Rhodiola

The herb on every roof

Bergen, 1218. It is the Wednesday before the ordeal.¹

A woman named Inga has been fasting in church, watched day and night by twelve guards so that nobody can tamper with the trial. Her son Håkon is a teenager and already king of Norway. His enemies say he is not the royal heir she swears he is. So tomorrow Inga will carry red-hot iron in her bare hand. Afterwards it will be bound up, then unbound and inspected before the king, the bishops and the townsfolk. A clean hand will prove her word.^{1, 3}

A smith from Brabant called Sigar takes Inga's ally Dagfinn aside. Sigar works for Earl Skule, Inga's enemy. He has a herb, he says. Rub it on her hand and she will bear the iron with a steady heart.²

Dagfinn asks where such a powerful herb grows.

"On thy house and every other man's house here in Bergen."²

Dagfinn smells a trap. "No leaf nor leechcraft," he answers, will they have in this matter, only God's mercy. Then he warns Inga to take nothing from Sigar.² The next day she carries the iron. When the bandage comes off, witnesses say the hand looks "far fairer" than before.³ Her son rules Norway until 1263.⁴

Håkon's saga never names the herb. Seven centuries later, the Norwegian botanist Rolf Nordhagen worked out what it must have been.⁵ Bergen's houses had turf roofs. And on those roofs, people planted a fleshy little plant with yellow flowers, to keep fire away. Roseroot. Rhodiola rosea.^{5, 21}

A root that smells of roses

Roseroot grows where little else will. It clings to sea cliffs and wet mountain ledges right around the top of the world.^{6, 7} In Britain it reaches 1,208 metres on the north face of Ben Nevis.⁷ Cut the thick root and it smells faintly of roses.^{6, 9} That smell has followed it through history.

The first writer to describe it was the Greek physician Dioscorides, in the first century AD.⁹ He called it rhodia rhiza, the rose root. It grew in Macedonia, he wrote, and gave off a scent like roses when rubbed. People spread it on the forehead and temples for headaches.⁸

The name stuck. Seventeen centuries later, Carl Linnaeus built the plant's scientific name from the same rose.⁹

The king's salad

May 1599. Half the Danish-Norwegian navy is rounding the North Cape.¹⁰ On board is the 22-year-old king, Christian IV. He has come to show the flag in the far north, where ships dodge his tolls and Sweden is pressing tax claims.¹⁰

On 17 May his flagship, the Victor, almost runs onto two hidden rocks off the Kola coast. It shelters instead in a little-known harbour called Dibin, shown to them by English prisoners on board. The Captain goes ashore. A local commander serves cheese and butter made from reindeer milk, and kvass, a drink brewed from water and flour. The Captain tosses silver coins, and Russian men fight for them, naked and unarmed, their bodies smeared with fat.¹²

On voyages like this one, sailors feared scurvy. Up on the mountain, they gather a herb, and a nobleman called Sivert Grubbe wrote up the day's finds in his Latin diary. The English call it orpin, he noted, and the Norwegians stubberod. It is "an excellent remedy for scurvy, and very frequent in these places." Then a small detail. "Our captain used the leaves of this plant as a salad."^{11, 12}

The Captain was the king himself. At sea he went by plain Captain Christian Frederiksen, and anyone who called him otherwise risked death.¹²

A lawyer named Jonas Charisius kept a second diary, and he met the same plant on the nearby island of Kildin. "The root smells of rose," he wrote, "and tastes well in beer."^{11, 12}

They were onto something. In East Greenland in the 1930s, the Norwegian researcher Arne Høygaard measured it. Roseroot was the richest land plant source of vitamin C available to the Inuit he studied.¹³ Greenlanders ate the roots, as the missionary Hans Egede had noted back in 1741.¹³

In Norway it went to the cattle. At the hungry end of winter, when fodder ran out, children were sent to pick it for the calves. "The kalvegror was a welcome food for the calves," one man remembered of his childhood around 1900.¹⁴ Hence some of its many Norwegian names. Calf grass. Calf root. Calf dance.¹⁴

Linnaeus and the plant's love life

In 1732 a 25-year-old Carl Linnaeus set off on his famous journey through Lapland.¹⁵ In his Flora of Lapland five years later, roseroot gets a full entry. It grows "everywhere on the highest ridges" of the mountains, he wrote, "in immense quantity," free for the taking, and every bit as potent as the root from Italy.¹⁵

Then he got distracted by its sex life. Roseroot has separate male and female plants, and Linnaeus wrote them up as marriages. In one plant, husbands and wives share a splendid bridal chamber hung with a yellow, five-part curtain. But these wives are barren. They are "Sarahs." In the other plant the chambers are bare, and the wives have lost their husbands. These "Hagars" conceive by the husbands of the barren wives, and carry on the family.¹⁵

