Keeping it in the family

The Phys Org site yesterday had an interesting report about two Viking age skeletons that have been shown to be those of two close male relatives. One is that of an older man in his fifties, who appears to have received at some point wounds in conflict, found at Otterup on Funen in central Denmark. The other is of someone in his twenties who was discovered in Oxford. The pair have gone on display at the National Museum in Copenhagen. 

The Oxford skeleton is one of a series which were found in 2008 on a site being developed by St John’s College, and thought, in all likelihood, to be victims of the St Brice’s Day massacre of November 13th 1002. The burial contained the remains of 34 to 38 young men aged between 16 and 25. Just the age for Danish warriors acting as mercenaries in a troubled England. As my late friend Fr Jerome Bertram pointed out the site of the mass grave was also that of an ancient pagan cultic centre, and he thought that the good people of Oxford must have thought that was an appropriate place to bury, or simply dump, the remains of 

barely Christian Vikings.

How closely the two men were related is not clear - grandfather and grandson perhaps, uncle and nephew or half-brothers - is not clear, and they may be a generation apart, but, more than a thousand years, later these relatives have been reunited.

The article can be read at Two Viking relatives reunited in Denmark after 1,000 years

I have posted before about the 1002 massacre, which is particularly well documented in Oxford for such an event. The updated Wikipedia account at St. Brice's Day massacre puts the story in its historical setting and cites modern scholarly opinion as to what did and did not happen. In particular it quotes King Aethelred II’s charter of 1004 with its frank admission as to how the church of St Frideswide’s monastery was set on fire and its contents lost. The image of tiresome Danes fearing for their lives barricading themselves in St Frideswide’s, which as a result the English had to destroy so as to get at the Danes to kill them is recounted in an artlessly laconic manner - jolly unsporting of them not to want to be murdered....