like a minor Lord of the Rings character.” lol

Technically everyone in Lord of the Rings sounds like a Norse Saga character and this was done intentionally by Tolkien, who read the sagas extensively.

> King Sverre's claim to the throne was that he was the son of King Sigurd Munn, killed in 1155 CE by his brother. Sverre's men were known as "Birkenbeiner" because their legwear and shoes were made of birch bark. Among the rival factions were the "Bagleres" from southern Norway.

This honestly sounds like such a cool premise for a video game.

Are there any video games based on this saga?

If you want to play an epic Norse story, give The Banner Saga trilogy a try.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Banner_Saga

It's a cool premise for a cross country ski race. This is the sister race of the similarly named race in Norway:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Birkebeiner

Birkebeiner are these days most famous for their ham: https://www.matoppskrift.no/bilder/bilder_store/2889.jpg

While the Baglers were reduced to hiding in cozy Bergen streets: https://www.google.com/maps/@60.400775,5.3239763,3a,75y,37.9...

1000 year gap of being able to confirm is wild

Feels a bit existential to me, given that so many people are unceremoniously killed with no accountability every day

I guess I should ask how we know it isn't just another person that fell down a well or was thrown down there? Seems to happen pretty often unfortunately.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/41532635_Dead_Bodie...

Well they said that the remains were under boulders (which the sagas said they threw in after the body), the remains had battle trauma which was likely the cause of death, and radio carbon dating is spot-on.

Of course that could all just be coincidence, but I don't think they are even saying this is for sure 100% the person, it that it potentially corroborates the story.

On a similar note, we now know of at least two places where Norsemen were massacred by the Anglo-Saxons on St. Brice's Day (1002).

https://archaeology.org/issues/november-december-2013/featur...

It is always fascinating to see ancient written history corroborated by later physical discovery.

It is also a bit chilling to realize how our species resorts to mad brutality over and over again. Killing a bunch of random Danes in 1002 on the order of the king wasn't any better than killing a bunch of random Jews in 1942 on the order of der Führer.

Human walk a fine line. We're not actually civilized but more like pets... domesticated. We're house broken to a point, but still might bite, shit on the sofa, etc.

> Killing a bunch of random Danes

We don't really know much but supposedly they were mainly enemy combatants (and their affiliates, possibly including their families in a less generous interpretation. Although considering that the slave trade was a alive and well in Anglo-Saxon Britain killing women and children might not have been practical).

"Random" Danes have been violently terrorizing Britain for centuries, of course indiscriminate murder is always horrible but I wouldn't say it's necessarily comparable to what Nazi Germany was doing (maybe closer to what the Soviets did to Germans when they got the upper hand).

The analysis of skeletons found at St John's College indicates that the slain were a mixture of native Danes and youngsters who grew up in England.

Given how murder campaigns usually go, I would be a bit surprised if the killers were particularly careful about ensuring precise identities of the victims before killing them.

Jewish people didn't kill Germans, no, but the Nazi propaganda painted them as mortal enemies of the people, betrayers, swindlers, modern wannabe slavers: certainly, after years of such propaganda, at least some of the Germans "bought it" and could justify their participation in the Holocaust as a mix of vengeance and national self-defence. Dehumanization of victims usually precedes genocides.

Yes, I mean I'm not trying to justify those events however by the standards of the day it doesn't seem particularly exceptional (of course again, we only have a very vague understanding). Killing the entire male population (since in such societies all males above 12-14 were effectively treated as such) wasn't that particularly exceptional.

After all most Danes/Scandinavians in England seem to have survived?

The Holocaust was an extreme aberration though. Something generally unthinkable by the (European) standards of the 1800s or 1900s. We can go back another ~500 and even the medieval rulers of Spain, Portugal etc. (who expelled the entire Jewish and Muslim) populations from their countries) would consider outright extermination to be extremely appalling.

The Holocaust was explicitly modeled on the Armenian Genocide. Of course, there is a question to which degree we can consider the Turks as European. They are sorta-kinda "in between" Europe and the more stereotypical Orient.

Hittler admired the American extermination of natives, actually, and hoped to do the same in Eastern Europe, killing the Slavic people and Jews rather than the Native American peoples.

Killing a bunch of people whose people killed your people, whose people killed your people, etc. That's a big part of history.

The Jews weren't killing any Germans. That's just a lie. In fact, many Jews were Germans, and many Germans were Jews.

A slightly better analogy would how the Germans treated the French during WWII, in revenge for how the French treated Germans after WWI, in revenge for how the Germans treated the French after the Franco-Purssian War, in revenge for how the French treated the Germans during the Napoleanic Wars, in revenge for ...

They aren't actually killing the people responsible though, it's always a bunch of random innocent bystanders. People are just shit sometimes.

Sadly, that was the normal consequence for having lost a conflict for most of history.

During the holocaust, Nazis killed many German veterans of WWI.

Even by ancient standards, that’s inexplicable.

There was also a segment on this on one of the NRP shows over the weekend. I don't recall which one. Ideally, someone else will know.

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