This week a group of Norwegians succeeded in gaining access to the remains of the Dukes, Richard the I and II, at Fécamp in order to extract DN from their remains
For seven years a group of historians and genealogist have campaigned to open the graves of Richard the Fearless and his son, Richard the Good, dukes of Normandy. Their tomb is located in the floor of the monastery in Fécamp. This January the authorities in France as well as the Catholic Church gave permission. Apparently luck struck. In one of the graves the lower jar was found with enough teeth to carry out a DNA-analysis.
According to the press release, the aim is to decide whether their ancestor, Rollo, was Norwegian or Danish. In theory it should be possible through a mtDNA or a Y-DNA test the ethnicity of the person in the grave and by extension, those of his direct ancestors; mtDNA testing identifies the Haplogroup of the person in question, while Y-DNA testing can identify direct male-line ancestry, because the majority of the Y-chromosome is transmitted from father to son nearly unchanged.
From the newspaper accounts, it has not been revealed exactly which DNA-analyses are going to be carried out; nor whether they will be supplemented by for instance a forensic stable isotope analysis. Although this may not indicate the geographical heritage of the dukes (which is presumably Normandy), it might nevertheless give us important information about the diet of the person or persons in question, thus presenting us with important cultural historical knowledge; did the Norman dukes for instance eat a lot of fish or did they prefer animal protein?
What is the fuss?
To understand the reason behind the project, it is necessary to present the group behind.
The leader of the expedition is the historian Sturla Ellingvåg, who is founder of Explico, which “works to expand the knowledge of “Human History using New Technologies such as mapping of migrations through DNA as historical tools”. Explico is a private company, but affiliated with the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen and with both Professor Eske Willerslev from the said institution and Professor Emeritus Per Holck from the University of Oslo. The genetic studies will be carried out in Denmark.
At the opening of the grave in Fécamp both Sturla Ellingvåg, Per Holck and Andaine Seguin Orlando from the DNA lab at the Centre for Geogenetics at the University of Copenhagen were present together with Ole Bjørn Fausa. The latter is a Norwegian investor and entrepreneur, who is founder of the Samlerhuset Group, which sells coins and stamps at auctions. His company finances the “expedition”. According to the press release, Fausa is personally interested in the results. He claims that he by accident discovered “that he descends from Rollo in the 35th degree”. It is apparent, the founder of Samlerhuset hopes to have his DNA directly linked to the profile found in the graves in Fécamp, somewhat in the manner of the identification of Richard III and his modern day descendants.
But who was Rollo?
Sometime in the end of the 9th century and the beginning of the 10th century a group of “Pyrates” – Vikings – took part in raids in the north western part of France. They also worked as mercenaries for the French kings. On the 20th of July a Frankish victory led to negotiations with the leader of the war-band, Rollo. This led to the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte in 911, according to which Charles III ceded the land between Epte and the sea (perhaps Rouen, Évreux and Lisieux, perhaps less). According to the treaty, Rollo accepted to be baptised. The price for these concessions were the duty of the Vikings to help the king defend his territory against other Vikings.
The next references may be found in the Annals of Flodoard of Reims, written between 919 and 966. Flodoard occasionally notices a group of Viking Northmen, who were led by a man called Rollo and active in Normandy and surroundings. However, it is obvious that Flodoard did not consider this particular war-band more important than say the Vikings raiding around Loire. Flodoard refers to Rollo as “princeps”, and mentions him, fighting against King Raoul over the fortress of EU and supporting Charles the Simple against Heribert of Vermandois. To Flodoard the fact that he is a “pirate” is the important marker; his ethnic origin goes unnoticed.
However, at the end of the 10th century, the duke of Normandy commissioned Dudo of Saint-Quentin to write his Historia Normannorum, in which we are told that Rollo was of Danish descent. Dudo’s writings has generally been treated with a degree of circumspection since the book so obviously is complicated to define in terms of genre. Further, according to his own text, we are told that Dudo built his story on the oral tradition in the ducal family and there are not many signs of him consulting written records of any kind (as opposed to Flodoard, which worked much more traditionally as an annalist). For a long time the general opinion has been that Dodo’s identification of Rollo as a Dane was a an anachronistic element caused by the close cooperation between the Duke of Normandy and the Danish Royal family in the beginning of the eleventh century, when the Danish Kings, Svein Forkbeard and Cnut conquered England. Another problem is posed by the fact that it is known that Old Norse was understood as “Danish tongue” and that the use of the “Danish” by Dudo thus may be understood as referring to no more than a vague “Scandinavian” descent; on the other hand, recent linguistic research has demonstrated a close affinity between the modern dialects of Normandy and the region around present day Copenhagen.
