I am not sure why they used this title for this study as that is not the important part. We already have known Viking was a job description, thats been known for hundreds of years. We also knew that viking settlement was widespread. This study used DNA sequencing to settle the debate on if vikings from certain areas went to certain areas, and if they mixed. It seems to confirm the theory that the norse did NOT mix, and traded, raided and settled different areas separately.
The title is indeed odd.
The new (to me, at least) idea here is that the different regions of Scandinavia didn't mix as much, "on the job" or genetically, as I thought they would have. They each carved out their own territories and mixed with the local population, but not with each other to a significant degree. It's surprising to find that more genetic material was making it's way back to parts of Scandinavia from those far-flung regions than from neighbouring Scandinavian countries.
And they didn't use emacs, because they were Vi-Kings
It is linguistically possible that "viking" was simply a self-referential ethnonym, with the first part meaning "home" or "village".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
Compare Ancient Greek [w]oikos, and all the various ves, vas, wieś, which can be found all over Eastern Europe.
The first part of the word viking, or vik simply means "bay" in nordic languages
The even firster part "vi" means "we" though.
And vi was an outgrowth of ex, which was an improved version of ed, which in my experience, roughly translates to ‘ugh’.
I don’t think -kingur is a suffix in old norse. It is not a suffix in modern Icelandic, and I can’t think of any suffix like that.
In fact I don‘t remember a suffix which attaches to a pronoun. In modern Icelandic at least we like to introduce more pronouns or conjugate them rather then to suffix or prefix them.
If the word was broken as vi-kingur, I think the modern Icelandic would be við-kingur (or við-lingur), which is simply not a word in the language.
webay hmm. they started a trend
I don’t speak old norse but I speak Icelandic natively. Víkingur simply means Bay-er, that is somebody from a bay. As an Icelander living in America I experience the English word “viking” as an Exonym for my identity. In Iceland we use “Nordic” or “Scandinavian”, both terms are inclusive of Finns, Sámi, and Greenlanders, so strictly speaking this is not an Enthnonym.
In Icelandic, at least to my knowledge, we have never used Víkingur as an ethnonym (well maybe during a sports game, or among right-wing nationalists). It has always meant raiders. In 2007 there was even a new word dubbed Útrásarvíkingar meaning businessmen who made a bunch of money doing business abroad (buykings would a clever translation of the term).
EDIT: I just remembered that the -ingur suffix can also be used to indicate a temporary state e.g. ruglingur (confusion) and troðningur (trampling [n.]), and was used as such e.g. að fara í víking (to embark to a viking) so víkingur could also mean, a person that embarks to a bay.
The no-mixing part is what got me. If "viking" was just a job open to anyone, you'd expect genetic mixing in the burial sites. But Swedish groups went east, Danes south, Norwegians west — distinct genetic clusters throughout.
So it was a job, but one you apparently got by being born in the right place
It's so bizarre to me when North Americans proudly claim "Viking ancestry", rather than Scandinavian. Like, beyond it not being an ethnicity, you're identifying specifically with violent raiders who killed peaceful monks, even if that's romanticized by media. It's like proudly claiming "pirate" or perhaps more poignantly in current times "ICE agent ancestry".
> rather than Scandinavian
Strange, being in North America, I've yet to meet anyone identify themself as having viking blood, but we refer to Scandinavians as being of viking ancestry all the time.
I grew up in Minnesota and have literally never heard anyone ever say this about me or any other person of Scandinavian origin.
You've never heard of your NFL football team?
Sport team names have nothing to do with declaring ancestry.
This is not the zinger you think it is, my dude.
pretty common on twitter, esp these days where there is strong anglo-saxon white nationalism crowd
they do romanticize their ancient past as one of conquest and domination over others.
btw, even without the viking aspect, norse law was pretty strange in that it allowed murder for a fine. there is definitely a savage aspect to white tradition as there is to any modern culture, but there is a lot of whitewashing thats done to present anglo saxons as racially superior, highly civilized culture.
Restorative justice isn't that unusual in the world. Blood money has roots all over the place. Paying victims or their family/clan/tribe for deaths or injury is not unusual especially if the perpetrator is of higher status than the victim.
> pretty common on twitter
All sorts of strange things are common on twitter that are completely absent in real life. It shouldn't be used for any measure of reality, especially if you're judging the people of a continent.