His readers knew their Bible. In Genesis, Abraham's wife Sarah cannot have children, and her servant Hagar bears his son.¹⁶ The entry ends with a sad little postscript. The noble Rudbeck, almost certainly Linnaeus's patron Olof Rudbeck the Younger, had brought a single female plant to the Uppsala garden. It flowered every year. With no husband nearby, it flowered in vain, and laid only "wind eggs."¹⁵

Medicine followed the joke. Linnaeus's Materia Medica of 1749 lists the root as reddish, astringent and rose-scented, for hernia, vaginal discharge, hysteria and headache. Headache gets an exclamation mark.¹⁷ In 1753 he gave the plant the name it still has, Rhodiola rosea, and listed where it grew. The mountains of Lapland, Austria and Switzerland. And Britain.¹⁸ By 1775 it was in Sweden's official book of medicines, as Rhodia radix, from the mountains of Lapland.¹⁹

Hair, roofs and the god of thunder

Norwegian farmers had their own ideas. In Sunnmøre, on the west coast, the plant was simply called "hair growth." In 1762 the naturalist Hans Strøm explained why. People boil it in water and wash their hair with it, "in the belief, that it will grow well thereafter."²⁰ Two hundred years later, people in the same region said exactly the same.²⁰

And they kept it on their roofs. Roseroot was planted on Norway's turf roofs to protect the house from fire, including fire from lightning.²¹ In Gauldal, people said it was there for Thor, the old god of thunder. "When he saw the yellow flower on the roof, he passed by without striking it with fire."²¹

In Hornindal by the early 1930s, nobody could quite remember why. People still planted roseroot on their roofs all the same. Some said it was because the plant was so beautiful, others because great-grandpa had wished it, others because the neighbours had it like that.²² In 2002, a search of 908 photographs of Norwegian turf roofs at Tromsø Museum found not one with roseroot on it.²²

The golden root

The plant's biggest second life began in Siberia, where the Altai peoples knew it as the golden root.²³ A Soviet expedition went looking for it in 1934 and came back empty-handed. The scientists later blamed local families, who they said kept the harvesting places to themselves.²³

In 1961 the botanist G. V. Krylov led another expedition into the Altai and climbed to about 3,000 metres before he found it.²³ His roots went to the Tomsk Medical Institute, where a team led by the pharmacologist Albert Saratikov would study them for more than thirty years.²³ The Soviets already had a word for what they hoped to find. An adaptogen, a term the toxicologist Nikolai Lazarev had coined in 1947 for anything that raises the body's resistance to stress.²⁴

What followed was very Cold War. Mice were timed on climbing poles against eleuthero, already a well-studied tonic.²³ In 1968 Tomsk athletes rode a cycling machine that measured exactly how much energy they spent.²³ Saratikov's first human volunteers were his own students and staff, a choice historians now question. In one test, he gave students a 40% alcohol solution and then set them a concentration task, to see whether the root helped them cope with the drink.²³

In October 1975 the Soviet Ministry of Health registered a rhodiola extract as a medicine.^{23, 25} By the early 1990s, more than 150 Soviet papers had been written about it. One history of the programme suggests it ran longer than the science needed, partly because the golden root had become Tomsk's local trademark.²³

There is a final twist. The standard Soviet rhodiola medicine was an alcohol tincture. During Gorbachev's campaign against drinking in the late 1980s, attempts were made to replace it with a tablet. They had only limited success.²³

The Vikings who weren't there

Somewhere along the way, the root picked up a warrior's past. The Vikings took it for strength and endurance, or so supplement sites everywhere say.

No Old Norse name for the plant has been found.²⁶ The oldest Norwegian names we know of date from 1599, and one of them is Grubbe's stubberod.²⁶ The earliest possible mention in Norse sources is Inga's ordeal. That was written down in 1265, long after the Viking Age, and even there the herb has no name.^{2, 4} And Norway's folk records describe a plant for calves, hair and roofs, not for warriors.²⁶

So where does the claim come from? Follow the footnotes. A 2002 review in the herbal journal HerbalGram stated that Vikings used the herb to enhance their physical strength and endurance.²⁷ Its only source was a 1992 Swedish book about plants, Fägringar, by Berta Magnusson, printed in Östersund.^{27, 28} The same line, citing the same book, turns up in later scientific papers²⁹ and all over the internet.

We have not been able to read Magnusson's book, so we do not know what she based it on. And there the trail goes cold.

Still on the cliffs

Sweden registered a rhodiola root extract as a herbal medicine in the 1980s. In the UK, rhodiola products have carried a traditional herbal registration since 2008.²⁵ What modern trials found is in the Research tab.

Every age found its own use for the rose root. A headache cure. A scurvy salad. A hair tonic, a fire charm, a Cold War stimulant. The plant has not changed. We have.

It is still on the cliffs where Grubbe and Linnaeus found it, and it still smells of roses, just as Dioscorides said. Climb the north face of Ben Nevis and you will find it at 1,208 metres.^{6, 7, 8}