Egil's Bones

A few weeks ago when we started the bone chapter, I realized taking anatomy was probably the worst decision of my life, right next to taking honors chemistry.  I also received a packet (amongst the many others) that was about a viking man's bones; Egil's bones to be specific (in case you hadn't guessed from the title...)  Anyway, This man's bones were overgrown and, through studies of his writings, it's possible to say that it is very likely he had something called "Paget's Disease."  It's this disease where the bones overgrow and aren't able to break themselves down fast enough with the osteoclasts.  With this disease, the victims of these diseases are usually disfigured.

For a quick overview of the story, Egil was described as a man that had a very large forehead, a large jaw, and a very wide nose.  Once he was buried, Iceland converted to Christianity (like everyone else in the dark ages), and his children, if I'm remembering correctly, had a Christian church built on the land they inherited and they had Egil's remains dug up and moved into the church's graveyard.  So many years later, one of his other descendants built another church however many feet away from the other church and had his bones dug up yet again, and buried in THAT graveyard.  Some time after that, another one of his descendant's curious spouses dug up his bones because they had heard the stories of how Egil was a burly man and his bones could take a lot of punishment, and he wanted to know exactly how much.  Sooooo... he dug up the bones... again (I think I'm starting to see a pattern here).  By this point in time, when I retold this story to my band and my mom, my mom made the comment that "I bet he was rolling around in his grave."  I agree. 

Anyway, back to the story.  The last guy to dig up poor 'ole Egil's bones decided he wanted to exactly how thick these bones really were, so he took the blunt side of an axe and hit the skull with it as hard as he could.
Now, common sense would dictate that 150 year old bones, no matter thick, would probably collapse in on impact.  Instead, the axe simply left a white mark where it had hit.  After that, they were buried again, and they've been left alone for the last thousand or so years.  I'm not sure how old the article I read was, but they said they were thinking of digging them back up again for the first time in a long while (remember those thousand years I mentioned?).

link

I thought this was a pretty interesting story altogether, because I don't know much about the Northern-European/Viking history.  And though I think it'd be neat to be able to withstand man slaughtering-blows to the skull and all, in chronic victims of Paget's disease, they suffer vision loss, and uncontrollable dizzy spells.  Here is a link to what I actually read, for anyone who hasn't read it.  Here is a link with more about Paget's disease, for anyone interested.  In case anyone doesn't want to take the time to read those, here's a picture of someone that had this disease.