It's common among usian nazis of the David Lane strain, and on Facebook you can find quite a lot of "viking" groups mainly populated by usian dinguses, some of whom claim some scandinavian ancestor or other.
> It's so bizarre to me when North Americans proudly claim "Viking ancestry", rather than Scandinavian.
Where did you hear it? I am sure at least one out of hundreds of millions of Americans claimed it. But you know, we have people who think the earth is flat, as well. But by that token one can take any dumb thing someone from a large group said and sort of say “why do all X say this one dumb thing”
At least from my experience I only heard people claim Scandinavian ancestry. Or even more specifically a country like Norway or Sweden for example. Places like Minnesota or Wisconsin have a lot of that.
Yes, but when you call it "pillaging" it sounds much more romantic.
There are five million Irish in Ireland and something like 75 million “Irish” in the US. And Chicago has more Polish that Warsaw, but that’s actual expats and their kids. Not great great great grandchildren of Margaret and John who came over in 1845.
This source puts that number at 35M of people with "some" Irish descent: https://overlandirelandtours.com/blog/why-are-there-more-iri... — that means that most of them probably have some other heritage too.
People say similar stuff about Serbians in Chicago (how it's the second biggest Serbian city after Belgrade), but usually all of that is overestimated significantly. Just like people overestimate their local city population (most in Belgrade claim it has 2M people when census on a metropolitan area gets us to 1.57M).
Never heard someone saying they were Vikings tbh.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone IRL say they have viking ancestors.
Yearning for Valhalla is more a specific type of extremely online poster / podcast bro / FBI director kind of behavior.
Would wearing a haircut from that dreadful viking TV show and a Thor hammer necklace count? I’ve seen quite a meme-worthy characters over the years
No, that's not specifying the Viking job, just old nordic culture. I don't think that anyone wearing a cross is pretending to be a crusader.
Modern paganism went through a revival during the early 2000s. Are you sure you're not just seeing someone's religion?
And its not the first time, either. There's been several revivals of the beliefs and culture over the years - for example, we didn't even have the word 'viking' in English until the 18th Century.
The modern Techno Viking:
There was that one Indian guy who hit the gym, bleached his skin and hair and now does a pretty credible Viking impression.
Crazy what people will do for a government pension
It’s called the power of branding.
Much like pirates and gangsters, Vikings are cool if you consider them from an aesthetic as opposed to moralistic perspective. Everyone has evil ancestors, but some of them were cool.
Ninjas, samurai, Native Americans in war paint, etc. It's like every culture (that has survived) has reverence for their own group.
next will be combined "genitscope" readings "astrogenetics", the "pro" reading will include your chart including planet 10
> Like, beyond the point made by the article, you're identifying with violent raiders who killed peaceful monks, even if that's romanticized by media. It's like proudly claiming "pirate" or perhaps more poignantly in current times "ICE agent ancestry".
Mentioning "vikings" and "pirates" and "ICE agents" is fine.
Why the political correctness though?
There has to be for everyone so let's also use another example... And I know I'm going to be downvoted (double standards are wonderful).
The mayor of NY, Mamdani, said publicly that it was now time for american to "learn about the life of Muhammad". Many muslims proudly name their first born son after their prophet. Shall I list here the great deeds he did during his life? Owning sex slaves, engaging in slavery (of both white and black people: and the word "slave" comes from "slav" -- slavic people -- aka white people), slaughtering infidels, etc.
I encourage everybody to listen to the great words of the mayor of NYC and go buy a quran and read it to learn about the life of Muhammad, so they can then make up their mind about whether people naming their sons Muhammad should be proud or not.
Literally the most common name in the world is the name of a pedophile (of course due to the fact that lying to infidels is permitted, some are going to dispute the age of the youngest of his many wives he had sex with but nobody contests that he had sex slaves and that he was killing infidels). And that's the most common name in the world.
> Like, beyond it not being an ethnicity, you're identifying specifically with violent raiders who killed peaceful monks, even if that's romanticized by media.
Oh I fully agree.
The following is true too:
"Like, beyond it not being an ethnicity, you're identifying specifically with violent patriarcal human traffickers [who trafficked way more people, for way more centuries, than europeans ever did] who killed peaceful people, raped their wives and daughters, enslaved them, ... even if that's totally romanticized by media."
But somehow that's acceptable because? What exactly?
Have you read the old testament? It's much the same. Why focus on this specific religion?