Quite apart from the general evaluation of Dudo – which seems to have shifted somewhat in the last 30 years – this identification does not sit well with a later group of sources. Already, in the 11th century, Geoffrey Malaterra, an 11th century Benedictine monk and historian, wrote how: “Rollo sailed boldly from Norway with his fleet to the Christian coast”, while The 12th century English historian William of Malmesbury stated that Rollo was “born of noble lineage among the Norwegians”. Rollo is also mentioned in “The Life of Gruffud ap Cynan”, a 12th century history, which refers to him as the youngest of two brothers to the first king of Dublin. The 13th century Icelandic sagas, Heimskringla and Orkneyinga Saga, remember him as Hrólf the Walker (“who was so big that no horse could carry him”, hence his byname of Ganger-Hrólf; Both sources mention Rollo was born as Hrólfr Rognvaldsson in Møre, Western Norway, in the late 9th century as a son to the Norwegian jarl Rognvald Eysteinsson. Eysteinsson was known to be an enemy of the two brothers mentioned in The Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan. Finally, Richer of Reims, who lived in the 10th century, named Rollo’s father as one Catillus, or Ketil; the latter, though, is generally believed to be a legendary figure.
National-romantic myths
Whatever, the truth behind these different legends, they were probably all anachronistic at the time of their writing. In the end of the 9th century, the sources reveal a complicated landscape in Scandinavia featuring a number of competing petty chiefdoms more or less backing the war-bands, which were harassing and conquering large tracts of land in the British Isles and Normandy, as well as pushing a diaspora into the northern archipelagos in the Atlantic (Iceland, The Faroes, Greenland and Vineland). It is obvious that there existed a common cultural denominator in this diaspora and that questions of Danish or Norwegian descent probably did not matter as they came to do at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, when the question of the “ethnicity” of Rollo once again got the attention.
Probably, the background was the growing nationalism in Norway and the search for independence from Sweden (achieved 1905), which naturally led to a renewed public interest in the independent Viking and Medieval heritage of the Norwegian kingdom (before the Danish supremacy in the 14th century). By launching Rollo as a Norwegian hero it was also possible to claim ancestry to the English royal family though William the Conqueror. This fitted nicely with the candidate for the new dynasty, a Danish prince (Carl) married to an English princess (Maud).
In this highly volatile situation, two copies of the statue of Rollo by Arsene Letellier, of which the original may be seen at Rouen, were requested by the “Sons of Norway”, an American-Canadian-Norwegian association. This initiative was led by Herman O. Fjelde from Wahpeton, who had no less than five Norwegian monuments raised in Fargo, USA. One of these copies was erected in Ålesund in Norway, a city in Möre in Norway in 1911, the millennium of the treaty from 911. Same year saw the erection of a commemorative stone in Faxe, the alleged location, from which some French sources say, he originated.
A competing study
Concomitantly to the project launched by Explico, another group has been working for some years to figure out the probable biogeographical origin through Y-chromosome signature of the House of Normandy. This work has been carried out by another DNA-enthusiast, Michael R. Maglio, who runs a company, OriginsDNA. According to their website, they offer “Scientific research conducted, in whole or in part, by nonprofessional scientist”. In 2014 Maglio privately published a five-page essay on “The Biographical Origins and Y-chromosome Signature for the House of Normandy”. According to this study – which has not been peer-reviewed – an analysis of 3.800 y-DNA records with surnames historically associated with William the Conqueror, a genetic signature of the first Norman King of England was identified. According to this study “the results show that Rollo’s origin was within 226 km of the centre of Denmark and validates the earliest biographical accounts that he was Danish. In addition, Rollo’s ancestors had Norwegian origins”
Does it matter?
Obviously, all this matters to the Norwegian consortium, which has both personal, economic and national interests vested in the final results, which are going to be published in the autumn of 2016. (The laboratory work on the recovered teeth will be carried out both in France and in Norway).
But to some extent, it also matters to medieval history proper. Why? The reason is, that we know that there probably were close connections between the Vikings, who conquered Danelagen and settled there, and the burgeoning royal house of the Jelling Dynasty. Exactly how they were related is not precisely known, but the prevalence of certain “names” (Guttorm, Gorm) and Airdecanut/Hardeknud does point to some sort of dynastic relation. If – as is perhaps possible – Rollo was somehow part of this network, it explains the obvious interest among Viking chieftains to come to the rescue of his grandson after 942, when his son, William Longsword, was murdered. One curious feature here is the identification by Dudo of one of these chieftains, Harold from Bayeux, with the later Harold Bluetooth. Historians has considered this as yet another way for Dudo to make his work pleasing to his ducal patron, who was at the time of Dudo’s writing allied with the son of Harold Blutooth, Sveyn Forkbeard, in the invasions of England (1002- 1016). However, if the genetic investigation demonstrates a plausible “Danish” biogeography of Rollo and his ancestors, it might be worth reframing the understanding of the political background for the Viking raids in the end of the 9th century and the character of the Danish and Scandinavian state-formation at that point. At least, this is a hypothesis worth considering.
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FEATURED PHOTO:
Professor emeritus from the University of Oslo, Per Holck, and Andaine Seguin-Orlando from the DNA-laboratory at the Centre for Geogenetics at the University of Copenhagen in Fécamp, opening the graves of the former dukes, Richard I and II.
© Vegard Stromsodd/Explico