About a year ago, a fellow American Servite gave me an article about the discovery of the tomb of a “Viking” under Prague’s Castle in the 1920s. I’ve since lost that article but have been interested in the story ever since.
The story shows up occasionally, both the English and Czech press, in good part because it’s fascinating: What was he doing there?
There’s a Wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Castle_skeleton
The most extensive recent article about it in English was written by Nicholas Saunders, Jan Frolik and Volker Hold in Antiquity 39 370(2019): 1009-1025.
The article was quite good, suggesting at the end that he was probably Nordic, but that at the time, he might not have considered himself as such, or was simply a mercenary or adventurer, who nonetheless was prominent enough to warrant the kind of burial that he had received, at a time, incidentally either before or just after the foundation of Prague’s castle.
Looking up / following some of the links / references made in both the Wikipedia and Antiquity article, I wrote then the principal author asking him if this “Viking” would be considered something of a 9-10th century “Heydrich” figure.
My argument was this:
(1) It is attested in the Fulda Annals of the time (attn non-Czech readers, just use the “translate option” on your web-browser to have the various pages here translated into English) that throughout the period in question, Bohemia and then certainly Central Bohemia was already clearly Slavic, though Bohemia was contested territory between the Frankish Germans to the West and the Slavic Moravians to the East, and pretty much every year the Frankish king sent out an expedition to Bohemia to plunder or otherwise extract tribute.
(2) In 872 there appeared to be indeed, a famous battle “U Vltavy” [FA] [Wikip] where a Frankish expedition took on five Czech Princes and possibly a sixth named Gariwey (Bořivoj?). That Frankish expedition apparently successfully scattered the Czech princes, but after the princes fled to their citadels the Frankish expedition was unable to do more … and subsequently went home.
Okay, I suggest that (1) _perhaps_ the encampment of the 872 Frankish expedition was on the _up to then uninhabited hill_ on which today's Prague Castle stands (it would seem like an obvious, strategically useful place to setup such an encampment), (2) after waiting some time for the Czechs to surrender after “scattering them at the Vltava,” THE COMMANDER of that expedition DIED either of battle wounds or simply disease, and (3) the Frankish expedition built him a nice “hero’s tomb” there on the hill and … went home.
Indeed, if one understands the Fulda Annals correctly, raiding Bohemia to plunder and then going home seemed to be the “modus operandi” of the Frankish Germans vis-à-vis the (Slavic) inhabitants of Bohemia of the time.
Subsequently (4) good old Bořivoj the first historically attested to member of the Premyslid (subsequent Czech royal) dynasty, its first Christian leader (certainly
St Ludmila his wife was already baptized), and the traditional founder of the
Hradcany Castle, _perhaps_ noting the success of building good strong citadels against
Frankish incursion, (a) left his existing citadel of Levý Hradec to the
Hradčany site, (b) built (or improved) the wall around it, (c) built a nice
church dedicated to St. Mary _near_ but _not_ on top of the tomb of the “Viking”
/ Frankish warrior, and (d) left the tomb untouched so as to both _not provoke_
the Frankish king but also to put the tomb “under his protection” and thus … beginning
the history of Prague’s castle.
