However, Sverre had other ideas. He had dreams that he was destined for greatness. Then in 1175, when Sverre was about twenty-five, Gunnhild threw gasoline on the fire by telling him that his father wasn't actually the humble comb-maker Unås, but King Sigurd Munn of Norway, who had been killed by his brother Inge Haraldsson twenty years earlier, precipitating what would end up being a fifty-year civil war.
After finding out about his paternity, Sverre decided to head over to Norway and see what he could do to rectify the situation.
Historians differ on whether they accept the claim that Sverre was actually Sigurd's son. The main source for this claim, Sverris Saga (thought to have been written by Karl Jónsson, Abbot of Þingeyraklaustur Monastery in Iceland), was certainly biased -- no aspersions meant toward the good abbot, but it was written under the direction and supervision of Sverre himself, so it's no surprise that in the saga the claim is treated as rock-solid fact. And certainly, kings fathering children with mistresses isn't unusual. But the whole thing definitely has overtones of mythology -- "the king's lost heir coming back to claim the throne" is a tale old as the hills. (Interesting that most of the fictional ones, like Aragorn son of Arathorn and Taran the Wanderer, succeeded brilliantly, while the real-life ones, like Perkin Warbeck, Lambert Simnel, and Kaspar Hauser, almost always came to bad ends.)
Whether or not his claim was legitimate, Sverre certainly acted like he deserved the throne. He landed in Norway in 1176, and predictably meeting with little support, allied himself with a rebel group called the Birkbeiners ("Birchlegs," so called because they were so poor they made themselves leggings out of birch bark). And initially, that didn't go so well, either. Sverre and the Birkbeiners were defeated in a series of battles, eventually whittling their numbers down to about seventy. But in a turn of fate that is astonishing by any measure, in 1179 they beat the much larger forces of King Magnus V Erlingsson, seizing control of the entire district of Trøndelag.
Magnus wouldn't give up, however, and certainly wouldn't accept Sverre as a co-regent. Sverre had to fight for another five years before fate once again intervened on his behalf. After yet another battle between the Birkbeiners and the Heklungs (Magnus's supporters) led to an unexpected rout, the surviving Heklungs -- including Mangus himself -- attempted to flee on ships down the long, narrow Sognefjord. The overloaded ships sank, drowning Magnus and the majority of his supporters, leaving Sverre the uncontested king of Norway.
A marble sculpture of Sverre Sigurdsson from Nidaros Cathedral (ca. 1200) [Image is in the Public Domain]
Sverre's reign, however, was never to see real peace. There were conflicts with landholding nobles, conflicts with the church, uprisings from rival parties, and even (ironically) a pretender to the throne who claimed to be Magnus's long-lost son. (The pretender, unsurprisingly, didn't last very long.) It was during one of these fights, however, that an event occurred that is why the whole topic comes up today.
In 1197, Sverre's forces were trapped in Sverresborg Castle outside the city of Trondheim, and it wasn't looking good. In a desperate attempt to end the siege and wipe out Sverre and the Birkbeiners once and for all, the besieging forces threw the dead body of one of the men killed in a skirmish into a well -- the main water source for the castle -- in the hopes that it would poison the water and either kill them outright or force them to give up. In the end it did neither -- Sverre would live to fight on for another five years -- and the story would have seemed to be one of those odd historical filigrees that could as easily be fabricated as true.
Except that researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology believe they found the body.
The skeleton of a blond, blue-eyed man, approximately thirty years old at death, was found in a well near Sverresborg Castle that had been clogged with stones. There were two deep cuts in his skull that are thought to be what caused his death. From DNA extracted from a tooth, the scientists determined not only the bits about his appearance, but a surmise that he came from the province of Vest-Agder, in the very southernmost tip of Norway.
"This is the first time that a person described in these historical texts has actually been found," said Michael D. Martin, who co-authored the study. "There are a lot of these medieval and ancient remains all around Europe, and they're increasingly being studied using genomic methods... The important Norwegian Saint Olaf is thought to be buried somewhere in Trondheim Cathedral, so I think that if eventually his remains are uncovered, there could be some effort to describe him physically and trace his ancestry using genetic sequencing."
It's amazing that techniques of cutting-edge genetic analysis are being brought to bear on questions from history. And in this case have corroborated a peculiar story from a saga long thought to be of questionable veracity -- giving us a lens into a turbulent, violent, and chaotic period of Scandinavian history.
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