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The results showed that Viking identity didn’t always equate to Scandinavian ancestry. Just before the Viking Age (around 750 to 1050 A.D.), for instance, people from Southern and Eastern...
Sep 16, 2020 · News. Largest-ever study of Viking genetics reveals new insights. The largest genetic study of the Vikings ever done has just been published, and offers surprising discoveries about the medieval warriors, including that they may not be quite as Nordic as hitherto believed.
Jan 10, 2023 · British and Irish ancestry was present across Scandinavia at the time, while eastern Baltic ancestry was contained in central Sweden and Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea. Southern...
- Will Sullivan
- Overview
- Murky origins
- Far-flung connections
- Unbound by ethnicity
- Bands of brothers
While our modern ideas of these ancient seafarers paint a very homogenous picture, their reality was decidedly diverse.
In popular imagination, Vikings were robust, flaxen-haired Scandinavian warriors who plundered the coastlines of northern Europe in sleek wooden battleships. But despite ancient sagas that celebrate seafaring adventurers with complex lineages, there remains a persistent, and pernicious, modern myth that Vikings were a distinctive ethnic or regional group of people with a “pure” genetic bloodline. Like the iconic “Viking” helmet, it’s a fiction that arose in the simmering nationalist movements of late 19th-century Europe. Yet it remains celebrated today among various white supremacist groups that use the supposed superiority of the Vikings as a way to justify hate, perpetuating the stereotype along the way.
Who were the Vikings? The answer has never been clear cut. The term “Viking” is itself contested; the English term has its origins in an Old Norse word, víking, with a variety of meanings that range from raiding to exploring to piracy. Usually used by people on the receiving end of violent encounters, it described groups of Scandinavian seafarers between A.D. 750 and 1050—the period now known as the Viking era.
Viking artifacts, such as these swords and helmet from sites in what is now Norway, help archaeologists trace their ancient expeditions.
Photograph by Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway/Eirik Irgens Johnsen (Left) and Photograph by Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway/Ove Holst (Right)
The Nature study brings together genetic data from 442 humans whose remains date from around 2400 B.C. to A.D. 1600—all buried in areas where the Vikings are known to have expanded. Some were simply located in places, like Greenland, where they journeyed; others were buried along Scandinavian-style artifacts like coins, weapons, and even entire boats.
The DNA analysis revealed Vikings were a diverse bunch, with ancestry from hunter-gatherers, farmers, and populations from the Eurasian steppe. The research also pinpoints three major genetically diverse hot spots where people mixed with people from other regions during the era: One in what is now Denmark, and one each on the islands of Gotland and Öland, in what is now Sweden. All three locations are thought to have been hotbeds of trade at the time.
Explore the realm of the Vikings.
But though Vikings set off from—and in some cases returned home to—Scandinavia, the genetic analysis reveals they didn’t interact as much within the greater Scandinavian region as they did outside it, mixing with a broad range of peoples they encountered in their far-flung travels.
“It’s pretty clear from the genetic analysis that Vikings are not a homogenous group of people,” says Willerslev. “A lot of the Vikings are mixed individuals” with ancestry from both Southern Europe and Scandinavia, for example, or even a mix of Sami (Indigenous Scandinavian) and European ancestry.
“We even see people buried in Scotland with Viking swords and equipment that are genetically not Scandinavian at all,” he adds.
What do we really know about the Vikings?
The subjects also don’t have as much in common with modern Scandinavians as you might think. Only 15 to 30 percent of modern-day Swedes share ancestry with the studied individuals who lived in the same region 1,300 years ago, suggesting even more migration and mixture of peoples after the Viking era. Nor did Viking-era residents of the region conform to stereotypical Scandinavian looks: The ancient individuals, for instance, had on average darker hair and eyes than a randomly selected group of modern Danes.
The genetic data confirms what researchers long suspected from historical and archaeological evidence, which paints a picture of Vikings as a diverse group unbound by nation or ethnicity. “It’s a wonderful study,” says archaeologist Jesse Byock, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who leads the Mosfell Archaeological Project in Iceland. He was not involved in the genetic research. “It provides new information, but reinforces almost all of what we know about the Viking age.”
Davide Zori, an assistant professor of history and archaeology at Baylor University, who was not involved with the study, agrees. “We are starting to think of the Vikings as less like a group of barrel-chested, blond-haired, bearded men that all looked the same,” he says. “We knew this in a way from the sources.”
To Miguel Vilar, former senior program officer for the National Geographic Society, it comes as no surprise that the findings paint such a complex picture of Viking heritage—one that runs counter to modern notions of nationalism and cultural identity. “DNA doesn’t always fit nicely into [preconceived] boxes,” he says. (Vilar, who was lead scientist for the NGS Genographic Project, was not involved in the study.)
While the Viking umbrella was broad, the study also revealed close kinship ties on the family level. At a burial in Salme, Estonia, where 41 Swedish males were interred after a battle alongside two boats and their weapons, four brothers were identified, laid side by side. Researchers also discovered a second-degree family connection between a Viking in a Danish cemetery and another in Oxford, England—proof of how mobile family members were during the era.
What the massive DNA study cannot resolve, however, is the question of how the Viking phenomenon began in the first place. If ethnicity did not bind these people together, what did? Was it the technological ability to build seaworthy boats and wage war efficiently on the water, or were other factors at play?
“People can adopt and adapt to dominant cultural modes of survival,” Zori says. “For whatever reason, being a Viking was one of the primary modes of surviving and being successful economically and politically.”
With new confirmation that at least 442 Viking Era humans were genetically diverse, researchers can now expand their search for Viking roots. “This is a magnificently large study, but it’s really only 450 skeletons,” says Byock. “It’s a large initial step.” He hopes it’s just the beginning of a wider consideration of the era’s genetic history.
“It’s probably true that genetics are a little more believable than Viking sagas,” adds Zori. But only time, and additional research, he says, can round out the picture.
Now the hard work of grappling with the massive study’s implications—and combining textual and archaeological evidence with the new DNA results—can begin. There’s still much to learn about how the cultural catalysts we call Vikings lived and moved, and what happened as they sought adventure and influence. “Migration has always been a factor in human history,” says Zori. “There’s more material out there.”
Vikings Constituted a Cultural and Not a Genetic or Ethnic Group. Many Vikings did come from the Scandinavian countries—Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. They were a Norse people whose legacy is evident in Scandinavian culture today. However, this does not necessarily mean that all Scandinavians descended from Vikings.
Jan 10, 2018 · When the ice sheet retreated, some of these hunter gatherers eventually colonised Scandinavia from the south about 11,700 years ago, making it one of the last areas of Europe to be inhabited. But...
Feb 17, 2024 · The Norse people living in Scandinavia during the Viking Age (including the seafaring raiders we call Vikings today) were a North Germanic people speaking a North Germanic language, directly descending from the Nordic Bronze Age culture which is seen by historians as the ancestral culture of all Germanic people.
