Vikings

Over at Syntagma, John Evans has discovered that he has viking genes. Apparently, he has "a minor medical condition which affects the small finger tendon in the palm of a hand" and this only occurs in those with remnant Scandinavian genes. Also, if you have ginger hair (John doesn't), you can be assured of viking ancestry - the gene for red hair comes from Scandinavia.

In fact and as I pointed out to John, it would be hard to find anyone in Britain who does not have at least a few old viking genes lurking somewhere in their bodies. The vikings settled almost everywhere in the British Isles and soon mingled with the locals, be they Anglo Saxons or Celts.

It began with the Danish raid on Lindisfarne in 793 and continued with mounting ferocity throughout the ninth and tenth centuries. By the late ninth century the vikings were settling in the north and East Anglia and it was only the victories of Alfred the Great that prevented them taking over all of England. North of Watling Street, the old Roman road that runs from London to Shrewsbury, became the Danelaw, the area of heaviest settlement by the Danes. It was Alfred's grandson, Aethelred, who conquered the Danelaw to create the kingdom that we now know as England.

Meanwhile, Norwegian vikings had been attacking and settling in the west of Scotland and Ireland. At times they joined in the assault on the Anglo Saxon kingdoms and many of them settled in what is now Lancashire, thus accounting for the differences between the Lancashire and Yorkshire accents of today.

The viking invasions were not halted completely until Harold Godwinson defeated perhaps the most dangerous of all their threats, the attempt to conquer England by the king of both Denmark and Norway, Harald Hardrada. At the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, Harold beat the vikings so soundly that they never raided again.

Yet that is not completely true. 1066 was also the year that William of Normandy invaded and took the kingship of England after the Battle of Hastings. And the Normans were really Danish vikings who had settled in France and learned the language and some of its customs. They still carried those relevant nordic genes, therefore.

Although the Normans tried to remain separate from the local populace, over the centuries it was inevitable that their genes should enter the mass of the Anglo Saxon gene pool to some extent and so, once again, we have an infusion from Scandinavia. Add the Irish immigrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in search of work in the industrialized areas of England (and remembering that they brought Scandinavian genes from the period of their own viking settlement) and it must be conceded that very few of the so-called English can be devoid of Scandinavian genes.

Like all peoples, the English are a mixture, mainly Anglo Saxon in essence but with infusions from Scandinavia, France, Holland and the Celts, to name just a few. And the really strange thing is that John's little finger condition is not more common in England than appears. Perhaps it's a recessive gene.

Technorati tags: Vikings; English; Anglo Saxon.