The Vikings – Are Modern Images Incorrect?

There’s no shortage of myths about the Vikings and what they looked like. If most of us were to close our eyes and picture them we would see fearsome men with flaxen hair, wearing horned helmets and furs to protect them on their plundering seaward journeys.

But apparently, our mental representations of these warriors could be inaccurate. Historians and archaeologists have been speculating for many years that the Vikings had an incredibly diverse genetic background, and recently, after the largest-ever DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons...well, it looks like they finally have the evidence to back them up.  

Vikings weren’t a homogenous group of people

Based on what we learned about Vikings from schoolbooks and television, we would have assumed them to be a homogenous group of people; similar looks, build, and thus, presumably, genetics, but findings from research conducted over the course of many years (recently published in Nature) essentially debunks the modern image of Vikings.

After tracing the routes that the Vikings took across Europe, as well as examining how people from other countries decided to take up the Viking ways, the research team, led by geneticist Eske Willersley, discovered some fascinating findings.

Instead of being purely blonde Scandinavians as was previously thought, the Vikings may have carried genes from Southern Europe and Asia – individuals with high levels of non-Scandinavian ancestry, meaning that they were likely to have had dark hair rather than light.

What’s more, Viking populations were likely to be considerably more isolated from each other than what was previously thought.

This created a larger spread than what would have been possible if they were more concentrated – for example, Vikings from Sweden would have travelled to the Baltic regions such as Poland, Russia, and Ukraine, Norwegian Vikings would likely have travelled to Ireland, Iceland and Greenland, and Vikings from what is now known as Denmark would have travelled to England. This would have created communities with high genetic diversity instead of the myth of uniformity that we are familiar with.

Surprisingly, the findings suggested that there was actually little evidence that Scandinavian populations were genetically diverse. In fact, aside from some coastal communities, other Scandinavian populations remained mostly homogeneous for centuries.

Another interesting finding from the research was the discovery of Viking-style graves in Orkney, Scotland which contained no Scandinavian DNA, as well as the fact that some of the Viking graves in Scandinavia contained Irish, Scottish, and Saami DNA.

Also, sequencing of remains uncovered in Greenland showed a mix of Scandinavian men from Norway and women from Britain – but the artefacts that they were buried with appear to be entirely Scandinavian. Although this information raises some questions, it also provides us with some answers – it suggests that being a Viking might have been an occupation rather than a genetic right.

The findings of this ground-breaking study, which examined the DNA of people who lived between the years of 750 AD to 1050 AD, provides us with the powerful realisation that being a Viking likely had more of social identity than a genetic influence.

This could potentially have implications for anyone wishing to discover more about their heritage – to find out whether you have a bit of Viking in your history, like the Viking Birka Shield-maiden, start your journey today with My True Ancestry.
 

Find out your Scandinavian ethnicity estimate today with an AncestryDNA test.