It's just one example, I don't think we expect commenters to hit ALL applicable examples. Why did you focus specifically on that religious text?
Please don't derail this discussion with unrelated political ragebait.
You won't be downvoted because of double-standards. You'll be downvoted because this is a hard tangent from the current discussion. I suspect you know that and decide to pre-emptively deflect the reason so as to appear the victim.
You do realize Tabari is not the Quran?
Why the political correctness though?
What does this even mean?
Pfft, ICE agents wish they were pirates.
In other parts of the world, plenty of people romanticize ancestry with Ghenghis Khan too.
Everyone loves being seen to be on the ‘winning’ side sometimes, (and there is always a counter-culture minority!) and when sufficiently remote in time, no one is going to really ‘feel’ the atrocities. Then it’s all about marketing and current social whims.
If the Nazi’s won, the current 80/20 pro/anti ratio would be flipped no question.
You don’t have to go very far back in history to see that humans have some pretty dark tendencies.
The answer is - it's both. There's also parallels in archers in Europe from the longbow period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow#Training You can tell who was a professional archer by looking at their skeleton, and so naturally families who had bodies with more readily adaptable skeletons typically became archers. This married the morphology of an archer to social status and family line.
“Make the tall girl join the women’s basketball/volleyball team.”
The title is rather confused, because DNA cannot show how people understood a certain word. Historical sources like the sagas show how the word was understood.
It's safe to say that 100% of the Northmen who invaded England in 1066 shared that same "job description", however.
99%.
Poor Sven just liked maps but they kept making him come along on their “excursions”.
By 1066, not quite. That was an invading army led by the King of Norway to press his claim on the throne of England. I’m sure many of the soldiers in that army had been Vikings but at that time they were soldiers of a Christian king, which would have been considered much more legitimate than being a heathen raider.
I guess the Normans were also of Nordic descent but they had given up the Viking way of life a century before.
What's gonna bake your noodle is, Viking raids were the VC-funded startups of medieval northern Europe. Norse kings were very generous with their kingdom's treasure, to the raiders with the most fearsome reputations.
This piece seems a little confused about what it’s actually reporting on.
It’s well known, to the point of near-cliche, that the word “Viking” didn’t refer to a nationality or ethnicity. It meant something akin to “raider”. The ethnic group is usually referred to as the Norse, at least until they start differentiating into the modern nationalities of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese.
The actual finding here seems to be the discovery of the remains of some Viking raiders who weren’t ethnically Norse. Fair enough. There are also examples of Norse populations assimilating into other cultures, such as the Normans and Rus. Likewise, the traditionally Norse Varangian Guard accepted many Anglo-Saxon warriors whose lords didn’t survive the Norman conquest. So it’s not too surprising that someone of non-Nordic descent might be accepted into a Viking warband.
I feel like this is common in most (at least western) empires. Vikings from Sweden would take over territory as far as Poland or even Italy and recruit new soldiers. Eventually some of them would end up in warrior style graves. What's actually more interesting in my mind is that they didn't bring people back, and so the gene pool in Sweden remained more or less unchanged
The slave trade only went south.
It was both.
The OG founders.
Never trust the headline. From the article:
> And comparing DNA and archaeology at individual sites suggests that for some in the Viking bands, "Viking" was a job description, not a matter of heredity.
I suspect this is an example of us seeing history through a mdoern lens and making false assumptions. For example, the idea that a nation project or an empire is genetically homogenous is a relatively modern concept. The truth is that empires incorporated various ethnic groups and those ethnic groups survived for long periods of time.
The Roman Empire at times extended all the way from England to the Persian Gulf. It included various Celtic people, North Africans, people from the Balkans, Turkic people and people from the Middle East. At no point did these people become ethnically homogenous but they all very much Romanized.
The British Empire spanned the globe.
In more modern times the Austro-Hungarian Empire included a dozen or more ethnic groups and languages.
Would we describe being Roman, a Briton or an Austro-Hungarian as a "job"? I don't think so.
> Would we describe being Roman, a Briton or an Austro-Hungarian as a "job"? I don't think so.
I think this is the articles point. We would not consider being Roman a job, but we would consider being a Legionary a job.
The article is arguing “Viking” is more “Legionary” than “Roman.”
The entire point of the article is that they called themselves collectively Norsemen. Going 'viking' (raiding) was an activity done by 'vikings' (raiders).