The Bluetooth Viking and the Scattered Bones of King Cnut
The origin story of the name "Bluetooth" and the logo used for that technology is a fascinating tale, connecting Viking history, the English civil war, and a curious saga of scattered royal bones.
Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. I published this edition when this newsletter had a few hundred subscribers; now there are roughly 25,000 of you. Since I love this bit of forgotten history that connects distant past with technological present, I’ve decided to resurrect it for your enjoyment. I’ll be back with a new edition early next week—one of the wildest stories you’ve probably never heard.
I: They just don’t name ‘em like they used to
This is the tale of an ancient and long forgotten Viking king, the scattered bones of his grandson, a curious calamity during the English civil war, and the origin story for the name and logo of a modern technology that you’re likely to use today.
Around 958, Harald Gormsson became the Viking king of Denmark. As his name suggests, he was the son of King Gorm the Old (they just don’t name kings as well as they used to, do they? Charles III? C’mon.). There aren’t many sources from the period, but we do know that he was an accomplished builder of public works and engaged in various foreign adventures with varying success. (Just imagine Harald’s humiliation upon being forced to surrender not once, but twice, to the Swedish prince Styrbjörn the Strong).
King Harald is partly known to history for bringing Christianity to his kingdom. Initially skeptical of this newfangled God, one chronicle alleges that Harald was convinced to convert by a cleric named Poppa. Harald put Poppa to the test, daring him to prove his divine righteousness. Poppa is said to have placed a great weight of iron into a fire, then took it out, walked around holding it, and miraculously he was not burned.
But for our story, there are two aspects of Harald’s reign that matter most.
At some point, Harald suffered a devastating loss, but this time it was not a loss on the battlefield, but in his mouth. One tooth is said to have died, turning a blueish-grey color. In a time in which photographs didn’t exist and you couldn’t just look someone up on Google images to see what they looked like, distinctive features were used to describe prominent individuals.
Harald “Bluetooth” was his new name—and that’s how he would be known to history.
Then, in 970, the king of Norway, Harald Greycloak—I told you the names were good—was assassinated. That meant that for a brief period, the kingdoms of Denmark and Norway were united (though as this map shows, it wasn’t quite the vast expanse of land that those countries comprise today).
Nonetheless, Harald Bluetooth had connected two empires—empires that, until his reign, were deemed incompatible, unable to work together.
II: The rise of modern bluetooth
Now, our story fast-forwards more than 1,000 years.
In the late 1990s, four major technology companies were working together to solve a common problem: lots of people were using computers and lots of people were using mobile phones, but they were incompatible, unable to work together, two separate kingdoms of technology. It was time to fix that, by inventing a way to unify them.
In 1997, Sven Mattisson of the Ericsson firm flew to Canada to meet with his counterpart at Intel—an American named Jim Kardach. They gave a presentation about their new technology, and it was met with a limp reception. Maybe it would work, but it didn’t seem to generate much excitement. The two men were undeterred, however, convinced that they mostly had a branding problem.
For some reason, nobody was enthusiastic about their product, which was variously called “Biz-RF, MC-Link or Low Power RF.”
Dejected after the meeting, the two men decided to go out for drinks. Kardach, a history enthusiast, took the opportunity to ask Mattisson about the Vikings. It dominated the remainder of the conversation, and at one point, Mattisson mentioned a long-forgotten Viking king with a dead tooth, a skilled communicator who was known for linking two kingdoms together. They had their codename: Bluetooth.
When it came time to decide on a logo, they decided to be true to the technology’s historical roots. They took the Viking rune for “H” for Harald, and the rune for “B” for Bluetooth, slapped them on top of each other, and the logo we still use today was born.
But the story doesn’t end there.
III: Sweyn Forkbeard and Winchester’s Mortuary Chests
Harald was killed when his son, Sweyn Forkbeard, rose up against him. And here is where we get what was, perhaps, the most unusually named king of England, because Sweyn soon invaded England and, on Christmas Day, 1013, England proclaimed a new monarch: King Forkbeard.
Sweyn Forkbeard was king of England for five weeks, then died.
But Sweyn’s son—Harald Bluetooth’s grandson—provides us with the final twist in this Viking-turned-Anglo-Saxon saga. His name was Cnut, and he was proclaimed king of England in 1016.
Cnut is often known to children as a fool who tried to show that he was more powerful than God, by placing his throne next to the sea and commanding the tide to bow to his wishes, keeping him dry. Inevitably, the tide did not obey. But this oft-repeated story is an inversion of the real tale from contemporary chronicles.
