Dómaldi

Domald is the Yngling king whose death is the darkest image of sacral kingship in the whole corpus. Through years of famine in his reign, the Swedes sacrificed at Uppsala for better seasons — the first autumn oxen, and the year did not mend; the next autumn men, and it grew worse; and the third autumn the chiefs took counsel and concluded that the cause of the dearth must be the king himself. So they seized Domald, killed him, and reddened the altars of the gods with their own king's blood — and afterward, the saga says, the seasons mended. Domald did nothing wrong; he was simply the king, and in the oldest reckoning the king is answerable with his life for the land's fruitfulness, a sacrifice in human shape when the luck fails. He is the corpus's starkest expression of the king as the people's luck — and as the thing that must be killed when that luck runs out.