My Lady of Wessex

A Story from the Tenth Century

Two sisters of the House of Wessex left England to cross the Channel and take the Rhine River to Cologne in Germany in the summer of 929. The older sister, the Lady Edith of Wessex, would marry the future Otto I the Great, King of Germany; the younger sister, the Lady Adiva of Wessex, had been sent along so that Otto could make his own choice and so that the girls could stay together. The sending of two brides was a unique event in the history of marriage treaties in medieval Europe; it was also life-changing for the two sisters. Edith’s life as Queen in Otto’s early reign, the birth of their children, her death in 946, and her husband's mourning for her is told by every historian of 10th century Germany. However, there is mostly silence about her sister Adiva except for the tantalizing gossip in the sources that she married a “prince of the Alps” or a “noble of the palace”. Here the latter appears in the form of the son of a royal Danish hostage and foster brother of Prince Otto called Heico Dagmarson. Their marriage and his position as Count of the Aar near Basle allow Adiva and Heico to be participants in the personal and political events at the heart of the German kingdom and Western Europe. This is Adiva’s STORY.