In truth, Cnut was trying to show that even he, an earthly king, was nothing compared to the will of the divine. His story, which is widely known as a parable of arrogance, is the opposite of the real story, which is one of a king showing humility in contrast to the forces of nature.
When Cnut died in 1035, he was buried at Winchester. His bones were put in a mortuary chest, a box to be displayed next to the altar of the Old Minster, the Anglo-Saxon cathedral. His bones were moved to the new Norman cathedral—the one still standing today—which was built by William the Conqueror in 1079. Cnut’s remains were placed in the new church shortly after the building was consecrated in 1093.1
Today, visitors to Winchester Cathedral from Denmark will sometimes eagerly ask tour guides: “Where is the grave of King Cnut?” But the answer they must give, due to a bizarre twist from English history, is not so straightforward.
In the early 1500s, the Winchester bishop, Richard Foxe, decided to replace the mortuary chests that housed the bones of many of the Viking, Anglo-Saxon, and early Norman kings who had been laid to rest in the Cathedral. The array of remains in various caskets and boxes and sarcophagi were cluttering the area around the altar. To tidy it up, he produced spectacularly decorated mortuary chests that have colloquially become known as “Foxe’s Boxes.” Each of them was lovingly labeled with the name of the monarch or monarchs who were inside.
But then, in December of 1642, during the English civil war, Winchester Cathedral was attacked by Oliver Cromwell’s rebel army. His troops smashed windows, shot statues, and generally ransacked the place.2 Someone in the regiment saw the mortuary chests and probably wrongly assumed that they were full of gold, or possibly jewels. Instead, as he flung the lids open, he was met with the sight of a lot of musty old bones, including the bones of King Cnut.
Rather than doing the respectful, normal thing—closing the lid and continuing to ransack elsewhere—the soldier had a brainwave: he could throw the bones at stained glass windows to destroy them. And that’s what he and others appear to have done. They threw the bones of some of the most important early kings of England at windows, hoping to maximize their destruction.
When the troops left, the townspeople found smashed glass and scattered bones throughout the Cathedral. Unfortunately, nobody had anticipated that this might happen, so the various bones weren’t exactly labelled (there was no Post-It note indicating that this was, indeed, Cnut’s femur and not William II’s or King Aethelwulf’s). As a result, the only thing that could be done was to just jumble up all the bones and stuff them back in Foxe’s Boxes, so that’s what they did.
Subsequent radiocarbon dating in the last decade has confirmed that the right people are in the boxes, but there isn’t sufficient precision to say that this skull belongs to Aethelwulf, only that they’re from roughly the right time period.3
So, when tour guides are asked to take visitors to the remains of King Cnut, all they can really do is point to the six boxes above the presbytery of the Cathedral and say: “Cnut is probably in four or five of those boxes.” Nobody knows which bit of him is in which chest.
But the next time you click that strange looking logo and use Bluetooth to listen to your music or connect your mobile phone to your car, think about how you, like King Harald, are—in some small way—connecting two kingdoms, a little glimpse of a forgotten saga from Viking and Anglo-Saxon history.
Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. Your support makes my writing possible. And if you’ve made the grave error of not having yet picked up a copy of my book, FLUKE, there’s still time to fix that by clicking here.
Further Reading:
Bartlett, W. B. (2016). King Cnut and the Viking Conquest of England 1016
A Burial Dispute Over Harald Bluetooth, CBS News.
Winchester Cathedral, 900 Years, by John Crook.
Fun fact: there are roughly seventeen miles of timbers in the roof of Winchester Cathedral. Those initially came from a nearby hunting forest, which was chopped down for the building. With that forest gone, the king needed to establish a new forest to replace the old one. That replacement is what we now call The New Forest National Park.
One bit of the cathedral was undamaged: the Chantry Chapel of William of Wykeham—a 14th Century bishop who founded New College, Oxford (where I completed my DPhil). In the invading army that attacked the cathedral during the English Civil War in 1642, there was a soldier named Nathaniel Fiennes, who knew that William of Wykeham was his ancestor. He stood guard, preventing damage to his ancestor’s tomb. Both William of Wykeham and Nathaniel Fiennes are direct ancestors of Ranulph Fiennes (the explorer) and Ralph Fiennes (the actor). The full surname of Ralph Fiennes is Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, and the second part comes from William of Wykeham’s lieneage.
You may have heard of Alfred the Great. His bones are not in these chests. His remains were later moved to a place called Hyde Abbey, which is a mile or so away from the cathedral. The abbey was destroyed and the remains were lost. Alfred’s bones are missing.
If only our modern day leaders were forced to adapt a nom de guerre our media would be much more interesting. "Honey - guess what Joe the Aged said about Orange Donald." Great read!
That was a super-fun read, Brian. Thanks!